Overview

Virgin Money Giving was created as a non-profit business by Virgin Money, a provider of financial products and an arm of the Virgin Group. The idea to launch Virgin Money Giving came as a result of Virgin Money’s sponsorship of the London Marathon, where the company recognized a need for an efficient fundraising platform for UK charities.

The London Marathon is the largest annual fundraising event in the world, and over the next five years Virgin hope to see over £250 million raised. However, Virgin Money Giving is not just for those planning to tackle the 26.2 mile route, and can be used for any fundraising event.

With Virgin Money Giving, more money finds its way to the charity, with Gift Aid enabled donations making each £10 donation stretch to £12.46 that the charity receives.

When launching this initiative, Virgin Money Giving identified the requirement tools that would improve reporting performance and installed Talend Integration Suite to restructure and optimize its data for reporting. Talend’s product provided open source capability and in result, greater visibility and control over key management information.

Challenge

Being a non-profit business, Virgin Money Giving charges just 2% on donations and is focused on its key objective: to keep costs to a minimum whilst still delivering high quality, reliable, scalable and secure systems.

Having spoken to a number of charities, Virgin Money Giving also identified that a key requirement of the reporting system was performance. The non-profit business had already selected Jaspersoft as a reporting tool, but in order to deliver the required performance, decided to restructure the operational data into a structure designed specifically for reporting.

Virgin Money Giving improves reporting performance with Talend Integration Suite

Case Study

Talend Integration Suite helps Virgin Money Giving in optimizing reporting on charitable donations.

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Talend Integration Suite is a great data integration platform and the vast range of features that it offers including advanced deployment and scheduling, and live production monitoring, have enabled us to customize data integration processes to suit specific requirements of each charity to keep within regulatory requirements.

Chris Edwards,System Delivery Manager

Business TypeFundraising for charitable organizations

ImplementationETL, data consolidation

Key factsOfficial fundraising for the London Marathon: the largest annual fundraising event in the worldProcessing of large data volumes Improved performance ratesCost-effective

www.talend.com info@talend.com

The Solution

The solution recommended by Jaspersoft was Talend Integration Suite, the first open source enterprise data integration solution, designed to support complex projects, and to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity.

From a technology perspective, the suite met Virgin Money Giving’s needs perfectly as they required a tool that could perform ETL jobs effectively for reporting, whilst maintaining low costs.

“The implementation took a small team seven months from inception to launch and this was part of the wider Virgin Money Giving project, which involved: gathering reporting requirements, designing the reporting repository, producing data mapping specifications, tool installation, building the ETL mappings using an iterative approach, extensive testing – all of this with only three days of training,” commented Chris Edwards, System Delivery Manager, Virgin Money. “We were extremely pleased with the overall delivery time-scale as well as the smooth running of the implementation.”

Talend Integration Suite is built on top of award winning Talend Open Studio and adds professional grade technical support and enterprise features, which can effortlessly facilitate the work of large teams and industrialize enterprise-scale deployments.

Talend Integration Suite’s shared repository was particularly attractive to Virgin Money Giving, as this feature would dramatically help to improve the performance of the project. The shared repository is designed to consolidate all project information and enterprise metadata in a centralized area, which would create greater visibility of Virgin Money Giving’s management information (MI).

Virgin Money Giving also recognized that this capability would improve the collaboration between team members by allowing them to store and share their business models, integration jobs, and metadata in an industry-standard source manager (SVN).

Benefits

Using Talend Integration Suite, Virgin Money Giving can now consolidate all relevant information into a solid and sophisticated reporting repository, which employees are using with ease.

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Chris Edwards commented: “We now have complete visibility of how much is being raised by each charity via the online donations website as well as details of individual donations. This is absolutely paramount in maintaining key management information, essential for business transparency as well as for the charities, who need to develop realistic fundraising strategies. As a result, we have received very positive feedback from charities on our new reporting capability as they can now access high quality, flexible management information.”

Using open source has proved tremendously valuable for Virgin Money Giving who has experienced the commercial benefits of using such a flexible and open tool.

“Talend Integration Suite is a great data integration platform and the vast range of features that it offers including advanced deployment and scheduling, and live production monitoring, have enabled us to customize data integration processes to suit specific requirements of each charity to keep within regulatory requirements,” Chris Edwards continued.

Chris Edwards said: “Using Talend’s product, Virgin Money Giving has benefited from having a dedicated ETL batch job, which transforms operational data into a structure optimized for reporting. As a result, ETL jobs can be processed overnight to populate the reporting repository, which dramatically improves performance rates without increasing costs.”

“As a non-profit business, cost is always a crucial factor when selecting any form of technology and adopting Talend Integration Suite meant that costs could be kept to a minimum. We needed to improve the management of data and reporting performance, however, we did not have the resources to implement proprietary software and this project would have not been feasible had we not been introduced to Talend’s open source offering,” Chris Edwards concluded.