World Central Kitchen uses Dataimporter to save time, share workload, and improve data accuracy.
Industry
Non-Profit
Location
Washington D.C.
Employees
97
Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen (WCK) is a nonprofit organization that is first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. When disaster strikes, WCK mobilizes with the urgency of now to start cooking and serving meals to people in need. By partnering with organizations on the ground and activating a network of local restaurants, food trucks, or emergency kitchens, WCK serves comforting meals to survivors of disasters quickly and effectively. To support regional economies, WCK prioritizes purchasing local ingredients to cook with or distribute directly to families in need.
Background
World Central Kitchen (WCK) needed to regularly import Non-Profit data into Salesforce. This was done across multiple team members, custom objects and complex logic.
"There are many ways to import data into Salesforce but Dataimporter does it better than any alternative."
Andrew Rowley, Salesforce Admin
Andrew and the team primarily needed Dataimporter to import donations that didn't come in through the website, including ACH, Wire Transfer, and checks. They have a team of more than 10 admins, but because of the complex nature of the imports, and the importance of data accuracy, only a couple could complete the CSV import process. They were looking for a solution where import templates could be created, and shared across the team.
They were also looking for time savings. Often, the data was not formatted correctly, and multiple related objects needed to be imported, meaning success files would be downloaded and vlookups completed in Excel. WCK was using dataloader.io, however they experienced multiple outages, a lack of support, and slow product development.
"With Dataimporter, there were noticeable improvements and support responses within the workday."
Decision
Being a non-profit, cost was a big factor for WCK. Dataimporter offered a significant discount to their previous pricing, and allowed for more of their team members to get access.
Not only that, it provided a number of efficiencies in the importing process including:
- Multi-Object Import
- Formulas
- Rollback
- Team Collaboration
"Dataimporter was cheaper than the service WCK was previously using, had more features/functionality, better support, and allowed more uploads per month."
Implementation & Use
Having all the team get up to speed as quick as possible with Dataimporter was paramount.
"Within a week WCK’s team was trained and up and running with the app. It is easy to use and intuitive to understand."
WCK uses the Teams functionality to create job templates, and share them between users. This means that a lead Admin can set up the Mappings and Formulas, and a newer admin can use the template to import their data. WCK also extensively uses Formulas in Dataimporter to format and filter their data before it comes into Salesforce.
"Formulas have been incredibly helpful! Having formulas to transform your data in the importer takes it out of excel where the file changes each time and creates a repetitive task."
Efficiency is key in the disaster relief space, so being able to test out new solutions in Sandbox environments is extremely important to WCK. Previously, they would export data from their production environment, mask it in Excel, and then import it into their Sandbox environment for testing. Now they are using the Sandbox Seeding features in Dataimporter to populate their Sandboxes with realistic data, without the need to handle CSV files.
Results
Across the team there has been significant time savings for both Sandbox Seeding and Imports. Using multi-object imports they have cut their processing time in half, as well as having huge efficiency gains in sharing templates between their team of admins. Their data accuracy has also improved. Because their data is coming from multiple different sources, duplicates were an issue, however by using Dataimporter Formulas they have been able to generate unique keys that they can use to match their donation records with.
Their accuracy has also improved with the use of Sampling and Rollback. Previously imports were run and if there was an error made, it added significant time to the process to undo the import, fix the error and rerun the import. WCK now uses Sampling to test a subset of records before processing the whole file, and can Rollback any imports that fail to automatically delete the imported records.
Their admins now have full visibility over who has performed what import. By utilising the Teams feature, admins can view the history of imports across the team, so that can be sure that Imports are being processed accurately and on time.
