"Informer's API gave us the ability to turn data into action. Instead of pulling reports and manually building lists, we now have a living ecosystem where the right message reaches the right person automatically. It's fundamentally changed how we communicate across campus."
Overview
California Lutheran University (CLU) is a private institution in Thousand Oaks, California. Facing a mandate to modernize its technology infrastructure, CLU set out on an ambitious strategic plan organized around three themes: elevating the student experience, building a fulfilling work environment through data-informed decision making, and creating purposeful communications that reach the right audience at the right time.
At the center of this transformation is Informer 5, whose API serves as the connective tissue between CLU’s enterprise data, its homegrown communications platform (CLUme), and its digital experience portal (MyCLU). By leveraging Informer’s API to power dynamic audience lists, personalized messaging, real-time notifications, and workflow automation, CLU has built an integrated ecosystem that touches every member of the campus community.
Strategic Theme 1, Student Experience: Build a modern technology infrastructure that improves workflows, processes, and procedures so students and employees enjoy a more efficient end-user experience.
Strategic Theme 2, Data-Informed Decision Making: Reduce inefficient manual input by identifying and eliminating pain points in technology systems and building the necessary solutions.
Strategic Theme 3, Purposeful Communications: Develop an internal communication framework with clear guidelines, channels, branding, distribution calendars, and training materials.
The Challenge
CLU’s enterprise data lived in Ellucian Colleague and a collection of departmental systems, including housing management (StarRez), survey tools, and club/affiliation databases, with no unified way to act on that data. Key pain points included:
- Siloed communication. Messages to students, faculty, and staff were generic and disconnected from real-time data, reducing engagement and response rates.
- Manual administrative processes. Identifying which students needed housing reminders, or which adjuncts were approaching budget thresholds, required labor-intensive data pulls and spreadsheet work.
- No actionable integration layer. Data existed in abundance, but there was no mechanism to translate Informer reports into dynamic audience lists, in-portal notifications, action items, or targeted email campaigns.
- Low survey participation. Collecting institution-wide data, such as a staff committee inventory, was difficult without a way to surface surveys contextually to the right audience.
- Fragmented student experience. Club management, academic resources, and campus services were scattered across disconnected tools with no unified digital hub.
The Solution
CLU built two core platforms, CLUme (communications) and MyCLU (digital experience), both deeply integrated with Informer 5 through its API. Informer became the intelligence engine powering dynamic lists, personalized data delivery, and automated workflows across the campus.
Key platforms and data sources:
- CLUme, the communications platform with dynamic lists and personalization
- MyCLU, the digital experience platform with roles, tiles, cards, notifications, and action items
- Colleague, the ERP and Student Information System
- StarRez, housing management via REST API
- Value Store, survey and response data via REST API
The MyCLU framework is role-based. Every user sees personalized tiles, cards, notifications, action items, and popups powered by Informer Datasets that map to Colleague roles such as student, faculty, adjunct, and staff. The team applied this architecture to four high-impact use cases:
Student Housing Applications
Challenge: Get more students to submit housing applications, and get them to do it sooner.
Solution: An Informer Report combining Colleague eligibility data with StarRez application status via REST API. Dynamic CLUme lists segmented students who had versus hadn’t completed applications. Scheduled email campaigns and MyCLU notifications were sent to non-completers, and an in-portal Action Item prompted students to apply.
Adjunct Faculty Time and Budget Tracking
Challenge: Track and analyze adjunct time and budget utilization, and proactively alert adjuncts approaching their limits.
Solution: An Informer Report combining and calculating budget fields from Colleague. A MyCLU Card gave adjuncts self-service visibility into their own usage. Dynamic CLUme lists grouped adjuncts by utilization level, enabling both automated alerts and manual outreach when thresholds were approached or exceeded.
Staff Committee Inventory
Challenge: Collect and analyze committee participation data from a significant number of staff members.
Solution: A MyCLU Popup survey targeted specifically at active staff members, ensuring high visibility. Survey responses flowed into a Web Query Dataset via the Value Store REST API, then merged with Colleague employee data in an Informer Report for rich analysis and reporting.
Student Clubs
Challenge: Replace a fragmented system with a better, integrated solution for student clubs and affiliations.
Solution: A general-purpose admin tool to manage affiliations, plus an integrated student-facing Clubs experience for both students and Club Officers. Web Query Datasets captured all affiliation data, dynamic CLUme lists powered targeted communications, and Informer Dashboards provided affiliation analytics.
Results
By positioning Informer 5 as the integration backbone of its digital ecosystem, CLU achieved transformative outcomes across the institution:
- Unified, data-driven communications. CLUme messages are now powered by dynamic Informer lists that update automatically, ensuring the right people receive the right messages at the right time with no manual list management required.
- Proactive student engagement. Housing application workflows replaced manual reminder processes with automated, multi-channel nudges including email, notifications, and in-portal action items, driving earlier and higher completion rates.
- Real-time self-service for faculty. Adjunct faculty can now see their own time and budget utilization directly in MyCLU, reducing inbound inquiries and enabling proactive financial management.
- Higher survey participation. Contextual popup surveys targeted to specific roles achieved greater reach than traditional email-only approaches, improving data collection for institutional analysis.
- Streamlined club management. A single integrated platform replaced scattered tools for club administration, student engagement, and affiliation analytics.
- Reduced administrative overhead. Automated workflows eliminated labor-intensive data pulls, manual spreadsheet reconciliation, and ad hoc communication processes across multiple departments.
- A scalable, repeatable pattern. CLU established a reusable architecture (Informer Report to Dynamic List to Targeted Communication/Action) that can be applied to virtually any future use case without new custom development.
"What I appreciate most is how repeatable the pattern is. Once we built the first integration between Informer, CLUme, and MyCLU, every new use case became faster to deliver. We went from housing applications to adjunct tracking to student clubs using the same approach, and we're just getting started."
