Optimizing data processes to support a nonprofit's mission

Background

A large, international nonprofit with a mission to improve quality of life through job and education support needed to standardize data collection and reporting. The nonprofit provides community-based programs and employment placement services and has over 160 member organizations across the nation. Each member has the same general business model but makes minor tweaks to better suit its local community. The headquarters at this organization identified an initiative to collect data from each of its member organizations in a more streamlined and scalable manner.

Challenge

When we began our engagement, there was no standardized reporting across these independent member organizations. Existing reporting was manually produced and released after the extensive data cleaning processes, delaying valuable insights. Team members were unable to effectively share insights across the member network, and data collection, submission, and validation was tedious and manual.

Approach

Member Data Ingestion Solution: Keyrus built an API to which members could automatically send their data programmatically. Upon successful data validation, the data is properly structured and inserted into a data warehouse to automatically feed into downstream reporting processes. Member Data Transformation & Management: After submitting data, members can view both the standardized organization view and the custom view of the specific member. The solution monitors data quality issues automatically using Quilliup and Keyrus deployed a master data management component to standardize nomenclature. Member Reporting & Analytics Solution: Keyrus created five Tableau dashboards for thousands of end users to present national and regional benchmarks so that members can spot actionable gaps in performance. Change Management: We implemented a controlled roll-out plan to a pilot audience before continuing to a wider rollout, including communication, training, and support.

Key results

Benefits

The organization has a web-friendly user interface for data submission. They can also rely on a new data warehouse as a single source of truth for reporting, including a full data quality alerting framework. Member organizations can also build comparison analytics dashboards to improve their performance. Prior to the engagement, the Annual Statistical Report (ASR) would not be released to members until July after intensive manual evaluation of missing data, data ranges, and then running the statistical analysis and generating the report. The ASR can now be generated the day after their data collection is complete, and with the automation of reporting and data integrity, the data collection period is much shorter as well. The ASR is ready to be released in February instead of July, greatly shortening the delivery window. Overall, members are now able to make better business decisions by comparing against similar member organizations.

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