CASE STUDY

Rethinking Donation Drives with a Web Application

Client: Be A Resource (BEAR)

At a glance

Challenge

BEAR needed to identify bottlenecks in the donation process and provide new functionality that addressed those needs to increase donor engagement and recipient impact while minimizing risk of processing donations.

Result

BEAR partnered with Pariveda to create a user-friendly app to increase the frequency and amount of information gathered from donors. Pariveda worked with the engagement team to identify common trends and conclusions they seek when reviewing donor information.

Impact

Donors now have a method of data entry that is reusable and easy to navigate, encouraging additional donation drives in the future. BEAR now has a centralized view of donor information across all their donation programs.

Technologies Used

Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, AWS CodeCommit.

Be A Resource (BEAR) is a non-profit organization that partners with Child Protective Services to provide services for 16k children affected every year in the greater Houston area.

BEAR has doubled their operating revenue in the past four years and is looking to expand its operations. Like most non-profits, communication and analyzing data is done manually which creates pain points during times of growth. Implementing this web application creates an opportunity to address these paint points and allow BEAR to continue its growth in an even more effective way.

Finding supporting technology to increase customer impact and donor engagement

BEAR strives to grow its donor base through a series of campaigns but they have a logistical barrier for every donation drive they host. Measuring the effectiveness of the campaigns, engaging existing users, and making the donation process more convenient with donors are insights that require lots of manual time and effort.

Because BEAR strives to cater to the needs of the children they provide donated items to, BEAR needed to centralize their data in a way that can grow with the company and has minimal cost.

How Pariveda leveraged AWS to create a better view of the data:

Anchored the project on customer personas and journeys to identify needs of the user to create a business hypothesis that mapped these user needs to business value that could be used to prioritize needed features.
Developed a Proof of Concept (POC) that demonstrated the values identified in the business hypothesis.
Created a user-friendly app to increase the frequency and amount of information gathered from donors that streamlined the communication of drop off dates between the donor and the engagement team.
Engineered a scalable solution in AWS to support the back end of the web application as well as the deployment infrastructure.

Donors now have a method of data entry that is reusable and easy to navigate, encouraging additional donation drives in the future. BEAR now has a centralized view of donor information across all their donation programs.

Custom views incorporate the needs of the engagement team to provide easier access to summarized information. Time is saved by automating the analysis needed to draw common conclusions.

The development infrastructure and cloud services allow the app to change hands and continue development through the different lifecycle phases. The cost associated with running these AWS services were extremely low- a fundamental baseline when working with nonprofits to ensure they can dedicate more of their budget directly towards fulfilling their mission. The ability of AWS Lambda to be a usage-based cost and the inexpensive storage of Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB are the main contributing factors to such a low cost.