Case Study: Vanderbilt University achieves improved donor engagement and data literacy with Snowflake

Vanderbilt University Uses Snowflake to Advance Donor Engagement and Data Literacy

Vanderbilt University, a private research institution in Nashville serving 13,710 students and over 150,000 living alumni, needed better ways to manage resources and advance student and donor experiences. Its on‑premises, siloed data environment and heavy spreadsheet use made it hard to produce trustworthy, timely insights and created governance challenges for development, alumni relations, and institutional analytics.

Vanderbilt moved to Snowflake’s Data Cloud to centralize constituent data (notably from Salesforce), power Tableau dashboards, and modernize pipelines with Snowpark and AWS AppFlow. The migration cut ETL bottlenecks (4x improvement in Salesforce ETL throughput), reduced vendor dependency and costs, improved donor and alumni engagement through embedded analytics, and strengthened proactive data governance and literacy—positioning the university to scale analytics and explore enriched and AI‑driven insights.

Vanderbilt University

Josh Vincent

Senior Director, Office of Continuous Improvement