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Confluent Case Study | Live Data Collection

By March 3, 2017March 13th, 2017Case Study, PowerApps

Thank you so much for being part of the show! We were delighted to have you, and these results provide some great info that will be very useful for us.” — Event Manager

A nonprofit organization approached Confluent to help them gather demographic information for a large annual event. Each year, the nonprofit would enroll the help of volunteers to stand at the event gates in order to write down and collect two important pieces of information: 1) How many people are in your group? and 2) What is your zip code?

After the event, the team would go through all of the pieces of paper and total up the details. Then they’d have to look up all of the zip codes and match them to the corresponding city and county. There had to be an easier way.

The Needs

The nonprofit had heard about the work Confluent had been doing, and wanted help with a new solution. The event was only a few weeks away, but they knew that Confluent had the technology and expertise to come up with an automated solution. In addition to saving a lot of time and effort, the true need was to gather much more information about event patrons — including what they already like to do in the area, and what they’d like to see in the area that’s not there today. Deeper demographic data would also enhance and improve future marketing efforts.

The Solution

As a pro bono project, Confluent created a mobile application for volunteers to use at the gates and also provided tablets for them to use, free of charge. The application allowed volunteers to ask for each guest’s zip code. As soon as a zip code was entered, the corresponding city, state and county would auto-populate. The volunteer could ask two more questions about the area of town, and then complete the demographic questions on their own (age range of guest, and number of guests in each party).

The Results

More data was collected than ever before! Confluent was able to show real-time analytics of the event using Microsoft PowerBI and Microsoft Power Map in Excel. Afterwards, the nonprofit was able to take the maps and demographic data back to the city in order to provide real customer feedback about why people came to the region, and what they wanted to see in the future.

How Can We Help You?

This is just one of several automated solution success stories. Would you like to figure out how to do more with less? Could your organization benefit from streamlined business processes, integrated systems, and the elimination of wasted time and money? If the answer is yes, we’d love to help.