Fusion Academy Provides Families with Easy Access to Key Student Data

“I would definitely recommend Torrent to others. I think they might just be our first vendor that has come in on time and on budget… They hit what they were planning to deliver on.”

Josiah Ploeger | Systems Development Manager | Fusion Academy

Some students feel lost in the face of school-related anxiety and stress. Some struggle with the pace and structure of traditional academic environments. Others simply need a different way to engage with their education.

 

Students and their families choose Fusion Academy for different reasons, but they all benefit from the same transformative pedagogical model — one student and one teacher per classroom. This personalized approach allows instructors to tailor their methods and curricula to address each student’s emotional and academic needs.

Business Challenge

 

All schools require a certain level of technological infrastructure, but Fusion Academy’s unique methodology, combined with its scale — 50-plus campuses across the country — demands multiple robust systems. Accounting, billing, scheduling, student information: Each solution houses data for Fusion’s more than 2,000 students.

 

The challenge? Until recently, these systems weren’t integrated, and there was no easy way for families to get the information they needed on demand — things like schedules, grades, tuition bills and more. Parents sought online access, but instead had to contact campus admins for help — admins who, in turn, were forced to pull the requested information manually. As Josiah Ploeger, Fusion’s systems development manager, put it: “We had pain points at the school because we didn’t have a self-serve portal.”

 

In order to better serve their students and families — and to save their internal team’s valuable time — Fusion Academy needed an efficient way to expose data from their many systems.

Disconnected systems

Lack of data visibility for families

Time-consuming manual processes

Solution

 

After speaking with Salesforce about the kind of solution they hoped to build, Ploeger decided to move forward with the Community Cloud platform — and he brought in Torrent Consulting to help with the implementation. “I came in saying, ‘Hey, this is what we want to expose to our parents, this is [the data] we want to pull and how I want it pulled, and what I want the end parent experience to be like,’” Ploeger said. “Torrent came in [to help] us understand how that looks in a Salesforce community. We didn’t have any idea what that looked like.”

 

Together, Fusion Academy and Torrent collaborated on a community that empowers families to access essential student information, update their contact info, view outstanding bills and more — all with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. An integration-rich backend allows parents to interact with data from Fusion’s other key systems, while a clean interface makes the experience a user-friendly one.

Discovery & design

Community Cloud

Boomi integrations

FullCalendar development

Results

Successful integrations with 4 core systems

Essential data exposed to 2,000+ families

Fewer manual tasks for campus administrators

With Fusion Academy’s new community in place, Ploeger expects relief from the school’s former pain points: “I think it’ll solve most of the problems out of the box.”

 

And going forward? The plan is to expand the tool’s capabilities. “For future revisions, we’re going to try to pivot [to] engage the parents more in their student’s educational journey,” Ploeger said — one more way to improve an already exceptional experience for students and their families.

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