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The Story
Through its platform of games, videos, and other interactive activities, Rocket Learning prepares young children in low-income households across India to start school on a stronger academic footing. More than 1 million pre-kindergarten learners and their parents have accessed the nonprofit’s free educational resources since 2020.
Source: Rocket Learning
Rocket Learning uses data-driven insights generated through Alteryx software to make its play-based content and approach even more impactful for families. The organization also is piloting more effective ways to support teachers and governmental partners.
“We are able to analyze feedback from parents and their children in real time with Alteryx,” says Ankita Kodavoor, Product Lead at Rocket Learning. “That’s helping us build a vibrant culture of experimentation with new methods of engaging and motivating our participants.”
Automating its data management processes has also enabled the nonprofit to perform more sophisticated analyses on a rapidly expanding array of information while actually requiring less staff time. Alteryx saves Rocket Learning about 100 to 150 hours a month compared with its previous system, which largely relied on compiling data manually in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
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As we continue to grow, the agility that Alteryx provides is absolutely critical. Instead of needing three people to run our analytics, we have one person doing that job. — Ankita Kodavoor, Product Lead, Rocket Learning
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In India, an estimated 35 million children ages 3-6 in low-income households have little or no access to quality early-childhood education resources. The resulting gap in school readiness creates persistent barriers to learning progress, post-secondary academic programs, and living-wage employment.
Rocket Learning coordinates with government and private partners to deliver age-appropriate, play-based learning content to parents and teachers via the WhatsApp mobile application. The nonprofit also sends an array of motivational “nudges” including virtual badges, certificates of completion, real-time report cards, and weekly video compilations of children's activities.
In this gamified approach, Rocking Learning relies on a continual stream of input from its WhatsApp learner communities to understand which activities are most or least effective.
“Data plays a big role in how we measure our impact on a daily basis,” says Rocket Learning co-founder Siddhant Sachdeva. “It helps us build accountability in terms of how many parents are actually engaging, and how deeply, in the content we provide.”
By early 2021, as participation had climbed well above the 100,000-user threshold, Siddhant and his colleagues recognized that they could no longer respond quickly or intelligently enough by relying on Excel to meet the nonprofit’s growing analytics demands.
He and Ankita knew about Alteryx from past roles at other organizations, but they initially questioned whether Rocket Learning could afford to adopt the software. While researching various technology options, Ankita learned that the Alteryx Tech for Good program offers free licensing and related support to nonprofits.
“It just took a quick email to get us in touch with the right people,” she says. “Alteryx was super responsive and has made this implementation process very easy.”
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Many more of our people now have data at their fingertips. They're able to slice and dice it however they need, which means they're also able to take action much faster and try out new ideas based on where the data is guiding them. — Siddhant Sachdeva, co-founder, Rocket Learning
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The Impact
Rocket Learning launched Alteryx in the summer of 2021 and began to see benefits almost immediately.
“On many of our teams, we have people with analytical skills who are not well-versed in technology coding languages. And that is the sweet spot with Alteryx because it's low- code,” Ankita says. “It's actually a really fun experience for our analytics associates to use Alteryx. They enjoy the process of building out data analytics workflows because it's drag-and-drop.”
Greater speed and ease of use support the nonprofit in creating more effective “nudges” for participants based on their survey responses and other sources of input. With the ability to generate automated, customized reports on their own using Alteryx, content creators across Rocket Learning can recognize and adjust to daily variations in how its communities are engaging with various educational activities or responding to different rewards.
“Motivation plays a huge role in our learning ecosystem,” says Siddhant. “We now have much more transparent insights about what keeps our communities engaged and excited.”
For example, Rocket Learning recently piloted a new participation leaderboard that awarded chocolate emojis to learners for each completed activity. Seeing a hugely positive response reflected in the Alteryx-generated survey results, the nonprofit quickly expanded this chocolate-themed reward to more of its user communities.
“That ended up becoming one of our most recognizable features,” Ankita says. “When our team members visit with families out in the field, some kids will even ask us for chocolate because they remember it from the online learning groups.”
As Rocket Learning has grown from 20 employees at its inception to more than 70 today, Siddhant credits its heightened level of data analytics with helping the organization reach hundreds of thousands more children with life-changing educational resources.
“The productivity gains that we’ve unlocked with Alteryx has been a significant advantage for us,” he says. “Also, we can easily build new features and try out different use cases to make our online classrooms more fun.”
Ankita adds that Rocket Learning teams in different parts of India can more freely share their successes and learn from each other’s experiences using Alteryx tools.
“Communicating our progress internally and to our key partners has become a very seamless process,” she says. “I am super-grateful for the support that we’ve received from Alteryx Tech for Good.”
Nonprofits: interested in learning more about the Alteryx Tech For Good program? Apply here
