Case Study: Duke’s Fuqua School of Business delivers data-driven nonprofit support and builds student analytics skills with DataCamp

How Duke’s Fuqua Volunteer Corps Helps Nonprofts Navigate the COVID-19 Crisis

Duke's Fuqua School of Business mobilized the Fuqua Volunteer Corps to help nonprofits struggling with reduced funding, disrupted operations, and a sudden need for data-driven decision making during the COVID-19 crisis. Facing a tough job market for recent graduates, Fuqua relied on DataCamp — giving Master of Quantitative Management (MQM) students baseline proficiency in R and ongoing access to DataCamp’s bite-size lessons — so volunteers could rapidly apply analytics skills to real nonprofit problems.

DataCamp’s learning platform served as an on-demand technical reference and training tool that enabled students to complete 99 nonprofit projects with 133 volunteers, automate reporting workflows (one volunteer replaced SQL/Excel processes with a single Python script that saves hours each extraction), and build marketable R and Python skills. By integrating DataCamp into the Fuqua Volunteer Corps, DataCamp helped scale analytics capacity for nonprofits while boosting student confidence and employability.

Duke's Fuqua School of Business

Jeremy Petranka

Assistant Dean, MQM Program