Establishing a Reusable ETL Workflow for Non-Profits

[DanielleR]

Author:

Andy Kriebel

Role:

Head Coach

Company:

The Information Lab

Excellence Awards Winner 2016: Creating a Reusable ETL Workflow for Non-Profits

Originally Published:  2016 Excellence Awards Winner

Use Case Overview: 

The Connect2Help 211 team outlined their requirements, including review the database structure and what they were looking for as outputs. Note that this was also the week that we introduced Data School to Alteryx. We knew that the team could use Alteryx to prepare, cleanse and analyse the data. Ultimately, the team wanted to create a workflow in Alteryx that Connect2Help 211 could use in the future.

Ann Hartman, Director of Connect2Help 211 summarized the impact best: "We were absolutely blown away by your presentation today. This is proof that a small group of dedicated people working together can change an entire community. With the Alteryx workflow and Tableau workbooks you created, we can show the community what is needed where, and how people can help in their communities."

The entire details of the project can be best found here - http://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/connect2help211/

Describe the problem you needed to solve:

In July 2015, Connect2Help 211, an Indianapolis-based non-profit service that facilitates connections between people who need human services and those who provide them, reached out to the Tableau Zen Masters as part of a broader effort that the Zens participate in for the Tableau Foundation. Their goals and needs were simple: Create an ETL process that extracts Refer data, transforms it, and loads it into a MYSQL database that can be connected to Tableau.

Describe the working solution:

See the workflow and further details in the blog post - http://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/connect2help211/

Describe the benefits you have achieved:

While the workflow looks amazingly complex, it absolutely accomplished the goal of creating a reusable ETL workflow. Ben Moss kicked off the project presentations by taking the Connect2Help 211 team through what the team had to do and how Connect2Help 211 could use this workflow going forward.

From there, the team went through the eight different visualisation that they created in Tableau. Keep in mind, Connect2Help 211 wasn't expecting any visualisations as part of the output, so to say they were excited with what the team created in just a week is a massive understatement.