“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs
A healthy planet, a world without injustice, a future filled with possibilities — nothing short of a very tall order, but at Green America, they want it all.
And they’re delivering.
Green America, a nonprofit located in Washington, DC, helps people in their roles as consumers, investors, business owners, homeowners, community activists, teachers, people of faith, children and parents, to take both personal and collective action that promotes positive social and environmental progress.
“We can use economic power to push for socially and environmentally responsible businesses … and put our society on a more sustainable path.”
— Green America
Save Time. Save the World.
In order to achieve their ambitious goals, Green America relies on a network of more than 250,000 Americans who donate to tackle climate change, build fair trading systems, stop corporate abuse, and support local communities.
“We have an individual membership side, which we use to inform and educate consumers. A Green Business Network side, which screens and certifies businesses from various sectors. And a supply chain side, where we host workgroups with key players in specific industries to create sustainable change,” said Pat Keyes, IT and Facilities Manager, Green America.
The complexity of these data sources led Green America to seek out an analytics automation solution so they could spend more time acting upon pressing issues.
“Multiple reports from multiple sources made accurately analyzing our donor information time intensive. The more time employees need to take before acting on the data means we need more staff to do less work,” Keyes explains.
“For the project I set up in Alteryx, we are transforming data from many sources, either Excel or csv files, to a single data set to then output the four reports needed for the member services department to do their monthly workflow for member renewals.
“With Alteryx, monthly data can now be added to a folder, that file can be run and the needed reports are produced automatically,” said Keyes.
Green America has cut hours of monthly tasks from their Donor Services, Operations and Database Manager, allowing her to better dissect donor information and focus on more pressing issues.
“Our gains are twofold, the most direct is the efficiency gains from automating a previously manual monthly process. The second is the skill building of our team and seeing other areas in the organization that can also benefit from a project like this,” says Keyes.
“It’s inspiring to look for other areas where we could increase staff efficiencies and give them more time to focus on other tasks.”
“As more data continues to get collected, nonprofit marketing will need to evolve and become more agile and shrink the timeline from collection to analysis. Alteryx is a great tool to do just that.”
— Pat Keyes, IT and Facilities Manager, Green America
Because Green America operates as a collaborative and participatory workplace, where staff members are encouraged to give input and to reach consensus through democratic decision-making processes on key issues affecting staff of the organization, the ability to empower everyone to use data for key decisions is critical. “In the remote work environment it is more important than ever to give managers the data they need to run their departments,” said Keyes.
“We have had many big breakthroughs recently. Major companies across all industries are changing — proof of the power of consumer pressure. We are witnessing how our economic power is truly changing the world for good and towards a simpler, more sustainable way of living. We are winning and we are opening doors for more businesses to go green.”
— Green America
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