Why Your Nonprofit Needs a Data Warehouse

Nonprofits are driven by their mission, working tirelessly to make a difference in the world. But behind the scenes, managing the organization often involves navigating a complex web of information. Donor lists, campaigns, donation histories, program participation, volunteer hours, financial records, impact metrics – this data is crucial, yet it often lives in data silos: separate spreadsheets and software systems that aren’t easily accessible to everyone who needs the information. This scattered approach can make it incredibly difficult to get a clear picture of your organization's health and impact.

Imagine trying to understand the true reach of a program when participation data is in one system, survey feedback in another, and related expenses in a third. Or trying to identify your most engaged donors when their giving history is separate from their volunteer record or event attendance. This is where a data warehouse comes in – not as a complicated tech gadget, but as a powerful tool to bring clarity and efficiency to your vital work.

It’s a central, organized database designed to collect and store copies of your data from all the different corners of your nonprofit. It's brought together, cleaned, and structured such that it makes it easy to access and understand.

Why is this so important for a nonprofit?

An data warehouse empowers your mission in several ways:

• A single source of truth: With a data warehouse, there’s no more debating which spreadsheet has the most up-to-date donor count or program outcome. It provides a unified, accurate view of your data, ensuring everyone in the organization is working with the same reliable information. This consistency is vital for accurate reporting, informed decision-making, and building trust with your stakeholders.
  
• Streamline reporting and analysis: When data is siloed, compiling reports for grants, board meetings, or impact statements can be a time-consuming and manual process. A data warehouse does most of the heavy lifting, making it faster and easier to generate comprehensive reports.
  
• A 360 view of your donors’ journeys: With your data connected and organized, you can move beyond basic reporting to gain insights that touch multiple aspects of your organization. You can see the complete journey of a donor, from their first small contribution to their volunteer activities and major gifts. You can understand which programs are most effectively serving your community by linking participation data with outcome metrics.
  
• Enhance fundraising efforts: A unified view of donor data allows for more sophisticated analysis and segmentation. Identify potential major donors based on a range of engagement factors, not just past giving. You can personalize your outreach based on donor interests and history, optimize future efforts, and increase donor retention.
  
• Improve program effectiveness: By bringing together data about programs, participants, and outcomes, an EDW provides the tools to evaluate program effectiveness rigorously. You can identify what's working well and where adjustments are needed to maximize your impact on the community you serve.
• Save time and money: With limited resources at your disposal, an EDW can significantly reduce processing time, cut down on manual or unexpected errors, and flag data quality concerns at the first possible moment. These changes can lead to real monetary savings and a big reduction in data headaches.

When does a nonprofit need a data warehouse?

Not every nonprofit needs an Enterprise Data Warehouse. For very small organizations with limited data sources and straightforward reporting needs, managing data through simpler tools might be sufficient. However, there comes a point where the complexity and volume of data, coupled with the increasing demands for reporting and impact measurement, create significant challenges that a data warehouse is designed to solve.

What are the signs that your nonprofit might be reaching this point?

• You're drowning in spreadsheets and manual reporting: If your staff spends an excessive amount of time manually extracting, cleaning, and combining data from multiple sources just to create basic reports, it's a strong indicator that your current systems are no longer sustainable.
  
• Reporting takes too long or lacks depth: Are you struggling to meet reporting requirements from funders or your board in a timely manner? Do your reports only provide basic numbers without the ability to drill down into the "why" behind the data? An inability to easily generate insightful reports hinders your ability to demonstrate impact and secure future support.
  
• You lack a unified view of your constituents: Can you easily see a complete history of every interaction a donor, volunteer, or beneficiary has had with your organization? If getting a 360-degree view requires pulling information from several different systems and trying to piece it together, you're missing valuable information and potentially jeopardizing relationships.
  
• You can't easily measure program effectiveness: If understanding the true impact of your programs is challenging because the relevant data is scattered and difficult to connect, you can't effectively assess what's working or make data-driven adjustments to improve outcomes.
  
