Care.com unlocks governed data access for the entire enterprise

The challenge

Care.com connects families to caregivers on their popular online marketplace for varying care services. Their data-powered platform enables families to browse, select and hire care professionals based on their location, budget and required services.

Care.com was working with legacy and homegrown solutions that were clunky and labor intensive when it came to innovation. The company processes huge volumes of data from their online, international community which currently spans more than 17 countries. While there is a high volume of site visits and transactions occurring daily on the platform, the legacy architecture and homegrown scheduling tool could only generate performance reports once per day, running overnight, reporting out on the previous day’s conversions and performance.

The legacy systems weren’t cost effective in terms of annual maintenance and were unable to keep up with Care.com’s data democratization demands. Even though the executive leadership team was receiving a fresh performance report every morning, they wanted to not only understand, but actually act on their performance insights fast enough to affect change. They needed a way to really see how and when their visitors were converting to members or changing their membership status, in real time.

Acting on a need for centralized data

Enter Jon Collazo, Director of Data Services at Care.com. Jon oversees four key areas that make up Care.com’s core data team: A group of Data Engineers who handle day-to-day business operations and a group of Data Engineers who focus on innovation. He also oversees a group of Database Administrators who upkeep their various Data Warehouses and Databases and an Analytics Engineer who leads cross-functional data enablement. Together, Jon and team needed a solution to improve reporting and provide more data services for the business at scale — without becoming a bottleneck.

Care.com was introduced to Fivetran via their consulting team, who frequently use the service to power insights for their customers. Their first project was to centralize all their advertising, social media and marketing data to visualize their marketing attribution efforts and streamline their campaigns to more efficiently boost conversions. Jon and team researched Fivetran and its capabilities, ultimately deciding it was the right tool to handle their migration to the cloud, a larger initiative Jon was advocating for to modernize their data infrastructure and improve reporting capabilities to more efficiently serve the business.

Choosing Fivetran and Snowflake

Care.com initially selected the Fivetran platform for its SaaS and database connector coverage, along with its platform uptime and security standards. But Fivetran’s priority support, strict data delivery SLAs and advanced access control (RBAC) settings within the enterprise plan are what really shined. Coming from his previous role at a financial services company, Jon prioritized data governance and security, and these enterprise level features hit all the marks.

Care.com selected Snowflake as their data cloud to replace their legacy warehousing platforms. Now with Snowflake, they consume full datasets beyond what their legacy systems could handle. They store structured and semi-structured data, track historical data and easily monitor queries and processes. Snowflake’s ease of administration and flexibility make their data storage and query volumes scalable, enabling them to add data capacity for future acquisitions. 

“It just checks all our boxes as far as capabilities go,” says Jon.

Results

To date, Care.com has migrated almost all of their raw data out of their legacy databases and into Snowflake, where they’ve created self-service data marts for their analysts. Now, Care.com analysts can ‘shop’ for clean, queryable data in Snowflake, instead of waiting for engineering to build new pipelines and prepare the data for them — a previously painfully, monotonous and onerous process for the engineering team. 

With their data moving to Snowflake, Care.com is able to convert their nightly reporting schedule to an intra hour, near-real time reporting cadence. Fivetran delivers fresh, clean data to their Snowflake cloud warehouse every half hour, where it’s pulled into Tableau as their executive performance report refreshes on the hour. Now, Care.com executives can monitor conversions hourly and act on increases and decreases in performance as they arise. For example, when they see a spike in conversions, they can immediately take action to uncover the source — maybe they sent an email with a compelling CTA or maybe an ad is performing exceptionally well — and really understand and act on the effects of their marketing efforts in real time

Care.com saves engineering hours by utilizing Fivetran, Snowflake and dbt to take the tedious work out of their data movement workflow and focus that effort on providing more self-service data programs for teams across the organization — from FP&A, to product, to marketing and up to the C-suite. Jon’s team is able to service the data needs of the whole organization.

Fivetran’s advanced access control settings give Care.com the flexibility to democratize their data even further by sharing platform access, and the pipelining workload, with employees outside the core data team. Care.com’s marketing data owners have custom Fivetran access that allows them to onboard new marketing sources and make changes to their existing pipelines without going through the core data team. This significantly reduces their time to insights and refocuses engineering hours to advanced transformations and more technical, business critical initiatives — without sacrificing control over the organization’s data movement.

Download this IDC report to learn how Fivetran drives millions in financial impact and enables new business initiatives for enterprises.