What if data could help uplift people who have one of the world’s most debilitating diseases?

Accelerating change with Domo for Good
Rising Star Outreach has more than 170 employees in India throughout 100 colonies in India that provide healthcare, education, and community development, supported by a small leadership team based in the United States.  

Before Domo, the leadership team often struggled to capture the accurate data it needed from their Indian colleagues to help direct funds and make decisions. Each department, program and project reported different information in different ways, making it difficult to measure progress or identify opportunities. Data was often buried in spreadsheets or emails, with no efficient way to find the right number when it came time for grant applications or donor reporting. Simple requests for information from the US to India often required days or even weeks to fulfill.

“We were keeping track of our data in a pretty scattered and unorganized way, and we knew we needed a system to centralize it,” said Kristen Edwards, sponsor director at Rising Star Outreach.  

Rising Star Outreach chose Domo to connect its data together and expand access to data across the organization. To accelerate its Domo adoption, Rising Star Outreach joined Domo for Good, a program that provides nonprofits with licenses and connections with volunteer Domo experts. Working with Andrew Ferguson, Domo’s director of client services and John Le at Dashboard Dudes, Rising Star Outreach learned about data governance, and how to build and manage dashboards that empower staff in both the US and India to make data-driven decisions. “It’s been deeply rewarding to contribute my skills to help amplify their impact,” Ferguson said.

“John was able to hold our hand as we worked through this process. He’s an awesome teacher. He loves Domo, he loves our mission, and together we were able to come up with a solution,” Edwards said. “For a nonprofit without a full-time data team, the Domo for Good partnership was game-changing. It gave us hands-on support and access to enterprise technology without the financial barrier.”

“Within a week, I built their first dashboard showing student progress year over year, broken down by test, gender, and subject. That led to insights they’d never seen before, like why some students were dropping out, and helped their team realize what data they should bring to the board. After that, I shifted to teaching the team to maintain and build dashboards themselves. Now they’re self-sufficient; I just jump in when they need help with something big,” Le said.

Powering purpose
Rising Star Outreach now tracks hundreds of data points across its education, healthcare, and community programs, ranging from student grades and teacher assessments to microloans, clean water projects, and medical outcomes.

“Now we're finally going to be able to put everything together to see how it all connects. For example, if we look at a colony where we installed clean water, are we seeing differences in medical outcomes? Are wounds healing faster because the water is clean instead of contaminated? We just couldn’t make those connections before, which seems so basic to what we’re trying to prove. Being able to see those relationships and play more with the data makes such a difference in the story we’re able to tell,” said Tawna Fowler, development director at Rising Star Outreach.  

Rising Star Outreach also uses Domo to improve how it leverages data for grant writing and donor reporting. Rather than search through emails or wait for data to come in from India, verified information can be gathered instantly.  

“Domo has helped make us so much more efficient. I know when I’m writing grants and reporting to donors about specific things they’ve funded, I can pull that all together quickly and tell them specifically what we’ve done, how many people we’ve served, how many treatments we provided, and the effectiveness of those treatments,” Fowler said.  

“Domo gives us the data to back up the story we tell, and accelerate our ability to tell our story to stakeholders,” Caywood said. “I don’t know how we got by so long without having that data. We’re able to make decisions much faster and with more confidence than we did before.”

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