Stanly Community College, a cornerstone of higher education in rural North Carolina, serves a diverse and growing population of students. Many of these students are part-time, balancing work, family, and academics. As a long-standing member of the Achieving the Dream (ATD) network since 2012, Stanly has remained dedicated to improving student outcomes and advancing equity. However, like many community colleges, Stanly struggled to efficiently harness data to inform decision-making and track student success. With limited resources within the Institutional Effectiveness (IE) team, the college needed a more streamlined, user-friendly solution to manage the increasing volume of data required to drive institutional progress.
Stanly faced challenges in efficiently harnessing data across multiple, fragmented systems, making it difficult to track critical metrics like retention, completion, and equity gaps. With inconsistent data definitions and silos, generating real-time insights became a slow, manual process, limiting the college’s ability to make informed decisions in a timely manner. Resources that could have been allocated to strategic initiatives were instead spent on time-intensive report-building and data importing.
As Dr. Cindy Dean, Director of Institutional Effectiveness at Stanly, described, “When I first stepped into this role, our data was scattered across different systems, and pulling meaningful insights was a manual, time-consuming process. We needed a reporting solution that could unify our data sources and make it accessible to everyone—without requiring advanced technical skills.”
The fragmentation of data across silos made it challenging to generate actionable insights during meetings or strategic discussions, slowing decision-making and limiting the ability to democratize data across the institution. Dr. Carmen Nunalee, Vice President of Student Success, described a related concern. “Data available to any one group of faculty or staff was incomplete. That made possible for different interpretations of the student experience because we were not evaluating a common data source for the one-truth of the Stanly student.” As more stakeholders sought access to reliable information, the limitations of the existing system became increasingly evident.
Partnering with ZogoTech proved to be the key to overcoming Stanly Community College’s data challenges. ZogoTech offers a comprehensive platform specifically designed to address the needs of community colleges, providing a more intuitive and efficient solution for data management and reporting. Unlike traditional BI tools, which demanded extensive manual work, ZogoTech allowed Stanly to consolidate its data sources and streamline reporting, saving time and resources for the IE team.
One of the most significant benefits of ZogoTech was its customizable dashboards, which empowered Stanly to track critical metrics across various student demographics with ease. By tailoring the momentum metrics dashboards to focus on part-time students—who make up the majority of the college’s population—Stanly could now gain real-time insights that had previously been inaccessible. This ability to segment data quickly and effectively proved instrumental in identifying and addressing equity gaps.
“ZogoTech has literally reduced the amount of time I spend on compiling data from hours to minutes,” said Dr. Dean. “The platform brought all of our data into one place and made it accessible for everyone. Now, instead of waiting days for a custom report, we have the data we need in real time, right when we need it.”
Compared to tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Informer, ZogoTech provided a more accessible and comprehensive interface. The platform integrated seamlessly with existing data sources and required minimal technical expertise, making it easier for faculty, staff, and administrators to pull relevant data themselves—without depending on the IE team for every request. This shift from reactive to proactive data access marked a turning point in Stanly’s ability to make timely, data-driven decisions.
The transformation brought about by ZogoTech has been profound for Stanly Community College, enabling the institution to become more data-informed, efficient, and responsive. One of the most immediate benefits was the significant time saved in data compilation and reporting. For a college with limited resources, this efficiency allowed the IE team to shift its focus from data gathering to strategic analysis and planning. This shift enabled Stanly to move from reactive data management to proactive, data-driven initiatives aimed at boosting student success and retention. Stanly is expanding its Guided Pathways framework to include improved student onboarding and labor market off-ramps. With ZogoTech, the dashboards have made it seamless to integrate real-time results into evaluating the actions steps of the latest Stanly strategic plan.
Beyond efficiency, ZogoTech’s platform played a pivotal role in democratizing data across the institution. Previously, only a few staff members had access to the tools needed to pull reports. Now, with ZogoTech, over 100 staff members at Stanly—from faculty to administrators—can access real-time data and use it to inform decisions in their respective areas. This access has fostered a culture of data literacy, with more stakeholders engaging directly with the data and making informed decisions that support student success. “We have transformed the culture for data usage from ad hoc and cumbersome reports to using dashboards that are accessible to any employee and easily manipulated with filters and charts. Faculty and staff now have information, not simply numbers, about our students that guide our educational services,” said Dr. Nunalee.
A key example of this transformation is the college’s use of ZogoTech to close equity gaps in the ENG-111 course. By using data to identify disparities in student outcomes, Stanly was able to implement targeted interventions, leading to significant improvements in student performance. The platform’s flexibility has also allowed the college to replicate this success across other programs, using data to inform every step of the decision-making process.
As a testament to these data-driven efforts, Stanly Community College was recently recognized as an Achieving the Dream (ATD) Leader College of Distinction—an honor awarded for its commitment to improving student outcomes and reducing equity gaps. ZogoTech has become more than just a data platform for Stanly—it has become a strategic partner in the college’s long-term mission to advance equity and improve student outcomes.
