Neonrain
ECS researchers used to spend days scouring data.
Now they find what they’re looking for in minutes.
The Client
Education Commission of the States (ECS) is a US interstate agency that tracks educational policy, translates research, provides advice, and helps state leaders implement more effective policy.
The Challenge
ECS receives thousands of information requests each year from policy advisors and other state education leaders. But fulfilling those requests was often difficult and time-consuming.
With tens of thousands of state policy documents housed in different systems, from Salesforce and WordPress to spreadsheets, their staff had no easy way to quickly find the information they needed.
The Solution
Neon Rain kicked off the project with a comprehensive discovery process to understand the types of content ECS manages and how staff use the information, all with the expected result in mind.
With a content plan in place, Neon Rain created an enterprise-grade searchable database that made it easy for ECS team members to instantly find and organize state policy insights.
The system pulls in multiple document types (Word, Excel, PDF, Blogs, XML, etc.) from multiple sources, processes them, automatically tags them by state based on what it sees in the content, and then indexes them — so ECS can access all their resources from one interface.
The powerful search platform includes features such as full-text search, fuzzy search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, and rich document handling. Faceted search means the platform processes data through multiple explicit dimensions so that the information can be found in multiple ways rather than using a single pre-determined method.
Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance and is utilized by companies such as Bank of America, Cigna, Boeing, Live Nation, Apple, and O'Reilly Auto Parts.
Neon Rain also created a system to display 50-state comparisons of different state policies and made those comparisons searchable on the public ECS website. Now, visitors can display the information with just a click and gather the insights they need to make more informed decisions.
“They offered a lot of personal attention and were incredibly responsive. Their careful listening and thoughtful questions really put our minds at ease. I've talked to a lot of developers, but Neon Rain is one of the best I've ever dealt with.”
- Claus V, Education Commission of the States
