How a Global Federated Nonprofit Streamlined Data Reporting to Track Its KPIs

For decades an international federated nonprofit dedicated to saving the planet had been burdened with antiquated on-premise data architecture that scattered information across disconnected systems and spreadsheets, creating silos within and between countries. This disorganization made it impossible to gauge KPIs like total giving received, how giving breaks down between one-off donors and regular financial contributors (AKA “sustainers”), supporter churn, etc. 

Even more challenging, the rules of the organization’s federated network model declare each of its international offices legally independent, with no global management hierarchy or formal processes to enforce standards, meaning decisions are made by more than two dozen regional stakeholders.

The organization was also grappling with:

Let’s dig into how the nonprofit standardizes its data and slashes time spent on manual reporting tasks.

What they needed was an upgrade to its data architecture and the ability to standardize reporting, work cross-functionally between regional teams, and utilize a multitude of source systems. The answer was Civis Platform.

Civis Platform is a cloud-based data management platform that makes it easy for nonprofits, advocacy groups, and other mission-driven organizations to import, transform, analyze, and report on their data. Platform allows stakeholders throughout the organization to collaborate in a centralized environment to quickly generate data-driven solutions and to close the loop on measurement, activation, and attribution.

The environmental nonprofit partnered with Civis to design a data architecture that addresses its operational needs, not its organizational structure, with an emphasis on: 

Civis worked with the nonprofit to bring each office’s raw fundraising and marketing data into Platform and to automate transformations to build and refresh reports. The Civis team also hosted on-site onboarding sessions to train affiliate data teams on using Platform to achieve analytics goals, customizing these sessions according to each office’s technical expertise and familiarity with data tools.

Civis Platform reinvented how the environmental nonprofit conducts business by enabling the development of a federation-wide analytics community. A hub-and-spoke model ensures timely, accurate access to standardized data while emphasizing interdependency and co-ownership among regional stakeholders, allowing data teams to embrace coordination and collaboration.

The organization’s central hub now monitors KPIs across its entire affiliate network, overseeing all data integration and ingestion responsibilities while assigning analytics/data science and reporting/insights duties to the regional offices (an approach that eliminates manual reporting chores, saving staffers significant staff time). Additional benefits of this “virtual hive” model and shared data platform include:

In addition to the creation of a shared data platform, Civis worked to create automated, standardized reporting to eliminate the tedious process of manual reporting and produce consistent, comparable metrics across all teams. Because of the nonprofit’s size and international footprint, Civis built out a BigQuery integration on Platform to give the organization the power it needed to draw meaningful conclusions from its data.

Three years into the project, the nonprofit has deployed Civis Platform in 23 countries across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and its global data staff now tops 120 members. With its data unified and its reporting processes transformed, the organization can go back to doing what it does best: creating solutions for a peaceful, environmentally sound future.