About Cal Poly Humboldt
Found on the North Coast where the ancient Redwood forests meet rolling ocean waves, Cal Poly Humboldt offers a hands-on, impactful education that’s crafting careers and launching industries. View Website“Openbook is an important step in making our budget more transparent and I am optimistic that greater visibility will help us build a shared understanding about our budgeted revenues and expenditures, and ultimately help us improve our budgeting in the future.”
Amber Blakeslee
University Budget Director, Cal Poly Humboldt
Business Challenge
The Cal Poly Humboldt Budget Office sought a new approach to portray the breakdown of the University’s budgeted revenues and expenditures in a more visual and interactive format. The Budget Office wanted to make information about their budget spending more transparent, and increase budget data accessibility for the public in a user-friendly method. Euna Budget, Powered by Questica – OpenBook, Operating, Personnel, and Capital module Business Benefits- Transparency
- Up-to-date information and charts
- Drill-down data with visualization tools
- Dashboards are easily embedded onto websites
- Choose what information you want to share with your users
- Interactive charts make it easy to depict budgeting data
Business Solution
OpenBook – Transparency and Data Visualization Module
OpenBook was created as a more user-friendly approach to exploring and relaying information about budgets and other data. Depending on what data an organization would like to share with its internal or external stakeholders, a visitor or user of the custom OpenBook site can explore the charts, graphics and tables. OpenBook provides different views to help illustrate where resources are being allocated in the budget. OpenBook promotes greater understanding with functionality that allows visitors to drill down on information to gain further insight about specific areas and types of activity.“With OpenBook you can drill from just about anywhere. You can drill from a label or within and get into the details from a variety of different places. It’s been a useful resource for us, and we are looking forward to continuing to build it out for the community and the campus.”
Business Benefits
Shareable
The Cal Poly Humboldt Budget Office has created a website that displays breakdowns of the University’s budgeted revenues and expenditures, and it lets visitors view budget information in different ways, such as by organizing data by types of spending and by organizational structure. Visitors can break down data into further detail, and its visualization tools, such as displaying dollar values and percentages by hovering over charts with a mouse, makes information transparent and straightforward.Create dialogue
Cal Poly Humboldt sought to enhance visibility and transparency with both its internal (faculty, staff, executive management, deans, department heads, etc.) and external stakeholders such as students, donors, alumni, and the greater community. The Budget Office uses OpenBook to help answer questions and generate discussion about the budget within the campus community. OpenBook provides users with different charts and breakdowns of how the University’s budget is being allocated to different departments. Cal Poly Humboldt plans to continue to enhance how they communicate to the campus community by adding more dashboards for visitors to access from their website, which could display budgets for personnel, student fees, and capital projects.
Compare and contrast
The Cal Poly Humboldt OpenBook website allows visitors to view up to 10 years of historical budget information. This allows the Budget Office to review and plan their current and future budgets, with historical and current data. It also informs the public how the Budget Office has adapted their budget allocations overtime, and ultimately helps Humboldt improve their budgeting for the future.
Data can be uploaded into OpenBook through a direct integration with Euna Budget, Powered by Questica, or from other sources, which makes it easy to continue to create different dashboards and add additional information to their OpenBook website. With Euna Budget’s OpenBook module as their data visualization and transparency solution, Cal Poly Humboldt has been able to increase awareness and foster dialogue about their budgeting practices. 
Through transparent budgeting solutions, Cal Poly Humboldt better inspires trust and confidence in their students and the community.