Key results
- Data unification enabling sharper, accelerated insights
- Automated high-quality reporting, enhancing operational efficiency
- Greater data accuracy enabling precise business approach
Data stack:
Fivetran connectors: MySQL, HubSpot, Zendesk
Data warehouse: BigQuery
Data visualization: Tableau, Metabase
Springly is an all-in-one nonprofit software that helps nonprofits spend less time on admin, more time on their mission. The goal? Help people, who help people!
The original product, AssoConnect – established in 2013 – is a market leader of nonprofit software in France. A few years ago, it began expanding into the United States, rebranding specifically and only for the American market as Springly. They are the same company, use the same product, and share a single international team comprising around 70 staff.
Springly has 30,000 clients globally and works exclusively with nonprofits – organizations of all shapes, sizes, and sectors that are ‘doing important, meaningful and necessary work in their missions.’ The company’s goal is to help its clients spend more time fulfilling those missions and less time tasked with admin. Providing software that has everything a nonprofit might need in one location – including a customer relationship management (CRM) system, membership management system, full accounting suite, email marketing, event planner, and website builder – Springly supports its clients’ unique needs while at the same time being easy to use. By harnessing the power of that software, Springly’s customers can generate more revenue, grow and retain membership, reach their fundraising goals, increase member engagement, and offer a great experience to users.
The challenge: automating processes to scale objectives
When Louise Columelli joined Springly as Head of Data in 2021, there wasn’t yet a data team in place and processes were not automated – everything was done asynchronously and staff were reliant on manual spreadsheets, making progress slow and accuracy hard to determine. “We were importing spreadsheets and putting them together, which was not very scalable,” explains Columelli. “So, when I started, I really had to think about the data stacks we wanted and put all the data in one place, which Fivetran does amazingly well.”
Managing clients that range in size from 50-strong local baseball teams to large federations and foundations of over 500,000 members presents something of a challenge in terms of the volume and complexity of data that Springly absorbs and how it is centralized.
Springly needed to scale and be robust, preferably without having to hire and retain expensive data engineers. Tasked with professionalizing the data stack and bringing together data sources like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Intercom, Columelli needed an extract-and-load tool since, as a one-person team, she simply didn’t have the time to build and handle the connectors alone.
The solution: driving business through data management
Springly considered several options to connect data, including direct Fivetran competitors, hiring freelancers, and rolling up their sleeves internally to do it themselves. However, the company didn’t want to maintain the code after they or a freelancer had finished the job. Instead, it decided to go with a click-and-collect solution to gain value from the work more quickly and be able to understand its data. “It was key for me,” explains Columelli, “that we chose a click-and-connect solution that would allow me to focus on business value directly, and not be taken up by the data engineering.”
Columelli found that the schema provided by Fivetran competitors – in particular, the data architecture proposed for Hubspot tables – was messy and hard to navigate. Fivetran, by comparison, was an altogether different prospect.
“With Fivetran, the tables proposed, and the structure of the data proposed, was much more straightforward and user-friendly,” explains Columelli. “That was a big draw, another was the robustness of the tool.”
The outcome: investment opportunities and new business leads
Centralizing data reliably, in a single location, and automating its processes, dashboard, and analytics has allowed Springly to scale its objectives and be more precise in its approach – a particularly important consequence in terms of the U.S. market because of the relative newness of the company’s activity there.
From a marketing perspective, the team has realized significant time savings since deploying Fivetran. “We have a weekly meeting every Monday morning where we look at the data from the previous week,” explains Patricia Seidel, Growth Manager at Springly. “The fact that we have it all in the same place and aren’t all bringing individual spreadsheets means we can analyze an entire week’s worth of data in less than 20 minutes. Previously it would take us 20 minutes each to present our own data, and there are five of us. It’s a huge timesaver just on this alone.”
The marketing team’s use of channels such as LinkedIn and webinars and blogs via Livestorm to acquire new clients has been essential to Springly’s expansion into the U.S. Having reliable and accurate data that allows the company to identify which of those channels are most effective has been a ‘godsend’.
“In a big way we’ve been able to automate and know exactly where our leads are coming from, and therefore which channel to put our money, time, and resources into,” says Seidel. “That has been a game-changer for us.”
With enhanced data intelligence, the team was able to understand that organic blog traffic would be Springly’s major acquisition channel in 2022 – an insight that enabled them to scale article rankings on Google and see a growth of 1,900% in 18 months.
“We’ve scaled from having about 5,000 monthly visitors because our website was so new to growing consistently,” says Seidel. “Now we’re at over 100,000 visitors per month – a huge metric for us – and it’s in big part thanks to Fivetran and the fact we’re all using the same data and have everything we need in one place.”
Another significantly important outcome for venture capital-backed Springly is that having access to exact and reliable historical data better positions it to attract investments going forward – especially in its newer market of the U.S.
“This is going to be a huge opportunity for us,” says Seidel. “We’ve had two full years of data since we implemented Fivetran, which we’ve been able to show to our investors. It means we continue to have a vote of confidence from them.”
Overall, the response to Fivetran has been one of immense relief. “We’re not spending precious minutes of our day debating which conversion rate is the most accurate, and we have everything we need in one place. It sounds trite, but it has saved us so much time,” concludes Seidel.
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