Equal Opportunity Schools

EOS Leverages Power of Tableau to Scale Its Impact

Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) is an educational nonprofit that uses school and student data to help public school districts make enrollment in rigorous courses more equitable. Collaboration with EOS strengthens educators’ and leaders’ capacity for breaking down barriers, increasing access, belonging, and success in Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes among students of color and students from low-income households.

Tableau has been an essential part of the digital transformation that has enabled EOS to go from working with 35 schools in 2014 to almost 500 schools in 2023. Educators and administrators experience and explore their school’s student data through interactive Tableau visualizations and dashboards, seeing students and their potential in new ways. EOS is building out its Salesforce environment to streamline and scale its internal operations, in preparation to grow and expand its outreach to schools across the United States.

Manual Processes Limited Nonprofit’s Ability to Deliver Actionable Data

EOS takes a data-driven approach to addressing enrollment inequities in advanced courses for students of color and students from low-income households. When school districts contract with EOS, high school students and staff complete in-depth surveys that the nonprofit analyzes.

EOS delivers actionable data about barriers to equitable access and insights about each student — not standard metrics like GPA, test scores, and prerequisites, but more nuanced indicators such as growth mindset, subject-matter passion, and leadership skills. Then EOS supports the school in measurably closing race and income enrollment gaps in its AP and/or IB programs, while maintaining or increasing the success of the program.

Ten years ago, working with 35–40 schools, EOS had no centralized database of student data. Five data analysts worked on separate, individual spreadsheets. For each partner school, an analyst manually built presentations featuring analytics and visualizations, to help school leadership see and understand where they could make progress. If the school asked follow-up questions, it could take six weeks for the analyst to find time to rerun the data a different way and respond.

EOS’s partnerships with schools were achieving positive outcomes, on a small scale. But EOS wanted to grow, and its existing systems clearly would not scale well. Having more sophisticated analytical tools could also empower EOS to use data more nimbly and strategically, to yield usable insights and develop more effective solutions.

Solving Problems with Data and Real-Time Tableau Visualizations

Equal Opportunity Schools’ digital transformation began with a Tableau Foundation grant. Besides giving EOS free use of the world’s leading analytics platform, the foundation provided staff with invaluable coaching and consultations, similar to benefits received by eligible nonprofits through the Salesforce Power of Us program.

Now, when a school contracts with EOS, students and staff complete surveys digitally. An API connection transfers survey data into a secure online application integrated with Tableau Server, where it’s combined with other information from the school. Within a day of submitting the data, the school can log into the external EOS portal, built on Heroku, to access interactive Tableau visualizations that reflect the school’s situation in real time. Up-to-date reports can be downloaded or exported on demand.

EOS analysts dig into the data and spin up new visualizations to quickly answer questions asked by school district partners and other stakeholders. By aggregating and analyzing data from hundreds of thousands of student surveys, EOS explores critical issues: “Why are Black and Latino students under-enrolled in AP STEM courses?” “What concrete actions can educators take to create cultures of belonging in which historically underserved students are more likely to succeed?”

Meanwhile, the nonprofit uses Sales Cloud to manage its relationships with districts and schools, to strengthen existing partnerships and reach out to potential partners. Its integration with Tableau helps EOS teams track indicators of organizational health and progress toward its goals.

“Tableau completely changed the course of our organization’s history,” stated EOS President Dr. Sasha Rabkin.

Accelerating Organizational Growth with Integrated Operational Systems

Today, EOS has contracts with nearly 500 schools in 26 states, and its data team is roughly the same size it was before it deployed Tableau. Annually, 85% of partner schools renew their contracts for the following year — a success rate the nonprofit’s leaders credit, in part, to the quality and usability of the data products that EOS delivers.

EOS is a revenue-generating nonprofit, with 75% of its annual budget covered by contracts with school districts. Currently, it’s building out its Salesforce environment to transform its internal operations, migrating financial data, human resources data, and school district contacts all onto one integrated platform. Leveraging the power of Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement will be key to engaging and contracting with school districts throughout the United States.

Use of Slack at EOS increased because of team members working from home during COVID-19 lockdowns. It’s even more widely used now, for cross-team collaboration, as EOS evolves into a virtual, technology-driven organization working with thousands of schools across the country.

President Sasha Rabkin envisions EOS scaling its impact tenfold again – to serve 5,000 schools – perhaps within the next five years: “The combination of Salesforce and Tableau has a transformative quality for us, in terms of imagining what that future looks like.”

About Equal Opportunity Schools

EOS works to strengthen educator and system leader capacity to break down barriers to increase access, belonging, and success in rigorous college and career-prep secondary school courses for students of color and low-income students, so that they may thrive in their postsecondary pursuits and life goals.