Why Nonprofit Organizations Need to Ditch Outdated Data Tools to be Successful

We spoke with Jeff Jacobs, Director of Data Operations at Virtuous. Virtuous is a nonprofit CRM, marketing, online giving, and volunteer management platform. Dedicated to empowering nonprofits with essential growth tools, Virtuous facilitates strategic insights and operational efficiencies crucial for organizational success.

Life Before Sigma

Data is paramount to growth in the nonprofit sector, just like it is for any business that's trying to grow and retain customers or identify areas where its business is struggling. At Virtuous, we’ve got about 1,500 nonprofit customers on our platforms. 

We were looking for a new data platform because our customers were really craving deeper insights and better reporting tools. We had some baked-in reporting that just didn't go deep enough and answer everyone's questions. Before we brought Sigma on, we looked at everything from Looker to Mode to Metabase, as well as Power BI – all things we had used in the past. All of them fell short in one way or another.

With Power BI, when we evaluated it, the ease of use just wasn't there for us. 

With Power BI, when we evaluated it, the ease of use just wasn't there for us. I didn't feel comfortable that we'd be able to hand that off to our internal teams and they would be successful. It really felt like a situation where we would be centralizing all of our reporting and analytics, rather than democratizing that and getting it out to the rest of the team for their own data discovery. 

Life with Sigma

What really sold us on Sigma was its ease of use. We knew we could get Sigma into anybody's hands in the organization, and if they were even a little familiar with Excel, they'd be able to work really well within it. Sigma allows people to make discoveries on their own, as well as do their own analysis. It's also freed up our analytics team to work on higher-priority projects. With Sigma and Snowflake combined, we can give our customers a proper data reporting warehouse. 

We use Sigma across our finance team, our revenue operations, data team, as well as our engineering and product teams. We might have multiple people on the data operations team working on models, and then collaborating within Sigma to make additions to a workbook.

With your embedded platform, we can now distribute analytics out to all of our nonprofit customers as well. That means they have the same ease of use and flexibility that we enjoy internally.

Security at Virtuous is paramount for us. We have a strict policy against sharing customer data with anyone outside of the organization. With Sigma, we've been able to work with your solutions engineers to implement the right security measures, such as column-access and row-access policies, to ensure that you only see the data that you have the right to see. 

Impact on Nonprofits

When we first launched Sigma, the response from our customers was overwhelming. They really were clamoring to see a demo and see what it was capable of as well as what it could do for their organization.

Traditionally, nonprofits have been handcuffed to outdated technology that hasn't met their needs. For example, they might be using finance software for fundraising purposes. They need data insights that allow them to grow and ultimately build better relationships with their donors.

Nonprofits just have such huge needs around data, data visibility, what's working, as well as what's not. Sigma is finally allowing Virtuous to give our customers the insights that they really need. 

Read more stories from Sigma’s customers here.