National Foundation Advances Grantmaking with Modern Data Platform

Overview

As one of the nation’s top charitable foundations, this organization works to help children thrive in several regions in the U.S. and overseas. The foundation has among its priorities openness, cross-sector collaboration, and information sharing – creating what they call “catalytic partners” in communities around the country. Doing so requires a unique set of technical solutions that enable large numbers of organizations to work together collaboratively.

The Challenge

To further that collaborative mission, several years ago, the foundation decided it would be important to migrate from a proprietary, on premises grants management software platform, to a more modern, sector-standard, cloud-hosted software solution. This change would have broad implications, requiring both a change in the core system and also a corresponding change in the systems used for data analytics and reporting. The foundation wanted to maintain the history of their grantmaking across this change, and to provide at least the same level of visibility, data analysis, and integration across systems on the new platform that they enjoyed on the old - all beginning on day one after going live with the new platform.

The Solution

BlueGranite joined a multi-firm and cross discipline team of staff and consultants that, together, accomplished the move of both the core application data and the data analytics/data warehousing/reporting platform. This required us to solve a unique problem: helping to migrate the foundation’s data to a new platform, while also constructing a new ground-up data warehouse and associated load automation, both while the new application was being constructed.

The Results

We successfully navigated this change by establishing strong relationships across this ad-hoc team, in order to track the development of the new platform. This enabled us to build out components of the data migration and of the new data warehouse platform simultaneously as the software development was completing features, rather than having to wait until it was complete, resulting in a significant schedule advantage.

The foundation was able to go live with this new platform while retaining the history of their grantmaking, and use a brand new data warehouse solution, built around current best practice, on the very first day.

The solution includes:
• A comprehensive data warehouse including both grantmaking and accounting/financials
• Plug-and-play compatibility with current analytics tools using star schema design principles
• Automated master data integration to maintain cross-application datasets
• Near-real time operational reporting
• Interactive visual dashboards
• Web-based traditional reporting

Interested in learning more about how BlueGranite can help accelerate your modern analytics solution? Contact us today.