Evisions Blog
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Best Practices for Dashboard Design
The difference between an art museum and an art gallery is subtle. Museums showcase art for the art enthusiast – for interest, critique or discussion. Museums tend to be grandiose, containing all types of art, separated by theme or artist. While...
Best Practices for Charting Your Higher Education Institution’s Data
“One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.” The phrase, often attributed to Fred Barnard after it appeared in the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink, also applies to the visual presentation of data. While our focus is often on higher education,...
Overcoming Data Integration Issues
Data. It’s a simple word. Yet collecting it, analyzing it, and understanding it isn’t always so simple. For institutions of higher education, this is usually the result of two circumstances: 1) Data from one source does not always match data from...
The 5 Most Commonly Found Metrics for Student Success
There is much debate on how to define and measure student success. At first glance, it seems simple: a successful student is a first-year who enrolls in college full-time, persists through terms, and then progresses to degree completion. However,...
Getting Your Reporting Efforts Aligned with Your Fundraising Goals
“What the New Year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the New Year.” – Vern McLellan The adage is as true in business practices as it is in personal practices. The start of a new year, whether it’s the calendar year or...
A Data-Oriented Approach to Higher Education
Making use of data can be difficult. For instance, many institutions still face the challenge of getting departments to agree on answers to questions such as, “What is an active enrolled student?” Meanwhile, students, accreditors, governments,...
Doing the Impossible in FormFusion: Creating a Fully Customized PO
Template designers know that Evisions FormFusion provides flexibility in the look and layout of documents. However, due to the variable nature of some Banner output (i.e. transcripts and purchase orders), versatility of data mapping and control is...
The Process: It’s Not Just for Acting (It’s for Reporting Too!)
To report, or not to report - that is the question. Okay, maybe it’s not a question. For many of you, reporting is your job, or at least part of it. As such, you need your report creation procedures to be as painless and as efficient as possible....
How Do I Know if My Reporting Staff is Effectively Trained?
So your institution just purchased a new reporting solution and you would like to train your employees on this product. Or perhaps you had a recent turnover in staff and would like to train these new individuals on the existing software without...
Successful Training Starts With the Manager
You already heard about the discovery process needed to assess whether or not training will be an effective solution to your reporting problems. Once you’ve decided it is necessary, the next key step is to establish a training goal. After all, once...
Data Mart: The Data Warehouse’s Little Brother
Your institution operates on data. Lots and lots of data. In order to run your university or college effectively, you need to make sense of that data. This means that all of that information must be stored, organized, and made available for...
Understanding When and Why Training is Needed
As a reporting manager, you become rightly concerned when: Your team can’t get reports out the door on time The reports that do go out look unprofessional The quality of the reports is inconsistent Your team struggles with the reporting tool You...
Restructuring the Report Tree
The starting point for all your reports is the report tree. It contains the tools you use to make budget decisions, analyze departmental trends, run course and student database applications, and more. It is an unassuming, yet important, place for...
How To Take The Guesswork Out of Advancement
Many prestigious schools face a common dilemma. Young people, specifically college graduates, are more philanthropic than ever, generously donating to charitable causes. However, these same students and graduates may also be under the impression...
How to Gather Data from Other Reporting Tools
The decision has been made that your institution will be switching to a new reporting tool. The existing tool has been in place for years. There are a multitude of reports that work like a well-oiled machine and haven’t been touched since their...