Transforming Charities Through Alteryx For Good Program

[rusheen2r]

Author:

Rusheen Rathore, Subrat Das, Vivek Sahoo and Yugandhar Muley

Role:

Volunteers

Company:

Sai Krushna Charitable Trust

Collaborators:

Bangalore Alteryx User Group and Alteryx For Good India Group

 

Overview of Use Case

Since founding Alteryx For Good (AFG) – India Chapter in March of 2018, we have successfully onboarded five charities, delivered real change by solving their data-related challenges and in the process, shaped thousands of lives. Our passion for the Alteryx Platform has led us to challenge the status-quo of these charities, create measurable impact by helping them achieve their objectives and enrich the Indian social fabric.

Our weekend excursions to these charities involved digitization of their data while making the personnel aware of its importance, training the staff to be capable of working with the Alteryx platform and of course, building Alteryx models to increase efficiency and solve problems.

We at AFG have shared a long and strong relationship with Sai Krushna Trust - one of the very first charities we onboarded and have helped transform since our inception. The Trust provides residence for orphan children and runs a school for free of charge for children in the nearby villages. It aims to fulfill its objectives of serving the downtrodden without any barrier of caste, creed, race or religion.

At one such weekend visit, we were introduced to a unique and almost unheard-of problem by modern standards being faced by the Trust – no means of identification of students, teachers and staff. This lack of ID cards was not only hindering daily administrative activities on the school’s part but was indicating to a much larger problem being faced by the unprivileged students – a lack of personal identity. These students did not possess any identification papers other than their birth certificates. Thus, there was an absence of vital information like emergency contact numbers, address, blood group – information that should always be handy. The teachers too lacked ID cards, making it difficult for students to interact with them if they weren’t familiar already.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Sai Krushna Trust is driven by the desire to provide a healthy, safe, and edifying educational environment for children in need. With that said, it is important that the staff dedicate as much time as possible towards taking care of the kids, instead of spending time on manual tasks that can be taken care of by tools such as Alteryx. Tasks as simple as marking attendance become quite the hassle without ID cards. Also, ad-hoc queries to look-up guardian’s contact numbers/addresses or student’s blood group information meant going through piles of large dusty journal books, housing data of 600+ students in no particular order. The students - especially the younger ones, often felt uncomfortable in approaching teachers because unless they were introduced to each other, they had no way of differentiating between teachers, volunteers or working staff. Issuing ID cards to each student, teacher and volunteer could be a simple solution to all these problems.  

Describe your working solution

The AFG volunteers took to brainstorming and devised a plan to deliver the solution. We started off with digitizing data of 600+ students, that involved creating a small orderly database which can be looked-up anytime and meant bidding farewell to the dusty old journals. What followed was taking digital photographs of students and teachers alike. The next step was to build templates for the ID cards – separately color coded for students, teachers and volunteers to allow for easy identification. We then built Alteryx models (using Alteryx Designer) to consume the data from the database, enrich it with the photographs that were clicked and generate ID cards with the help of reporting tools. These ID cards were then printed by the local printer and handed over to students and teachers respectively.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The impact is not merely an administrative success for Sai Krushna Trust but has resulted in an overall improvement in the students’ lives. A sense of self – that is what they feel when they see that piece of card hanging from their necks by the little loop of thread. All the information they, the teachers, the administrative staff, or any authority needs to identify them or to help them in time of need is now available in one handy piece of paper – the humble ID card. This goes beyond the number of hours saved by the staff members of these charities, who can now devote additional time and provide a proper education, and healthy environment for the children. The students have the first and the most important piece of life’s tough puzzle in place – the “I”.

[ydmuley]

Thank You @rusheen2r for posting this use case, definitely very powerful one and a huge impact on the charity.

Everything that we as Bengaluru User Group do for charities is very important in our mission to make charities self-sufficient when it comes to their data-related challenges and great to see that such use cases take us a step closer to our mission.

Thank you once again to the entire team in Bengaluru who are involved with Alteryx For Good in some way or the other and also every Alterx For Good post cannot be completed without our two strong influencers @SeanAdams and @MarqueeCrew and also Alteryx team for the strong support @ToriA @TuvyL @LaurenU

@Nezrin @scolaco @SubratDas5 @Sindhu1 @viveksahoo @Ashwathnkamath @rusheen2r @princejindal @Krisha @LeahK @vinutha @princejindal @SubratDas5 @scolaco @PShah93 @Sindhu1 @santoshigs11 @Aakriti @lahotynilesh @despri @palakjindal

[SeanAdams]

This really is fantastic to hear about - Sai Krishna Trust is a wonderful organisation and it's really gratifying that you and the team have been able to help give them time back to spend with their students - the entire purpose of their work!