Northeastern’s Center for Entrepreneurship Education (NUCEE) supports thousands of founders, students, mentors, and ventures every year through programs like IDEA, Mosaic, and the Venture Mentoring Network (VMN). The impact was massive—but the data behind it was scattered across tools, spreadsheets, and people’s memories.
As Data & Impact Fellow, I led NUCEE’s first end-to-end impact reporting process and designed a data strategy to match the scale of its ecosystem. I treated the work like an internal product: clarifying the problem, aligning stakeholders, designing systems, and delivering a repeatable reporting engine that now supports leadership decisions, rankings, and future fellows.
NUCEE sits at the center of Northeastern’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Through IDEA, Mosaic, and VMN, it supports more than 8,000+ students, 500+ ventures, and 300+ mentors every year. Each program tracked impact in its own way—different tools, different definitions, different owners.
Leadership wanted a unified story: one annual impact report that could clearly show how NUCEE drives venture creation, student learning, and community value. At the same time, NU wanted to maintain its top-10 national ranking for entrepreneurship, which depends heavily on accurate data submitted to the Princeton Review.
There was no single source of truth for entrepreneurship data. Program leads kept their own spreadsheets, CRMs, forms, and ad-hoc dashboards. Some data lived in Salesforce, some in Airtable, some in Chronus, and some only in people’s inboxes. Previous impact reports were one-off PDFs assembled manually, not systems that could scale.
My challenge was to design NUCEE’s first cohesive data strategy, deliver a new FY25 impact report, and reduce the operational drag of pulling numbers for leadership, rankings, and partners—all while the programs were still running at full speed.
I started by talking with program directors, operations staff, faculty, and central university partners. Each team had its own reporting calendar, KPIs, and “must-have” metrics. What looked like one impact report was really three separate reporting cultures stitched together.
I mapped every data source used across NUCEE: application forms, mentor logs, event registrations, alumni tracking, and venture milestones. This included Salesforce objects, Airtable bases, Chronus mentorship data, and one-off CSVs from tools like PitchBook.
The audit confirmed the core problem: NUCEE didn’t just lack a report—it lacked an agreed-upon data model for entrepreneurship.
To avoid reinventing the wheel, I benchmarked impact reports from other university entrepreneurship centers and startup accelerators. I looked for how they structured stories, balanced narrative vs. metrics, and used visuals to make data feel real.
I approached the work like a product problem: define the core user, clarify the job-to-be-done, and design systems that can be reused long after I leave. For NUCEE, the “users” were program leads and leadership; the “product” was a reliable data layer plus a storytelling surface (the impact report).
The final solution combined a new impact report, a set of standardized workflows, and a cleaned-up data infrastructure that now supports 8,000+ students, 500+ ventures, and 300+ mentors across NUCEE programs.
I designed NUCEE’s FY25 impact report as a modular narrative: ecosystem overview, student journeys, venture outcomes, mentorship network, and alumni highlights. Each section is powered by specific metrics and visualizations sourced from standardized datasets instead of ad-hoc pulls.
I consolidated fragmented data into a single, trackable source of truth by mapping every venture, student, mentor, and program touchpoint to a shared schema. I then implemented 10+ workflows and documentation that cut data retrieval time by roughly 50%.
For VMN and a newly formed NUCEE sub-organization, I helped lead the transition to a new management platform. We redesigned mentorship pipelines to better track 300+ mentors and 500+ students, reducing manual tracking by ~30% and improving reporting for future cohorts.
I worked with leadership and faculty to redesign Northeastern’s Princeton Review reporting process—its first major overhaul in more than 20 years. We aligned NUCEE metrics with ranking criteria and documented a repeatable approach so future submissions can be faster, cleaner, and less fragile.
The work turned NUCEE’s impact reporting from a one-off scramble into an ongoing capability. Instead of re-collecting the same numbers every year, NUCEE now has a structured system and narrative that can evolve alongside its programs.