Case Study: Calvin College increases research capacity and turns students into app builders with Quick Base

Calvin College's Center for Social Research Turns Students into App Builders with Quick Base

Calvin College’s Center for Social Research (CSR) needed a more efficient way to manage technology-intensive research projects that were bogged down by paper, spreadsheets, and a patchwork of custom-coded apps. These legacy approaches limited data integration, slowed project workflows, and constrained the team’s capacity—especially for training student researchers and quickly iterating on study designs.

Adopting Quick Base gave CSR a no-code platform to build and customize research apps without heavy IT support, train students rapidly as app builders, and integrate with surveys, financial tools, and SQL sources for real-time reporting. The results included faster time-to-value, on-the-fly report customizations during client meetings, a 75% response rate (350 interviews) on a recent study, and significant growth in revenue and project capacity (from $180K to $750K annually), all while lowering operational costs.

Calvin College

Neil Carlson

Director of CSR