User Conference Recap

It's been one week since our User Conference wrapped up, and we're happy to say that we set a new attendance record with this one. Thank you to all who attended, and for those who were not able to attend, here's what you missed: We had some great presentations from customers and staff alike on topics such as "Effective Assessment and Accreditation Using Veera", "Dealing with Common Modeling Issues", "Using Veer to Compile Survey Data from Multiple Sources", "Pivoting Away from Excel", "Predictive Modeling as Proactive Retention Strategy", and "Automating IPEDS". Thanks again to all who presented.  Some of the feedback we got indicated that our customers would like more opportunities to talk to one another and exchange ideas and feedback concerning projects they're working on. We agree! To that end, we've set up a few networking groups on LinkedIn organized by subject to facilitate those exchanges. The direct links to these networks, by department, are: Fundraising and Advancement Network Institutional Research Network Strategic Enrollment Management Network We got a lot of feedback about things that we can add to our products to make them work better for you. If you have anything to add - suggestions, enhancements, or things we can be doing better - please email me and I'll make sure your ideas get to the right person.  At the end of the conference, Mike Laracy, our Founder, President, and CEO, talked a little bit about product enhancements and changes on the horizon. We will be detailing these more as they come out on our blog, but here are some of the most important changes: We'll be adding a conditional stop in Veera so that you can choose to stop a job based on a condition you set (for example, if you don't find any matches in a merge). You'll be able to un-dock data views and individual jobs in Veera so that you can work on dual screens and easily see both your data and jobs at the same time. We'll be adding in a 'Variable Reduction' feature, which will filter your variable set down to just those variables which are predictive (similar to the Automated Mining tab in Analytics). This allows you to focus on a smaller dataset consisting of predictive variables only.  We saved the best for last: one of the things we're most excited about is a users-only Veera Collaborative Cloud. Our users will be able to share jobs with each other by saving and downloading them to and from the cloud. So, if you have a report that you think other institutions would benefit from using, you'll be able to upload that report to share with them. Similarly, if there's a particular report or output that you're hoping to achieve, before creating it by hand, you can see if anyone else has already created a similar job. We hope that the Collaborative Cloud will allow all of our customers to be as efficient as possible, and that the exchange of ideas will compound the speed of growth for all of the institutions we work with.  -Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight

User Conference or Bust!

Great news, guys – only three more months until our 4^th Annual Rapid Insight User Conference! Here’s what you need to know about this  inspiring, informative, and FREE event:

The user conference will take place here in Conway, New Hampshire, on the campus of Granite State College. It will kick off at 8:45am on Thursday, June 21st, and wrap up around noon on Friday, June 22nd. The conference is free; we’ll be providing continental breakfasts, a lunch, and an evening reception to all registrants. We encourage all attendees to consider extending your stay for a family-friendly long weekend getaway. The Mount Washington Valley area (where the conference site is located) boasts a wide variety of outdoor activities many of which will be made available to attendees at special discounted rates.

In addition to sessions presented by both customers and Rapid Insight staff, there will be “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Data) hands-on lab time where staff members will be available to help you build predictive models using your own data, as well as office hours after the conference where staff will be on-hand to answer questions and consult on projects for the remainder of the afternoon.

Although this is a free event, we do ask that you register in advance here. As the conference gets closer, be sure to check our User Conference page with more information about specific sessions and activities. Looking forward to seeing you all!