NYU Silver School of Social Work transformed data management

Discover how Adaptavist and ScriptRunner helped a leading social work school replace an ageing system with a scalable, cloud-based work management solution using monday.com.

About NYU Silver School of Social Work

New York University (NYU) Silver School of Social Work is a major training centre for practising social workers, offering undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degree programs. Founded in 1960, it's known for clinical excellence, strong dedication to social justice, and an innovative teaching approach, providing training to more than 20,000 social work practitioners.

Industry: Education

Implemented tools: monday.com and ScriptRunner Connect

Headquarters: New York City, NY

Total students: 900+

Overview

Managing 900 student placements annually, NYU Silver was trapped in a cycle of manual data entry, legacy technology, and stakeholders facing challenges. Their existing 20-year-old system required staff to manually download, rename, and re-upload thousands of documents each semester, taking up months of administrative time. With no remote access and vendor lock-in preventing basic updates, they knew it was time for a complete digital transformation.

Adaptavist partnered with NYU Silver to design and implement a cloud-based solution using monday.com, which integrated seamlessly with their student information system via the ScriptRunner Connect integration platform. The result was a single source of truth that automated workflows, eliminated friction for students and community partners, and freed up the operations team to focus on more strategic work.

Requirements at a glance

A secure, cloud-based and highly scalable solution

The ability for the team to quickly make changes themselves

Workflow automation to reduce manual efforts

The capability to integrate data across the new solution and the university's legacy student information system

A flexible, code-based integration solution to deliver exact business requirements

Improved experience for students and community partners

The challenge

A legacy system lacking flexibility

NYU Silver's previous student placement system was starting to seriously impact the team's productivity. The database could only be accessed from work computers, creating additional barriers during the pandemic and remaining a challenge afterwards for remote part-time staff. Students and community partners had to navigate clunky portals that were inaccessible on mobile devices and routinely locked users out.

But the true cost was invisible: the administrative burden that consumed extraordinary amounts of staff time. Each semester, the operations team were forced to manually download thousands of evaluation forms and questionnaires, rename each file individually, and re-upload them. Staff also spent weeks manually entering multiple data points into spreadsheets, all because the existing system couldn't generate usable reports.

Frustrating vendor lock-in and tech debt

The team also lacked control over their own system. When the department changed its name, something as simple as updating it on forms became an ordeal requiring external vendor intervention at an eye-watering cost, with no guarantee the changes would even be accurate. They could only make changes during a narrow window each year, and even basic updates to evaluation forms required for accreditation were impossible without direct vendor involvement. Any new system would also need to support modern security standards, such as multi-factor authentication. Aligning with current security expectations became a top priority as the school looked to future-proof their infrastructure.

We were always reacting; now we can be proactive, and I don't even know what that means yet, because we haven't had the luxury of thinking that way before.

Meredith O'Boyle

Senior Associate Director at NYU Silver

A cascading impact on students and partners

These inefficiencies started to create real problems. The legacy system’s limitations posed a risk to timely student interviews and created unnecessary challenges for community partners. This meant the school's operations team spent most of their time reacting to system issues rather than proactively supporting students and partners.

The breaking point

The tipping point came when the legacy vendor announced plans to shut down the portal system. With no replacement ready, NYU Silver faced a challenging scenario. They needed a partner who could move quickly, understand the complexity of their workflows, and deliver a solution that staff could quickly pick up, control and modify themselves.

illustration of person on a cloud looking at a work management board, surrounded by related apps and tools

The solution

The start of a strategic partnership

monday.com recognised a strong strategic and cultural fit and introduced Adaptavist to NYU Silver. NYU Silver connected with Adaptavist and immediately felt confident in the partnership.

Throughout the discovery phase, Adaptavist asked a lot of questions to enable a thorough understanding of critical workflows for evaluations, questionnaires, and reporting, and to distinguish between must-haves, nice-to-haves, and non-essentials.

We're a school of social work. We needed a partner with technical acumen who was also willing to work with me as a novice, not making us feel stupid or inadequate.

Meredith O'Boyle

Senior Associate Director at NYU Silver

Building a cloud-based single source of truth

Adaptavist designed a comprehensive solution that consolidated fragmented workflows into a single system. The new architecture includes different boards for vetting community partners, tracking student placements with visual map functionality, managing evaluation workflows, and storing all relevant data in a single, accessible location. And crucially, students, community partners, and staff can quickly access what they need from any device, anywhere.

Solving the integration challenge with ScriptRunner Connect

One of the project's most complex requirements was integrating monday.com with the university's legacy student information system—a task that required careful coordination with the university's central IT department. Adaptavist used ScriptRunner Connect to build its API integration layer. As an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), it enables organisations to build, manage, and scale integrations across systems, applications and data sources. Its flexibility and ability to handle complex use cases made it the perfect solution for this challenge. ScriptRunner Connect's generic connector capability enabled seamless data synchronisation between systems, automatically pulling in student class schedules, contact information, and other critical data rather than requiring manual entry. This makes it an ideal solution for integrating data between legacy systems and modern platforms like monday.com, while saving significant development time compared to building connections from scratch.

Automating without over-engineering

A key principle throughout this project was finding the balance between automation and human oversight. That's why Adaptavist built intelligent workflows to automate repetitive tasks while preserving critical touchpoints. For example, when prospective community partners complete a vetting questionnaire, the system automatically routes pre-approved organisations to coordinators for outreach. But it doesn't fully automate that conversation, enabling the university's coordinators to focus on relationship-building.

Giving back control

NYU Silver now has complete autonomy. Staff can modify forms accessed by clicking a link. The team can also update workflows and make changes instantly. Adaptavist delivered comprehensive workflow documentation, ensuring institutional knowledge remains available even if team members leave. The visual, colour-coded interface makes information accessible and intuitive: coordinators can filter their caseload, view placement locations on a map, and find student information without downloading huge Excel files and manually sorting through historical data.

The results

A transformation that's already making waves

The transformation's impact is already clear. Staff now have more time for strategic work, community partner relationships are strengthening, and the implementation's initial success is sparking interest across the wider university. The central IT team is now exploring the possibility of rolling out monday.com to other schools, with NYU Silver serving as the proof-of-concept.

NYU Silver also has support from Adaptavist and the scalability of ScriptRunner Connect to ensure continued improvement and ongoing success. In stark contrast to the original legacy system, they now have a secure, scalable platform with multi-factor authentication and the flexibility to evolve as needs change.

Placement coordination streamlined for 900+ students each semester

Months of manual data entry eliminated

A new secure, scalable and seamless system

The partner relationship that made it possible

When asked if they would recommend Adaptavist, the response was unequivocal: "Absolutely. Everybody has been great to work with and has dealt with our many technical questions so well. I was shocked that they understood the intricacies of what we were trying to do and came up with a viable solution using ScriptRunner Connect. The team has far exceeded expectations."

For organisations recognising themselves in this story, Meredith's advice is simple: "There's no perfect time to do this, everybody's busy. But it's a time and energy suck to keep going with a process that's not working. It's better to put the time and energy into something that's going to give you back both. And you don't need to be technical. As long as you trust the partner and they're asking the right questions, you'll figure it out together."

illustration of partner talking to customer surrounded by continuous arrows

illustration of people on ladders building monday boards

Talk to us about monday.com

If you recognise some of the challenges shared by NYU Silver School of Social Work, get in touch to discuss how we can help you get started or optimise your monday.com implementation with integrations, automations, workflows and AI capabilities.

How NYU Silver School of Social Work transformed data management for 900 students each semester