• You're missing golden opportunities due to lack of data access: Are you unable to identify key trends, segment your audience effectively for targeted outreach, or personalize communications because your data is not readily accessible or connected? This can lead to missed fundraising opportunities and less effective engagement.
• You’re spending an arm and a leg on CRM data storage: A CRM is a great place to store data for your front-of-house staff to reference on a daily basis, but it’s a costly home for your historical records. If you’re using your CRM as your primary data storage solution you’re likely finding storage to be exorbitantly expensive. A data warehouse will likely come with reduced data storage costs such that you can cut down and save big on CRM storage fees.

At Civis, we often hear this from customers right before they start their data warehousing journey. If any of these hit close to home, you have likely outgrown your current data capabilities and are ready for a data warehouse. 

Managing your data warehouse with Civis Platform

Civis Platform has everything you need to start your data warehousing journey. The data warehousing process can be broken down into four stages as shown in the diagram below.

Let’s look at how each of them work in Civis Platform.

Data Sources and Staging

This involves gathering data from a wide array of sources, which can include CRMs, donation platforms, social media, event management systems, spreadsheets, and more. The data is then brought into a centralized repository, an AWS S3 data lake for massive unstructured datasets or an AWS Redshift or bring-your-own Google BigQuery database, and stored in a structured and accessible format. 

Civis Platform can import data from a variety of sources via the Civis Integrations. Our integrations are continually updated to reflect the changing landscape. Particularly important to nonprofits, Civis connects with popular CRMs such as Salesforce and Blackbaud. Do you see an integration that doesn’t exist? Reach out for more information.

Data Standardization

Raw data is often messy and unstructured. Data standardization involves cleaning, transforming, and modeling the data to make it suitable for analysis and reporting. This includes tasks such as standardizing data formats, handling missing values, creating calculated fields, and combining data across data sources to produce a single source of truth for your business, the data warehouse. A typical data warehouse contains tables that cover entities important to the business (e.g. constituent, member, customer) as well as tables that track specific metrics (e.g. donations and transactions).

The complexity of this process is determined by several factors, including but not limited to the following: structure of your source data, data completeness, data quality, infrastructure, and tooling.

Civis Platform provides data infrastructure as well as several data transformation tools that suit a variety of use cases and user personas. This includes Python, R, SQL, and custom compute environments via Container scripts and Docker containers.

data build tool (dbt)

data build tool (dbt) is an industry standard tool for building resilient SQL pipelines. While there are many tools available on the market to facilitate data standardization, Civis recommends building analytic workflows using dbt as it provides out-of-the-box functionality for data transformation, testing, data lineage, and data catalogs, all while adhering to software engineering best practices. Read our article Elevating Data Transformation: Deploy dbt Effortlessly in Civis Analytics’s Platform to find out how to start using dbt in Civis Platform.

Visualization & Reporting

Data visualization is essential for communicating insights and trends. Charts, graphs, and dashboards enable users to explore data and understand key metrics tracked in their data warehouse. For a streamlined dashboarding experience, Civis Platform provides SQL Reports as well as offering integrations with Tableau. For a more custom experience, Civis Platform makes it easy to build and host dashboards with frameworks like Streamlit and Shiny. 

For more information, see Civis for Business Intelligence 101.

Start your journey today

A data warehouse centralizes and organizes your nonprofit's data from various sources, eliminates data silos and provides a single source of truth of data for your organization. This enables deeper insights, streamlined reporting, enhanced fundraising, improved program effectiveness, and data-driven decision-making.

If your nonprofit is struggling with data silos, manual reporting, or difficulty measuring program effectiveness, it may be the right time to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse with Civis Platform. Have questions or need help? Civis offers professional services to assist in the design and implementation of enterprise data warehouses tailored to your nonprofit's specific needs. Contact Civis today to start your data warehousing journey.