Hi, everyone! I would be very glad to help, and to join on a WebEx any time to talk about how our Dallas Alteryx User Group started volunteering with The Commit! Partnership in Dallas!
We started with one AFG license for Commit, and they were thrilled with what they could begin to accomplish. For AFG week a couple of months ago, I sent out a few posts to our user group ahead of time, asking for volunteers to sign up. We ended up with about 12 volunteers, and half of them could meet onsite at Commit during AFG week. Some advice I would give is to have one or two leaders to coordinate schedules: working directly with the non-profit contact, and reaching out to all of the volunteers. It is especially helpful first to ask the non-profit what days and times work for them, then let the volunteers choose multiple options. It also really helps to give the volunteers a wide range of dates and times they can be onsite; for example, 1 day, 1 afternoon for 4 hours, or even a few lunch hours spread throughout a week. We met with Commit 3 times in the first week, and our meeting times ranged from mornings to afternoons, depending on Commit's availability. Onsite volunteering doesn't have to take up a whole day; it seems to work best when volunteers can use their lunch hour or 1-2 hours in a day - as we all have seen, you can accomplish a lot with Alteryx in one hour! (In the first hour we met with Commit, we transferred one of their Excel processes into an Alteryx workflow that runs in 2 minutes :)
We also arranged meetings with multiple Commit staff and departments, through our main contact there. When the various departments saw the benefits that Alteryx could provide, it became clear right away that more than one license was needed; having Alteryx in the hands of many of these staff members meant that they could realize not only goals they had been waiting to achieve (like accessing large datasets that wouldn't fit into Excel), but also generate ideas for many more analytics they didn't have time for previously!
Something that really helped our volunteer team get started with Commit was to send them a list of "data and analytics" questions, to get to know their processes, data, and analytic methods, as well as issues and needs. I created the following list, and sent it about a week prior to our first AFG visit:
- Are there Alteryx processes you have wanted to utilize, but haven’t had the time? These would include analytic apps to make repetitive processes easier (i.e., enter a location name, and a report is automatically generated).
- Do you have data preparation methods that are manual, such as entering data into Excel, cutting and pasting data, etc.?
- Are there reports you would like to transfer into Alteryx, and let Alteryx generate them?
- Do you have “messy” data that needs to be cleaned prior to use?
- Do you come across any bottlenecks in your processes, such as waiting for analyses to be completed, waiting for reports to be batch run, waiting for data to be cleaned?
- Are there any data that you connect to via the internet for download, and are you manually downloading them?
- Do you need assistance connecting to multiple data sources and/or databases?
- Do you need a way to place reports into a central shared drive/repository?
- What is your day like? Do you spend most of it using spreadsheets and/or downloading and cleaning data?
The responses to these questions helped our team formulate our approach, even for the first visit. We were able to arrive at Commit with targeted answers to the responses, as well as ideas for creating many different workflows that would provide solutions for their needs. In the first week, we not only built workflows to transfer Excel processes to Alteryx, but we started 1) creating analytic apps for their Gallery, 2) using the In-Database tools to access large databases, and 3) showing them how to connect to Salesforce and pull data; we also introduced them to spatial and demographic analytics!
After AFG week, we continue to meet with Commit when possible; however, since half of our volunteers aren't available to meet onsite, we developed a way for us to share data and Alteryx workflows through the internet. Commit had previously sent us some initial data via DropBox, and I realized that this could be a way for our volunteers to download data and partially created workflows, and work on augmenting and/or completing these workflows on their own time. I have found it helpful to review a main workflow or project, then divide the workflow into smaller "tasks" that each volunteer can work on. Getting to know each volunteer's strengths, such as spatial, analytic apps, database connections, etc., allowed me to recommend certain tasks to specific volunteers ("Tom, can you take on this DB connection task?" or "Brian, can you convert this numeric data to a string and add a leading zero?"). We are now branching into this type of collaborative online volunteering, and it is exciting to see where these next steps will take us and Commit!
I think DropBox works well for this non-profit, since any datasets they are sharing are public data; however, if the non-profit you are working with needs to share private, proprietary, or sensitive data, I would recommend researching into highly secure options.
In addition, I would recommend having the volunteers sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) if the volunteers will be accessing and/or seeing any proprietary or sensitive data. Some non-profits may be able to provide their own NDA to the volunteers.
I would be interested in hearing from your users what secure options might be considered for online data/workflow storage and collaboration? Any recommendations you have would be great to share with other user groups!
Commit has just installed their additional Alteryx licenses, and are moving forward at an amazing speed; I let them know about the wealth of online training available at Alteryx.com (Menu/Resources/Training), and I am meeting with them later this week to provide some one on one training in spatial and demographic analytics. This type of onsite training (or by WebEx) might be another benefit your volunteer team can offer to your non-profit as well.
Marie at Commit also has let me know that the users are training each other; when they find something cool, such as Dynamic Rename, they share it with the other users. She also has suggested having an internal weekly meeting for the users where they discuss Alteryx and share what they have discovered! I think this is a best practice that many AFG non-profits could start utilizing when they receive Alteryx; it is wonderful to think that all of this started just a couple of months ago, and they have made so much progress in a very short time. I imagine that this will happen for your user group and non-profit(s) as well very soon!
As mentioned, I am glad to join on a WebEx any time and talk more about Alteryx For Good and how to get started! As @LaurenU said in the post, the non-profit needs to apply and become qualified (see Requirements below). Reach out to the amazing AFG team at alteryxforgood@alteryx.com as well as the talented and energetic User Group staff such as Lauren! Together, they were our guides for the Dallas Alteryx User Group, and we couldn't have done it all without each of them ( @ToriA, @QuyenT, @TaylorM, Lauren and @TatianaS ) and our wonderful volunteers!
Looking forward to hearing about the Boston User Group's accomplishments with Alteryx For Good, and the many, many ways your non-profit(s) will benefit!
@Deanna
Deanna
