"pivotal effort" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to denote a major effort or initiative taken to achieve a desired result or outcome. For example, "The mayor made a pivotal effort to get the city's homeless into shelters and off the streets."
For Pivotal, its effort is as much about big data as it is about application development.
American military officials have suggested that the coming NATO action will be pivotal in efforts to break the back of Taliban influence in the southern region.
Egypt proved pivotal in that effort.
Union leaders are focusing on members of Congress in pivotal districts, an effort that makes many Democrats wary of signing up with the White House.
The auto industry is pivotal to that effort, and Mr. Obama will surely continue to make the case that without his aggressive moves to save General Motors, for instance, the American automobile industry would be in far more dire straits.
Republican senators in the bipartisan group have said a border standard is pivotal to their efforts.
But despite being pivotal in global efforts to reach the MDGs by 2015, people with disabilities are largely invisible in development statistics and absent from aid budgets.
At the same time, the Kurds had been pivotal to US efforts to break the grip of Isis in the area, being used as a proxy force by US trainers and given air support by fighter jets.
"Samir Kuntar was pivotal in the efforts of Hezbollah to prepare the next launching pad in the Golan Heights," Amidror said.
At a time when child mortality could be dropping much faster, the recently published accountability report for the G8 gathering in Lough Erne, UK next week doesn't even contain a section on nutrition, exposing the G8 as giving less focus to this huge child killer at a time when all the evidence points to nutrition being pivotal in our efforts to attain the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs).
