Data-driven decisions for Residential Life

Knowledge is love and light and vision.
~Helen Keller

Your team makes a difference in the lives of your residents every day, and the ResLife Poral can help your team track their positive impact. Both our ResLife Portal — Free Edition and ResLife Portal — Paid Subscription Edition are prepared to serve as a data-driven decision making tool for your residential life team.

Here are some example insights we can help answer:

• For programming evaluations: Are the programs hosted meeting the needs of your residents? What is the total attendance for each programming category?
• For programming proposals: Are staff members including all the appropriate factors when planning to host a program?
• For programming funding: How are funds being dispersed throughout the academic year? Which programming categories received the most funding? What is the relation to program funding and program attendance?
• For residents: Which residents are most involved in attending programs? what types of programs are they attending?
• For overall trends: Which days of the week are most programs hosted? which days have the highest attendance? Which staff members are going above-and-beyond expectations?

A Forbes article, by Bernard Marr, describes the 10 steps for data-driven decision making for any type of organization as:

1. Start with strategy. In other words, what goals is your residential life team trying to achieve during the academic year?
2. Hone in on the business area. Such as, “if you could only work on improving one or two areas, which would you choose?”
3. Identify your unanswered organization questions. In other words, “which questions you need to answer in order to achieve those goals?”
4. Find the data to answer your questions. For example, “the data that could help you answer your most pressing questions and deliver on your strategic objectives.” If the ResLife Portal isn’t currently tracking a needed data metric, we’d be open to discussing it with you.
5. Identify what data you already have. We believe we have you covered on this one.
6. Work out if the costs and effort are justified. Luckily, this one should only be relevant if we need to further expand the ResLife Portal to capture new data metrics.
7. Collect the data. Empower your residential life staff.
8. Analyze the data. The ResLife Portal help you extract meaningful and useful organizational insights.
9. Present and distribute the insights. In other words, “You need to make sure the insights gained from your data are used to inform decision making and, ultimately, improve performance.”
10. Incorporate the learning into the organization. Such as, “you need to apply the insights from the data to your decision making, making the decisions that will transform your [organization] for the better …and then acting on those decisions.”

(Source: “Data-Driven Decision Making: 10 Simple Steps For Any Business” http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/06/14/data-driven-decision-making-10-simple-steps-for-any-business/#22659d2d7283)

Learn more about how to increase the data-driven decisions for your residential life team at www.reslifeportal.com