Introducing Admin Analytics

Our check-ins and renewal meetings with research offices tend to go the same way. We bring the usage numbers: how many faculty are active, what they search for, which funders they keep going back to, and which departments haven't really started. Before the meeting is over, someone usually asks whether they could pull those numbers themselves instead of waiting for us.

So we've built them into Atom, in two new admin pages. Overview is a weekly summary of activity at your institution, with a short list of things worth following up on. Analytics has the detail behind it, which you can filter by department and date range and export to CSV. If you're an Atom admin, both are already under Admin in the sidebar.

Each example in this post is the real page, running on Atom University, our demo institution, so the names and numbers are made up. You're welcome to click around.

Reporting to leadership

When a VPR or dean asks how Atom is going, they usually want to know two things: whether faculty are using it, and whether it's leading to proposals. The top of the Overview answers both for the current week. It shows how many researchers you have and how many were active, the grants they favorited and the award dollars behind them, and how many proposals are in progress or completed.

For anything longer than a week, use Analytics. Its date range goes from the last seven days up to all time, and every range except all time is compared with the period before it. The 12-month view, for example, shows the past year against the year before.

For a department or college report, filter to that unit and export the table you need as a CSV. The file name includes the department and the dates, which helps when you're pulling several at once for an annual report. The same filter is a quick way to prepare for a meeting with a department chair.

Finding the gaps

Adoption is rarely even across a campus. Adoption by Researchers shows, for each department, how many people were active out of everyone who could be. In our experience, a department well below the rest often hasn't had a proper introduction to Atom yet, and a short demo at a faculty meeting or a note to the chair usually helps.

Atom matches every open grant against your researchers' interests, so it can also show you where a good fit is going unnoticed. Overlooked Funders lists funders with open grants that fit several of your researchers, where nobody at your institution has opened one yet. It's a useful list to bring to a department that only ever applies to NIH or NSF.

Closing Soon, Not Seen Yet is the short-term version: grants due in two to six weeks that fit researchers who haven't opened them. That's late for a large federal proposal, but workable for many foundation and society applications, and it's enough time to get the call in front of the right PI.

How your faculty use Atom

Feature Usage shows what share of your active researchers have used each part of Atom. In the example below, nearly everyone opens grants and favorites them, but only about a third have tried Deep Research, which checks a researcher's eligibility and fit against every open grant in Atom and brings back the ones that match their work. When a useful feature is that far behind, it's usually worth five minutes at the next faculty meeting.

Most Engaged Funders breaks down your team's favorites by funder type over time, so you can see how much of their attention goes to federal agencies compared with foundations, societies, and industry, and whether that's changing. Rising Funders lists the individual funders drawing more interest than before, and Search Terms, on the Activity tab, shows the research areas people search for most. Taken together, they're a fair read on where your faculty think the money is.

Needs a Boost lists researchers who used Atom before but haven't been back in four months or more. When that list is short, it also includes people who have never signed in. Remind and Invite send a note to one person, and Remind All sends one to everyone who has gone quiet.

Using the Overview each week

Opening Admin in the sidebar takes you to the Overview. It's meant to be a five-minute weekly check.

Below the week's numbers is Set Up Your Team. It lists new people who could use a welcome, invitations that were never accepted, incomplete profiles, and researchers without a department or research interests, each with a next step you can take from the list. It's worth clearing this before anything else. Atom matches grants against research interests, so a researcher without them gets weaker recommendations, and anyone missing a department won't show up in your department numbers.

Further down, charts compare the last 30 days of active researchers, grant visits, searches, and favorites with the 30 days before. New grants are grouped into strong fits for your researchers, newly listed grants, and limited submissions.

Opportunities is a short list of what's worth doing this week. In a given week that might be a limited submission your researchers have favorited that closes within 30 days, which means it's time to run your internal competition. Other items include a department whose activity is dropping, new people who joined but haven't done anything yet, and favorited grants that close this month. When an email would help, Send Email opens a draft you can edit. Atom sends it from you: your name is on it, replies come to your inbox, and each person gets their own copy addressed by first name.

Analytics, tab by tab

Analytics is for when you need more than the current week. It has six tabs, each filterable by department and date range, with tables you can export to CSV.

• Activity: overall engagement, feature usage, adoption by department, and search terms.
• Researchers: who's new, who's a regular, who has gone quiet, and the Needs a Boost list.
• Grants: what your researchers are finding and favoriting, new grants that fit them, and good fits closing soon that nobody has opened.
• Funders: the funders your team engages with most, who's rising, which departments lean on which funders, and who's being overlooked.
• Grant Emails: how Atom's grant recommendation emails perform, from emails sent through clicks, favorites, and proposals started.
• Proposals: your proposal pipeline, including what's due soon but not ready and what has stalled.

Training webinar

We're hosting a live webinar on both pages. We'll walk through them, show how other research offices are using them, and answer questions. [Webinar date and registration link]

If there's something you'd like to measure that isn't here yet, tell your Atom contact. Much of what's on these pages started as a question someone asked us in a check-in.