How Share Our Strength addresses childhood hunger with unified data analysis on AWS

This is a guest post by Ryo Hang, lead solution architect in Ascending Inc, and Rich Kostro, chief information officer at Share Our Strength.

Every child has big aspirations for having a successful future. However, childhood hunger in America is a persistent problem that affects millions of children every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one in eight children in the United States face hunger. Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit organization, is dedicated to ending hunger and poverty in the US and abroad. Through the No Kid Hungry and Cooking Matters campaigns, Share Our Strength is ending childhood hunger in America by making sure all children get the healthy food they need by working with community organizations to provide funding, technical assistance, and resources across the country.

However, managing and utilizing data at scale can be a challenge for a nonprofit organization like Share Our Strength. With multiple data sources and limited resources, it can be difficult to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. This is where Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an AWS Partner like Ascending, can help. By unifying and interpreting data, nonprofit organizations like Share Our Strength can gain valuable insights to drive fundraising outcomes and better support their mission.

In this blog post, learn how Share Our Strength used AWS to overcome data management challenges and improve their strategic planning outcomes to end childhood hunger in America.

When childhood hunger strikes

“At Share Our Strength, we work hard every day to find solutions to end childhood hunger. Yet, managing data for a non-profit tackling this complex issue can be just as challenging as for any for-profit organization. We, too, must wrangle data from multiple sources, and work to artfully integrate individual data streams into useful business intelligence,” said Rich Kostro, senior vice president and chief information officer at Share Our Strength.. “Without an effective data strategy, we could easily get lost in the many different data streams flowing into our organization. For us the key to informed decision making lies in having the ability to conduct integrated data analysis.”

In one recent example, Share Our Strength sought to improve information sharing between their grants department and staff managing relationships with state and local partners. The Grants Team desired a way to view all the information they had about a particular applicant or region in a consolidated view within their grants application system. The relationship managers wanted a simple way to see which organizations in a given region had received a grant using their existing tools for planning outreach and technical assistance efforts. To achieve both goals, Share Our Strength needed to join the Grants Team’s data housed in Salesforce with data received from federal, state, and local agencies, which was ingested, cleaned, and stored in Share Our Strength’s AWS data lake.

Harnessing the power of AWS Partner Network for tailored solutions

To tackle the challenge of data integration, aggregation, and sharing, Share Our Strength worked with Ascending Inc., an AWS Partner, to develop a customized solution. The solution involved designing and building an automatic bi-directional data integration and migration flow to synchronize records between their existing Salesforce instance and a MySQL database hosted in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Ascending used AWS services such as AWS Glue and AWS Lambda to enable seamless data transformation and loading into the data lake. They also used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable storage of raw and processed data and Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse to aggregate and analyze data.

To overcome the challenge of unifying data schema in extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs from multiple data sources, Ascending designed and implemented a flexible ETL process that could handle data from both MySQL and Salesforce systems. The ETL process was designed to transform data into a unified data schema according to the mapping table provided by Share Our Strength. Ascending also made sure that the performance and accuracy of data processing met the business requirements.

Overall, the customized solution helped Share Our Strength streamline their data integration process, enabling downstream analysts and business users to access the data they needed more efficiently.

Results that improve efficiency and cost savings for No Kid Hungry initiatives

Share Our Strength used AWS Glue jobs to automate their data migration process, resulting in significant improvements to their operations. The bi-direction data link enabled different teams throughout the organization to always utilize the most up to date data in their planning processes, and not wait for a single, all encompassing, annual data refresh effort. The automated updates also reduced transcription errors that manual processes inevitably introduced and spared the teams significant time spent coordinating and confirming data sharing arrangements. An additional benefit was an overall cost savings, as the teams were able to eliminate recurring external consulting costs that were often brought in to support the annual refresh efforts. Finally, and most importantly, users report a much greater confidence in the data available once the latency and transcription errors were addressed.

“With the help of AWS, we were able to streamline our data migration process and focus on our mission to work with communities to address childhood hunger,” said Adam Wozniak, senior management of measurement, planning, and analysis at Share Our Strength. “Automating data migration processes with AWS brought data together that used to live in multiple systems. Now, when data users make decisions about where we should conduct outreach or what grant applications we should fund, they can see all the data points they need in one place. This has allowed us to save time and make better-informed decisions. It will also help us build more complete analyses and visualizations in the future.”

Learn more about how AWS can help your organization optimize its processes and drive growth with the AWS Partner Network.

Do you have any questions about how to get started with AWS or AWS Partners? Connect with us to learn more.

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