Take a moment to picture a child in your life—the color of their eyes, their hair, their smile. Now consider the sobering fact that 1 in every 7 children in the US faces adversities like hunger, dropping out of school, teenage pregnancy, and child mortality. 

For nearly a century, Save the Children has been on a mission to improve the lives of children worldwide. In the US, the organization serves children in America's poorest, hardest-to-reach rural communities, which have historically had limited access to critical early childhood education, health, and resilience-building services.

As a nonprofit, Save the Children also maintains a strong commitment to maximizing the impact of donations, with less than 7% of every dollar spent on administrative costs. This financial responsibility ensures that the majority of funds directly benefit children in need.

And yet, the ability to truly optimize program funding and quantify the impact of each dollar was limited by disconnected data systems and a lack of advanced analytics capabilities. 

To solve these challenges and further its mission of creating lasting change for children, Save the Children US (SCUS) embarked on a digital transformation journey to modernize its data infrastructure. By centralizing all data into a unified platform, SCUS has established the foundation to equip everyone in the organization with the data-driven insights to optimize their operations and maximize positive impact on children's lives worldwide.

SCUS recognized that its ability to truly understand program effectiveness, optimize funding decisions, streamline reporting, and serve both internal and external stakeholders was limited by fragmented data across its own systems as well as those of numerous program partners. With data scattered in siloes and consolidated through time-consuming manual reporting processes, the organization lacked the ability to derive holistic insights into end-to-end program performance.

In addition, SCUS was facing increasing challenges with its existing data lake, which was built for limited use cases and costly to maintain. As demand grew, the traditional setup lacked the flexibility and scalability to handle the increasingly vast amounts of data from across the organization and its partners.

The pressing need to modernize its data infrastructure, integrate disparate sources into a centralized, high-performance data lakehouse, and enable self-service business intelligence and data reporting capabilities served as the driving force to develop a comprehensive digital transformation roadmap. 

A key turning point in the transformation journey came when the organization adopted Salesforce. “When Salesforce came in, it made sense to adopt the AWS ecosystem to align with all the features and services Salesforce offers” recalls Shantha Kumar, managing director of DevOps and integrations at SCUS. “That’s when our journey began to build a highly scalable, robust data lake architecture on AWS.”  

Given our strong relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce, as well as our expertise across leading data and technology platforms, SCUS approached Slalom to build out a modern, high-performance data lakehouse platform leveraging Snowflake on AWS, with Tableau for self-serve reporting and insights. The vision was to empower each functional area including finance, US programs, and HR to become users and customers of the solution, breaking down long-standing data silos and providing access to previously unavailable insights. 

“Slalom was wonderful,” says Doug Williams, solutions architect at SCUS. “Very technically knowledgeable with a good sense of how to architect things in order to deliver maximum business value.”

“We had Scrum meetings with the different vendors, and Slalom was pivotal in bringing everything together from Salesforce and AWS to the partners in our business as well,” adds Kumar. “So, bringing everyone together and delivering on the ultimate requirement is what Slalom did really well.”

Once engaged, Slalom’s team of multidisciplinary data and analytics experts immediately got to work implementing the cloud-based data lakehouse architecture. Following an Agile delivery methodology with iterative sprints, they constructed the data ingestion layer by leveraging services like Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) and AWS Lambda, establishing pipelines to extract and load information from various sources into the Snowflake Data Cloud platform. The data is then transformed and modeled in Snowflake, which provides a robust analytical platform with real-time insights and enables outputs to Tableau, empowering decision-makers across the organization. The team also established data quality checks, enabled data lineage tracking, and instituted data governance policies to ensure accuracy and consistency as the lakehouse scales in the future.

“We wanted to implement a solution that combines the flexibility and cost-efficiency of a data lake with the reliability and query performance of a data warehouse,” says Olya Solomon, Slalom principal and solution architect. “And thanks to the modern architectural paradigms and data engineering techniques we were able to employ, the entire end-to-end pipeline execution takes less than an hour.”

Before, reporting was a highly manual process. “Staff had to take reports in Excel and manipulate them by hand,” explains Williams. “Anytime they needed a different data view, it required countless staff hours. By getting all that into Tableau, they can now click a filter and in seconds have the exact data view they need.”  

The outcome is a single source of truth for all SCUS’s data needs, and the ability to access and analyze the data faster and easier than ever before. SCUS now benefits from having a scalable, secure, and cost-effective data platform that can support their current and future business goals and challenges.

"Ultimately, everything we’re doing, and the tools implemented, are not only to help all parts of the US business but can also scale to benefit Save the Children International" says Katie Wharton, Slalom principal and engagement lead for the project. 

"This data lake has been all about making our staff more effective by getting them better access to the data that helps them do their jobs effectively,” says Williams. “As the staff become more effective, the people they work on behalf of benefit—whether that’s donors, program recipients, keeping our board better informed, or better governance, enabling your staff has waves of positive effects afterwards."  

Every child deserves a healthy start in life. This data transformation establishes the foundation to empower Save the Children with comprehensive data insights to make fully data-informed decisions that best further its mission of creating lasting, meaningful change in children's lives worldwide.