The Challenge: Data Without Context

A groundbreaking nonprofit based in Boston has collected a huge wealth of information in its thirty years of serving communities and advancing early education, but much of that data was spread out across departments and individual owners. With no common standards nor way to report on the disparate data, they was missing out on actionable insights that could enhance their work and assist in their fundraising. 

The Opportunity: Connecting The Dots 

Looking to make the most of what they already had, the organization had to analyze and standardize their data, integrate and relate the areas of concern, and process and report on the information in an effective and audience appropriate manner. The organization already knew TNB’s familiarity with tools like Salesforce, Power BI, PostgreSQL, and others would make them a good partner in putting the pieces together. 

The Solution: Understand the Past, Build the Future 

The process of empowering the organization with data began with mapping what that data was, where it was, and what kind of relationships existed between them. That allowed us to establish sources of truth that all staff could rely on and answered the question “where do we find that?” Standardizing individual and relationship data into Salesforce, interaction data into a PostgreSQL data warehouse, and communication tracking through Constant Contact greatly helped departments know where their question could be answered from, and where to go to make their own updates. 

Once information was mapped, integrating the data into information was accomplished through careful automation in Microsoft’s Power Automate and Power BI platforms. Instead of manual ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes, Jumpstart could rely on automatic relationships between systems as well as conforming information to reduce errors and ambiguity. Finally the standardized, cleaned, and connected data was brought into Power BI’s reporting tools to create dashboards for multiple audiences, ensuring that everyone shared the same ground truth but could establish measures and KPIs that best fit their individual work. 

The Result: Insight Becoming Action 

With TNB’s support, the organization was able to make the most of what it already had and prepare itself for greater effectiveness driven by data in the future. The new standards for data entry and sources of truth have freed staff of nagging questions about their records and increased confidence in the information they see in their systems. The automation of data cleaning and relation has freed the technology staff to focus more on delivering helpful reports in a timely manner, no longer needing to dig through Excel files and emails to reformat and configure the basics. And maybe best of all, from donors to program staff to the families they serve, Jumpstart can now easily demonstrate their program effectiveness and the impact that they are having in the lives of underserved communities all over the country.