Case Study: University of Pennsylvania achieves 5× faster data acquisition and streamlined online fundraising with Talend

Simplifying fundraising to increase diversity and access to higher education

The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League research university, needed to modernize its Online Giving platform to support its Inclusion priority of making a Penn education accessible through a no‑loan financial aid policy. An aging donation site was limiting alumni engagement, mobile usability and the ability to keep pace with growing data volumes and year‑end traffic spikes, while also requiring integration with legacy on‑premise systems.

Penn rebuilt the Online Giving app as a cloud‑native solution on AWS and used Talend Studio and Talend Cloud to manage hybrid integrations between the cloud (including S3) and its on‑premise Oracle CRM. The new architecture enabled five‑times faster data acquisition, core data ingestion in under six months, improved campaign conversion and more efficient marketing spend, plus reliable auto‑scaling for peak donation periods.

University of Pennsylvania

Anne Marie del Rossi

Senior Director of Data Services