Planned Parenthood Federation of America: Data Warehouse
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is a national network of affiliated health centers as well as more than 120 local affiliates and 50 state public affairs offices that focus on education, public affairs, and advocacy related to health care issues. They provide high-quality, affordable reproductive health care and sexual health information to nearly 5 million women, men, and teens. The public policy office engaged Beaconfire to select a data warehouse application service provider and provide guidance during implementation.
The Challenge:One of Planned Parenthood’s Vision 2025 goals is to build the largest donor and citizen activist base of any social movement in the United States. To do so, PPFA needed to determine the most effective way to leverage many data sources (data files from partner projects, an online advocacy database, phone banking data, and data in other internal systems, to name just a few). The ultimate goal was to analyze this vast array of data to be better able to effectively target key supporters.
The Solution:A data warehouse solution allows
PPFA to leave in place the existing systems (e.g., online advocacy and development),
feeding their data into a central warehouse for analysis and reporting. A hosted
solution with robust support services was determined to be the most cost-effective
path.
PPFA first engaged Beaconfire to identify possible vendors and conduct an independent Software Selection. Beaconfire gathered PPFA’s business and functional requirements to create a custom evaluation matrix used to rate each vendor. Each vendor then completed the feature-by-feature matrix, and Beaconfire objectively evaluated vendor responses to determine the best fit. The top three vendors conducted demonstrations of the proposed solutions. Florida firm DataMentorswas selected.
PPFA next engaged Beaconfire to guide the implementation. Beaconfire
provided valuable insights on business rules for record matching (which data
elements of two different sources can be compared to provide a match), data
survivorship (which source data element overrides the others in cases of duplicates),
and project management. Beaconfire’s involvement also provided welcome
relief for the Public Policy staff for whom this was only one of many projects.
As of October 2005, access to the data warehouse has rolled out to a pilot group
of 6 affiliates. PPFA is exploring further integration with additional data
sources and other applications.