CASE STUDY 6

After-School Learning Center (Maryland)

Automating attendance tracking and strengthening grant reporting.

ORGANIZATION OVERVIEW

Type: After-School Learning & Enrichment Center

Location: Maryland

Size: 400+ youth served annually across three sites

Mission: Support academic success, mentorship, enrichment, and youth leadership

THE CHALLENGE

Attendance was tracked across three different spreadsheets, all formatted differently.

This caused:

  • Inconsistent numbers
  • Difficulty identifying trends
  • Slow, stressful grant reporting
  • Staff uncertainty about which data was correct
  • No real-time view of student engagement

The system was time-consuming, error-prone, and unreliable.

GOALS & DESIRED OUTCOMES

The center wanted:

  • A unified attendance system
  • A dashboard showing trends by day, grade, and location
  • Faster, more accurate grant reports
  • A simple workflow staff could manage
  • Clear visuals for leadership and funders

SANDAI’S
APPROACH

SaNDAI transformed the process through:

  • A BI data cleanup and standardization

  • Automated ingestion from daily attendance logs

  • A Youth Engagement Dashboard showing real-time attendance

  • Training for program staff using plain language

  • A grant-ready reporting template

THE SOLUTION DELIVERED

  • A single dashboard showing:

    • Daily attendance

    • Trends over time

    • Grade-level participation

    • Comparison across locations

  • Automated data refresh

  • A simplified attendance workflow

THE RESULTS

Attendance reporting time cut by 70%

Dashboards used weekly by leadership

Grant reports produced in minutes

Staff confidence improved

Stronger visibility into low engagement days and groups

IMPACT ON
MISSION

The center can now quickly identify when students are falling behind and adjust programming to ensure they stay engaged — strengthening academic and personal development.

WHY THEY CHOSE SANDAI

They needed a simple, easy-to-use dashboard that fit a small team’s capacity and supported their funding goals.

WHAT’S NEXT

SaNDAI is expanding their dashboard to include student outcomes, enrichment participation, and family engagement metrics.

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

“SaNDAI helped us go from tracking attendance in three spreadsheets to an automated dashboard that shows trends by day, grade, and location. Our grant reports practically write themselves now.”

— Program Director