American Student Assistance
Nonprofit streamlines data pipelines and orchestration to cut costs by 50%, improve visibility, and accelerate analytics for better education outcomes.
Business goals
American Student Assistance puts a significant amount of time and money into digital experiences focused on student success. To better understand user engagement and campaign ROI, the organization needed to unify and streamline data from diverse sources.
The nonprofit wanted to reduce costs, improve data pipeline transparency, orchestrate workflows seamlessly, and enable data teams to focus on analysis rather than maintenance. Enhancing collaboration across marketing, product, and data teams was also a focus, to drive smarter decisions and scale efficiently.
Integration Challenges
The nonprofit’s organization’s original setup was fragmented and costly. Key issues included:
- Multiple disconnected tools handled ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and BI, complicating management
- Rising Fivetran licensing fees were unsustainable, far exceeding Snowflake costs
- Lack of pipeline visibility caused delays in identifying data issues, impacting trust in analytics
- Fivetran’s rigid data structuring limited flexibility and led to reconciliation problems
- Having no formal CI/CD process forced manual, error-prone deployments, slowing development
These challenges led to increased labor, higher costs, and inefficiencies that hindered strategic growth.
How Boomi Helped
Boomi Data Integration replaced multiple tools by providing an all-in-one SaaS platform that:
- Seamlessly connects diverse sources
- Enables ingestion, orchestrates dbt Cloud transformations, and triggers Tableau extract refreshes within a single platform
- Supports data engineers and analysts with flexible pipelines, allowing granular control of data ingestion and transformation
- Offers built-in environment management for streamlined CI/CD deployment workflows
- Delivers enterprise-grade security compliant with PII requirements
This empowered cross-functional teams to collaborate efficiently and scale confidently.
Results
With Boomi Data Integration, American Student Assistance:
- Reduced data pipeline validation from days to hours
- Cut data integration costs by 50%
- Orchestrated complete workflows, minimizing unnecessary costs
- Improved deployment speed and quality
- Freed data engineers to focus more on analytics and business value
This transformation accelerated decision-making and supported the nonprofit’s mission more effectively.
