Code for Chicago

Overview

Client

The Chicago Defender Charities (ChiDC) was founded by the late Chicago Defender Publisher John H. Sengstacke in 1945 as the charity arm of the Chicago Defender. Its focus is the African American community with the production of the Bud Billiken ® Parade as its primary mission. In addition to the parade, the Chicago Defender Charities oversees a scholarship program, Bronzeville Life, and education programs.

The Challenge

Identify a technical solution that will integrate their digital tools through Salesforce for the short and long term.

Approach

Code for Chicago approached the integration with a client-focused approach by prioritizing a seamless integration with their existing digital tools.

Project Month/Year:

August 2021 to February 2022

Problem Statement

Creating a new digital experience will add to the overall workflow for the staff at ChiDC. Currently, whenever the team has issues with their various websites, they have to rely on external contractors to resolve these issues. This ends up being a block for them to take action. The final deliverable should address this gap by improving the digital workflow for their online platforms. It should reduce the blocks from completing technical tasks on their various platforms.

Our Approach

Facilitate stakeholder interviews to identify all tools the partner currently uses and examine what their workflow is. This includes gathering info on how each program interacts with Salesforce while looking for possible better integrations for the partner’s workflow. Setup a test environment to ensure the partner doesn’t lose data during the integration process. Finally, implementing the product solution that best fits their needs.

Methodology

Discovery & Technical Research

At the onset, the team gathered info from the partner on which programs they use and why they use them. Using this info, the team facilitated technical research to understand the level of effort that goes into implementing it and exploring the feasibility of facilitating a custom solution.

Test & Implementation

As a result of the technical research, it was determined that there was no elegant way to integrate all 5 SaaS solutions into Salesforce without adding more work. The team thought about the amount of support the partner would need after this project. Hence, it made sense to seek out a product that could seamlessly integrate the products they use and provide support that Code for Chicago couldn’t after this project was done. Ultimately, Automate.iO seemed to fit their use case. It was a solution that integrated each SaaS software in a simple and intuitive way.

After setting up a data backup solution, the team facilitated the integration and walked the partner on how to use the product.

Outcome

ChiDC now has a better workflow for handling the large ingesting of data into Salesforce. Instead of having to do everything manually, Automate.io allows for events to trigger predetermined actions to automatically sort data into Salesforce or trigger some other event to happen.