“Plan Data” Project: Digital Transformation at América Solidaria Chile

Today, I invite you on a journey where the principles and values of América Solidaria are connected to critical strategic challenges. Its mission is clear and powerful: Through effective networking, we tirelessly work to promote the participation and rights of the most excluded and vulnerable children and teenager on our continent, ensuring that they have the opportunity for a just and dignified life and full of happiness.

However, what does this mean in the practice? Essentially, it means that all our efforts are dedicated to ensuring that every child and teenager, without exception, has the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a continent they dream of and unquestionably deserve to be part of.

That translates into social projects developed by professional volunteers in various countries throughout the Americas, with a specific focus on essential areas such as education and regions marked by the exclusion and social vulnerability.

Nevertheless, América Solidaria is at a strategic crossroads, facing important decisions about its future direction and maintaining its sustainability. And this regard, the organization has made the decision to accelerate its digital transformation process.

From a financial perspective, highlighting significant challenges. In 2022, its individual donors represented 79% of the annual donations, which is equivalent to USD $1.07 million dollars, therefore, it is crucial to foster a proactive relationship with its donors and address the increasing of double-digit churn rate.

On the other hand, the current technology is not aligned with operational requirements, which leads to the generation of inefficiencies instead of effective solutions.

Additionally, there is an underutilization of its technological stack, resulting in inefficient costs, a lack of tech support. This reflects a significant obstacle that must be overcome on the path toward a digitally empowered and sustainable future.

“Plan Data”: Everything is summarized by the experience of Donors and Volunteers

As a professional with a background in Growth Marketing and Omnichannel strategies, I contemplated the idea of approaching América Solidaria’s users from the following perspective: In many cases, Donors and Volunteers are, in fact, the same person, and throughout their lifecycle, who may assume various archetypes or be multiple roles simultaneously.

Therefore, as the team responsible of the Plan Data project, we had set an ambitious goal: to achieve a 360-degree view of America Solidaria’s users, with a particular focus on the Donors and Volunteers experience at this stage.

Through this project, we are redefining how we interact with those who share our passion for making the world a better place to live.

Critical Decision: Maintaining or Changing the current CRM Software

In this context, it emerged a critical question: should we keep the current CRM software or opt for a change?

The decision was remarkably important because this system was complicated to use and functioned solely as a datawarehouse. For the organization, the annual cost of $2,400 dollars did not justify CRM maintenance. Indeed, this amount could be significant and should be carefully considered in decision-making, especially in small and medium NGOs like América Solidaria.

On the other hand, the foundation had been working on the development of an internal platform for managing its project and volunteering recruitment. However, the coexistence of separated environments presented challenges in terms of achieving a synchronized and smooth data management while creating a data model that promotes a 360-degree view of Donors and Volunteers.

Therefore, it was essential to establish an effective connection between both systems to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.

Integrating systems and Centralizing Data for Effective Management

Based on my experience working with GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and the numerous discussions I’ve had with the América Solidaria team, we have made the decision to consolidate our technological tools, which includes selecting the CRM system and integrating the Internal Recruitment Platform, Payment Gateways, and HR software into a centralized data management strategy.

As a result, over the past few months, we have been working on a data migration process to the cloud, taking advantage of advanced technologies such as BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage for data storage and analysis, as well as Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Scheduler for automation and batch processing.

Our decision to migrate data to the Cloud is driven by the benefits it can provide to América Solidaria. In particular, we anticipate a nearly 30% increase in transactional data processing over the next two years, making it clear that depending solely on Google Sheets or Excel files is no longer a sustainable alternative.

Additionally, when considering only the annual data warehousing costs in comparison with the use of the previous CRM, we estimate a potential reduction of them by approximately 80%.

Overcoming Users Overlap — Omnichannel in action

In our pursuit of an optimal experience that reflects the foundation’s purpose, we have focused our efforts on developing a Data Lake in which users data (donors, leads, volunteers, and former members) can navigate seamlessly. This focus on the individual and their journey will enable us to address the complexity of user overlap in the foundation’s ecosystem, and our response to this challenge is through omnichannel communication.

From my perspective, to achieve an omnichannel strategy, it is necessary to understand the user’s behavior and how we can interact with them. So, in the first stage, I think a good starting point is to create multichannel communication, because that provides knowledge about their preferences and interests and experience to scale and professionalize our CRM and Growth Marketing actions to a team who is not accustomed to working under this logic.

Ultimately, it helps us optimize resources because by collecting new and enriched data, we can identify where, when, and through which channels we interact with them.

Conclusion

With everything that has been presented, it is clear that we are in the midst of a challenging and demanding process of development and transformation. Every aspect presented is in a constant state of evolution and validation, and in the upcoming posts, I will delve deeper into how we approach each key stage of the Plan Data project.

Finally, I reiterate my commitment to share this case as we progress in this excitement journey towards a digital empowered and sustainable future for América Solidaria.