Case Study: University of Notre Dame achieves rapid, scalable data-driven fundraising with Snowflake

University of Notre Dame Deploys Snowflake for Data-driven Fundraising

The University of Notre Dame, a top-25 research university with a 135,000-strong alumni base, needed faster, more flexible analytics to drive targeted fundraising and engagement. Its eight-year-old on-premises data warehouse struggled with long load times, unnormalized data and queries that took 30–90 minutes—forcing overnight reports and limiting the university’s ability to reach alumni (including younger, social-media–native graduates) in real time.

Notre Dame moved to Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse to load diverse data types, auto-scale for up to hundreds of concurrent Tableau users, and eliminate infrastructure maintenance. The result: queries that once took 30 minutes now run in under one minute, seamless concurrency during peak campaigns, pay-for-use scalability, almost zero maintenance for IT, and expanded use of the platform for other applications like the student database—accelerating data-driven fundraising and decision-making.

University of Notre Dame

Chris Frederick

Manager of Business Intelligence