Background
This client is a nonprofit organization that helps low-income individuals access essential benefits to help them live healthier, more independent lives while reducing “churn” in federal aid programs. The nonprofit needed a more streamlined way to ingest and manage data to support more efficient, targeted outreach campaigns. They turned to J2, who created a robust data architecture solution and repeatable process, and helped staff their data engineering team, which was critically low on resources.
Key Challenges
Client uses data provided by dozens of community partners and state agencies to identify program-eligible individuals and deploy SMS texting campaigns. While the data from each partner was invaluable, the format, volume, and upload frequency varied across each dataset. In addition to the widespread standardization issues, the data engineering team was understaffed due largely to the tight labor market and specialized skill set required. The resource-constrained department was plagued by labor-intensive processes, data quality issues, and bottlenecks. They needed a foundation of clean, standardized data with an automated ingestion process to support more efficient use of manpower, deploy more campaigns faster, and support scalability.
Solution
This client turned to J2 Solutions to address the immediate standardization needs and help them extract transformative value from their data. First, to get a fundamental understanding of the client’s current data environment, J2 completed a comprehensive assessment of their existing assets and processes, including data sources, associated links, workflows, and more. Next, they partnered with the team to flesh out an architecture design that could support an end-to-end data ingestion process. From there, the J2 team designed, tested, and implemented a modern data platform that automated and standardized the data, making it easy to ingest, store, analyze, and use to support business processes. Beyond the platform, the J2 data experts created a repeatable process to support future projects and outreach campaigns.
As the project progressed, it became abundantly clear that the department’s bandwidth issues needed to be addressed sooner rather than later. The newly implemented systems and processes were only as good as the team managing it moving forward. As an industry leader in IT staff augmentation, J2 helped successfully recruit, vet, and hire IT professionals and enterprise-level data experts to fill the gaps on the data engineering team, despite the specialized skills required and constraints of the limited talent pool.
Impact
By designing, building, and implementing an automated end-to-end data solution, J2 helped streamline the ingestion process and standardize the data to facilitate more frequent, less time-intensive outreach campaigns. The extendible solution can be easily configured to accommodate new partners and datasets and scale with ease to support business continuity. Plus, with a fully staffed data engineering department, and repeatable processes and standards in place, the client is enjoying a cost-effective use of resources, improved efficiencies without the damaging burden of bottlenecks, and improved ROI on campaigns. With the ability to reach more people, this client is ultimately poised to help more individuals in need get access to benefits and services to support a better quality of life.