The Data Conundrum
Data helps lead every aspect of our nonprofit and educational institutions. We strive to understand our constituents through their engagements with organizations, what webpages they interact with, how they like to be communicated with, which programs or courses they’re participating in, and when and how much they give.
However, when that data lives across multiple systems, often coming coupled with storage/data limits and fees, the data can begin to be disjointed, leaving us with unclear pictures and imprecise estimations on the best next steps.
What is MuleSoft?
MuleSoft is a best-in-breed tool for designing and managing API networks. MuleSoft’s design enables IT departments to unlock systems and surface data to the rest of the enterprise. Atop this foundation is an orchestration layer, consisting of process APIs, that are developed to solve business problems without rebuilding connections to enterprise systems each time. This keeps IT teams focused on managing enterprise systems and enables functional owners to develop solutions. Finally, all these components ultimately enable real-time access to enterprise data that reduces data silos and boosts efficiency enterprise-wide.
Cloud for Good’s MuleSoft Accelerators for Nonprofit and Higher Education Customers
Cloud for Good MuleSoft solutions act as a bridge to enable connectivity between disjointed information systems. Orchestration layers, driven by API development, allow our clients to reuse assets and empower their teams to access data in a self-service model. Through industry/product expertise, integrated workstreams, end-to-end solutions, and managed services, Cloud for Good is poised to become the go-to partner for designing and implementing MuleSoft solutions for nonprofits and higher education institutions.
Cloud for Good leans on over a decade of experience in the higher education and nonprofit spaces, with a dedicated team of MuleSoft-certified consultants, including MuleSoft Certified Developers and MuleSoft Certified Integration Architects. This gives Cloud for Good a unique perspective on how to help our clients create scalable application networks using our team’s deep knowledge of both Salesforce and MuleSoft technical solutions. As such, we’ve created several accelerators to help speed up the time-to-value of MuleSoft implementations:
Fundraising Pipeline Management
Consider a scenario where a fundraising team is managing a large donation pipeline where gifts can come from multiple front-facing locations. In this same scenario, gift data is structured in various formats and needs to be transformed and standardized to fit within a shared data model. Cloud for Good provides the solution to this scenario through our proprietary Fundraising Pipeline Accelerator, which includes a single gift API and constituent API that define the business logic for gift and constituent data.
Through this accelerator, donation websites interface with the APIs, not the back-end system, and the API building blocks can be reused to launch new solutions quickly. This results in IT teams spending less time building end-to-end solutions and frees up fundraising teams to launch new sites quickly without investing heavily in development. Additionally, changes to business logic can be implemented in a single place without touching the experience layer.
Mailing House Management
Now imagine a separate scenario where fundraising teams needed to share constituent data with vendors, like mail houses, address validations, and direct response services. These teams need an easy and secure way to share similar sets of data. MuleSoft can be the right solution for teams in these scenarios as well, as vendors can access data directly through API endpoints created through MuleSoft.
These APIs are secured, and requests can be managed through AnyPoint Platform portal, while generic data outputs can be placed in a secure FTP location for vendors that aren’t equipped to work with API endpoints. The end result of this scenario is fundraising teams saving invaluable time preparing filed and sending to vendors.
Data are secured through formal access management protocols associated with MuleSoft, and vendors can then access the data they need quickly and easily.
Student Advising
One more scenario, this time for those looking to streamline student advising in the higher education space. Say that students are assigned academic and faculty advisors within the Student Information System (SIS). The data model provides multiple ways to represent advising relationships. Advisors need a streamlined tool for managing student interactions, and student academic information is difficult to navigate within SIS.
Through MuleSoft, advising system APIs provide a consistent interface to retrieve current data about advising relationships and student academics. Advisor Service can then manage relationship records in Education Cloud, while individual advisors and advising teams are displayed to students on the advising portal. Course and program data are also synced to Education Cloud through the power of MuleSoft in this scenario.
Advisors can now manage their current advisees in reports and list views, see a full picture of their advisees’ academic work, appointments, and advising notes. Students, on the other hand, can now view their advisors, make appointments, and manage tasks all within the advising portal created through the combination of Salesforce and MuleSoft.
See the Solution in Action
Cloud for Good has already found proven success implementing MuleSoft for a number of our clients. The following use case helps illustrate what MuleSoft can do, not just for technology but for the people that technology helps serve.
Large Nonprofit Organizations focused on Healthcare
A large nonprofit organization focused on healthcare and education has also benefitted from MuleSoft solutions developed by Cloud for Good to process data from multiple vendor files to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud for the organization’s giving program.
This organization receives data files from multiple sources, including caging, lockbox, offline giving, telemarketing, canvassing, and more. MuleSoft has been integrated to act as a processing engine to receive these many files and then perform validations before staging data into a warehouse.
The staged data is then loaded onto Salesforce standard and custom objects to support fundraising team processes. Additionally, MuleSoft handles complete synchronization of data between the warehouse and Nonprofit Cloud, ensuring the organization can maintain a single source of truth that reliably empowers internal processes and external outreach.
If you’re curious about what Cloud for Good MuleSoft implementation services can do for your organization, contact us at [email protected] today.
