Challenge
Like most nonprofit organizations, Hands of Hope, a nonprofit organization focused on adoption, foster care, and children’s home support, worked with a limited budget and staff and primarily relied on donations as their lifeline. Having to manually enter and reconcile donation information into their external-facing contribution portal and backend donor management system was incredibly time-consuming and quickly drained their valuable time and resources while increasing the potential for mistakes that could be disastrous.
Hands of Hope leadership knew they needed a more efficient, effective way to enter and track donations, but they couldn't do it alone. They reached out to Fusion's technology experts to create and implement the right solution for their organization. was bogged down with having to manually enter donation information from their external-facing contribution portal and their back-end donor management system.
Solution
After assessing their needs and challenges, we determined that Hands of Hope needed an affordable, low-maintenance modern cloud solution to connect their two systems. Our team evaluated multiple options and decided that Azure Logics Apps, an integrated platform as a service (IPaaS) would be the best option. Azure Logics Apps is a cloud-based platform that allows you to automate workflows with little to no specific coding. We could integrate their contribution portal and donor management systems and implement an automated workflow to eliminate tedious and time-consuming manual data entry.
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
