Challenge
Hands of Hope, a non-profit organization focused on adoption, foster care, and children’s home support, was bogged down with having to manually enter donation information from their external-facing contribution portal and their back-end donor management system.
With a limited administrative staff, they had to spend time every day to manually enter and reconcile the contributions from the portal, losing valuable time and resources that could be better spent furthering their mission. Manual data entry also increased the potential for errors that required additional time and effort to investigate and fix.
For non-profits, donations are the lifeline of the organization, and Hands of Hope leadership knew they had to find a better, more efficient way to track contributions. They just needed technology expertise to execute a new solution.
Solution
They needed a low-cost, low-maintenance way to connect their two systems. Working with Hands of Hope, we evaluated multiple options and decided that Azure Logics Apps would be the best way to move forward. As a cloud-based solution that doesn’t require any specific coding, Azure Logic Apps allowed us to integrate their two systems and implement a new automated workflow quickly. For Hands of Hope, it was a perfect, budget-friendly solution that requires minimal long-term maintenance.
In order to implement it successfully, we needed to complete some important planning steps first. This work included:
- Testing authentication
- Field mapping, which allowed them to understand what data needed to be integrated, including how many fields were involved and if the data was 1:1 or if it needed to be transformed
- Process mapping to identify data requirements to allow the integration to work for a variety of fundraising scenarios, including steps like schedule triggers, variables, data validation, etc.
- Understanding error scenarios
Once these steps were completed, we created a workflow to:
- Retrieve data from one endpoint (the fundraising portal system)
- Transform and prepare the data
- Post the data to another endpoint (Hands of Hope’s back-end system)
Because we used Azure Logic Apps to complete the system integration, the normally lengthy and complex process took only a matter of hours and required no manual intervention.
This simple to use solution is exactly what we were looking for when we reached out to Fusion Alliance. The business process review helped us confirm the necessary requirements and the resulting integration will provide long-term efficiency gains.
Suzy Roth, Hands of Hope Executive Director
