Ready Education (CampusGroups) is a student engagement platform used by colleges and universities to connect students, staff, and faculty through events, groups, and community tools.
Education
51-200
NA
Burlington, Massachusetts
Ready Education had rich platform data on events, groups, and connections, but no visibility into how users actually behaved in their product. They couldn't deliver the actionable insights their university clients needed to improve student retention.
Ready Education used Pendo Data Sync to layer behavioral data on top of their existing platform data, then packaged it as a new, monetizable Data Intelligence module sold as an add-on to their platform.
703 users explored dashboards during a free trial period. 35% returned within two weeks. 32 deals in pipeline in month one.
Higher education has a retention problem. Four in ten students who start college never graduate, and disconnection from campus community is a leading reason why. Universities know they need data to identify at-risk students early, but the data they need is often scattered across disconnected systems.
Ready Education's CampusGroups platform sits at the center of campus life, providing tools for student engagement and community building on college campuses. It already captured a wealth of aggregate data: event attendance, group membership, post volume, and more. But Kimberly Mathews, Director of Product at Ready Education, saw a clear gap, "Our data tools were all built off bulk platform data, meaning we could make inferences from counts, but we couldn't see the actual behavior driving it."
What users were clicking on, how long they spent in the app, and how they navigated content, none of that was visible. And without it, the picture remained incomplete.
The platform Ready Education had built could tell admins what was happening. It couldn't tell them how users were actually experiencing it.
CampusGroups is a content management system where school administrators design and curate content for different audiences. They need to create effective UX and content strategies for their end users: students, faculty, and staff.
Without behavioral data, they were essentially flying blind, making assumptions about what was working and what wasn't.
That's where Pendo Data Sync came in. By piping Pendo's behavioral event data directly into the same data lakes that already held CampusGroups' platform records, Ready Education was able to combine two types of data that had never lived together before: the what (activity counts) and the how (clicks, navigation paths, session duration, feature adoption).
Together, they finally gave admins the full picture of how students were really using their platform.
With Pendo data flowing into the platform, their Data Intelligence module became a genuinely new kind of product.
Admins can now:
Check their content assumptions. Because CampusGroups is so configurable, the quality of the experience depends heavily on the decisions admins make. Pendo data lets them see what content is actually getting engagement, (not what they assume is useful) and pivot accordingly. A section they spent weeks building might be going unvisited. A resource they added as an afterthought might be a daily destination.
Justify their budget at renewal time. Demonstrating platform growth is critical in higher ed procurement, where renewals require clear evidence of value. Admins can now show concrete usage trends like daily, weekly, and monthly active users to their stakeholders managing the budget.
Find the right channels for important messages. By seeing which menu items get the most clicks and which features see the highest adoption, admins know exactly where to place time-sensitive communications.
Identify who’s thriving and who isn’t. Admins can segment engagement by account type, class year, major, or degree program, or filter dashboards to focus on specific populations. This is where engagement data starts to connect directly to retention, not just as a hypothesis, but as something visible and actionable.
All of this Pendo event data combined with CampusGroups platform records is surfaced through an open-source dashboarding tool. Intelligence that was once internal is now the product itself.
Letting admins ask their own questions
Dashboards can answer a lot of questions, but it can’t answer all of them. And transforming that data into clear, actionable answers has been a consistent challenge.
Ready Education recognized this gap. No matter how many charts they built, they couldn’t anticipate every question or guide every admin through the data. So they connected the platform to a large language model (LLM), enabling admins to ask questions in natural language.
Want to know which graduation year was most active on the platform last semester? Which features saw the biggest drop-off after onboarding? Which student segment is least engaged with off-campus events? Just ask.
This kind of exploratory, conversational analysis turns reporting into a decision-making tool.
What started as an internal analytics initiative became a new revenue stream.
Ready Education packaged the Data Intelligence module as a paid add-on and brought it to market with a deliberate strategy. Instead of targeting Student Affairs teams alone, they expanded their audience to Presidents, Vice Presidents of Enrollment, and Institutional Research teams (stakeholders with larger budgets and direct accountability for retention).
They also changed how they sold. Rather than relying on generic demos, they offered time-gated free trials using each institution’s own data. When admins saw their actual engagement metrics (their students, their features, their menu click) the value was immediate.
And the urgency to keep access was real.
The team also shipped iteratively, launching a strong version one, gathering feedback, and positioning AI-powered insights as a key reason to commit budget before fiscal year end.
The free trial told a clear story.
That's not casual curiosity. That's active exploration.
On the revenue side, 32 deals were either closed or in the pipeline within the first month. In higher education, where procurement cycles are notoriously slow, that's a meaningful early signal.
Mathews' advice to product teams sitting on similar data: "The behavioral data you're already collecting is raw material for a sellable offering. Think of Data Sync as an ingredient, not just a report."
