The University Development and Alumni Relations (UDAR) division at the University of California at Berkeley is the hub of a large, complex advancement program that is a hybrid of centralized and decentralized components. Upon his arrival, UDAR’s Chief Technology Officer, Karl Otto, met a vast user base operating within independent fundraising programs with varying sizes and objectives. He and his team worked collaboratively on a reporting initiative aimed at serving all of Berkeley’s disparate fundraising teams, aligning their metrics and tools to facilitate collaboration and optimal performance. 

 

Berkeley’s biggest challenge was one of timing. With its six-billion-dollar Light the Way campaign scheduled to kick off in three months, UDAR needed to act quickly to meet its objective of having campaign-critical dashboards finalized and published before the campaign’s public announcement. This meant not only doing the hard work of synthesizing a large list of user needs, but also making the dashboards available with thoughtful attention paid to user experience and adoption.