Sarah McLachlan Foundation
Reporting and Insights Modernization: Amazon QuickSight and S3 Data Lake
Project Details
Background
The Sarah McLachlan Foundation was established in 2000 to share the transformative power of music with children and youth from under-resourced populations through the Sarah McLachlan School of Music. The School provides high-quality community music programs in Vancouver, Surrey, and Edmonton, offering lessons at no cost for over 1000 students per year. As a Not-for-Profit, the School is heavily funded through corporate and individual donors and therefore relies on data around enrolment, fundraising, students, and more to operate, and make decisions
Challenge
Administrative and technology staff at the school were spending several days each month curating, cleansing, and merging data in order to build KPIs into Excel reports around student demographics, enrolment, fundraising, and donor trends.
The school lacked a secure central data repository with trusted, clean data and the ability to drill into trends. The VP of Philanthropy and the Director of IT were seeking a fit-for-purpose, cost-effective reporting and data solution that would modernize the manual and time-consuming data and reporting tasks with automated data pipelines and KPIs. The goal was to provide a trusted data repository and self-service reporting capabilities.
Outcomes
Over a 2-week period, Data Elephant set up and migrated source data into an S3 data lake and RDS (SQL) instance and connected QuickSight to build a pilot enrolment dashboard. The Director of IT received ongoing AWS enablement to own and expand the solution with more data and dashboards moving forward post-project.
Why AWS? The team was new to the power of the cloud and self-serve reporting tools. AWS provided a robust and easy-to-use solution with an attractive pricing model.
AWS Services Used Amazon QuickSight, S3 Data Lake, RDS (SQL Server), AWS Glue Studio, AWS Glue Catalog.
Why Data Elephant? Data Elephant was selected due to our AWS skills, our collaborative approach to building data solutions, and our ability to set up the client for future sustainment and scale of the solution independently.