Cobry took Investor in Students from spreadsheets to a production data platform, then built them a customer-facing analytics portal on top of it. The platform gathers, processes and presents millions of datapoints. The portal gives IIS members secure, direct access to their own student experience data, served through embedded Looker dashboards behind a proper login.
Overview
Investor in Students (IIS) is a global accreditation focused on understanding, measuring and improving the student experience in accommodation. It provides a 360º assessment of how well that experience is working, and currently measures the experience of over 216,000 students across more than 44 members worldwide.
Growth had been strong, and that was the problem. The tooling that worked at a smaller scale was buckling:
Survey data lived in Google Sheets and Excel, which got slower and harder to manage as volumes grew.
Extracting and analysing responses was manual, so insights took too long to reach customers.
Sharing those insights was awkward, which limited the value IIS could pass on to members.
Building and maintaining Looker Studio dashboards became a bottleneck, particularly around end-of-year customer reports.
The stack was never designed for the volumes IIS was now handling, and it showed.
IIS needed a data platform that could scale with them, and a way to put insights in front of their members without a person in the middle every time.
The solution
Cobry rebuilt the foundation on Google Cloud. Fivetran handles ingestion, BigQuery stores and processes the data, and Dataform manages the SQL transformations as version-controlled, automated pipelines. The path from survey response to finished insight runs end to end with no manual handling, which removes both the delay and the human error that came with it.
On top of the warehouse, we built a sentiment analysis pipeline that turns qualitative free-text responses into quantitative signals. IIS members care a lot about the comments their students leave, and this lets IIS measure and report on them rather than read through them by hand.
The bigger change is how members now see their data. We replaced the Looker Studio reporting layer with full Looker as the modelling and visualisation engine, then embedded it inside a custom analytics portal built for IIS and their customers.
The portal is a Next.js application running on Cloud Run, backed by CloudSQL, with secure authentication for every customer. Each member logs in and sees only their own data, presented through embedded Looker dashboards and explores. There is no manual export, no emailing PDFs at year end, and no shared report that has to be rebuilt for each customer. Members get governed, self-serve access to live insights, and IIS controls exactly what each one can see.
Problem, solution, outcome
Problem. IIS was growing fast in the student living sector but ran its data on spreadsheets and manual processes. That made analysis slow, sharing difficult, and scaling close to impossible.
Solution. Cobry migrated IIS to BigQuery with Dataform for transformations and Fivetran for ingestion, added a sentiment analysis pipeline to extract structured insight from free text, and moved reporting onto full Looker. We then built a Next.js portal on Cloud Run and CloudSQL that embeds Looker and gives each member secure access to their own dashboards.
Outcome. IIS now runs an automated pipeline from data capture through to insight, and delivers that insight to members through a branded portal they log into directly. Reporting that used to be a manual bottleneck is now self-serve and always current. The platform scales with the data, and IIS can take on new members without taking on new spreadsheet work.