Helping Sir David Martin Foundation reduce storage costs and unlock data accessibility through Snowflake

Sir David Martin Foundation (SDMF) is a charitable organisation dedicated to supporting young people in crisis. The Foundation was established in 1990 and is the major funder of Mission Australia’s Triple Care Farm, a unique youth-specific addiction treatment centre which gives Australians aged 16-24 a safe place to get well.

The opportunity

As SDMFs fundraising efforts continued to grow, so did the volume of historical CRM data stored in their fundraising system. This data, made up of 40,000 contact records had become costly to retain within their primary CRM and increasingly difficult for staff to access efficiently.

With nowhere to reliably store and access this information, SDMF required assistance with setting up a cloud-based solution for the migration of this data out of their CRM to lower their ongoing storage costs.

Second to this, SDMF also aimed to strengthen their data and analytics capability to better understand regular givers and identify growth opportunities. However, the heavy integration effort required across multiple disparate systems made progress on this
initiative challenging.

The Foundation approached Altis to help design and deliver a cost effective data archiving solution that would reduce storage costs, simplify access, and set them up for future analytics maturity.

The solution

Altis drew on 27 years of experience in data analytics, including its extensive work on Snowflake’s cloud-first data platform to support SDMF. This included firstly establishing a Snowflake account and developing a purpose-built archive for their CRM records. Snowflake was a great option for SDMF to use for this purpose as it offers:

• Extremely low storage costs, especially for infrequently accessed datasets.
• Automatic scalability and ease of maintenance.
• A secure, centralised location for all archived records.

The Altis team then set about executing the migration process of records from SDMF’s CRM into their Snowflake account. This began with a thorough analysis of the source data, validating data quality and migrating into the Snowflake platform. It was then structured into a 3NF data model to house the customer and regular giving data in a familiar format to the internal team. Throughout the process, Altis embedded strong data governance practices by ensuring any PII or sensitive data was handled appropriately, with access controls in place so users could only view the data they required.

Altis then delivered training for the SDMF team to enable them to confidently access Snowflake and perform queries on the data to access specific customer subsets and groups depending on their required filtering criteria.

The outcome

The partnership between Altis and Sir David Martin Foundation successfully delivered a modern, cloudbased archival solution that reduced storage costs, simplified access, and created a future-ready data environment. By migrating legacy CRM data into Snowflake, SDMF now benefits from lower operational expenses, greater data accessibility, a scalable analytics foundation and a roadmap for transformation into a more data-driven organisation.

SDMF were able to create an account with Snowflake utilising their pay-as-you-go billing model to only pay for the data they use, which led to a large cost saving for the foundation and allowed them to free up the necessary funds to help them with their key priorities as an organisation.

This project demonstrates how non-profit organisations can modernise their data ecosystem without large upfront investments, enabling them to redirect savings and energy back into their mission - in this case, supporting young people in crisis.

Unlock your data potential with Altis

The successful outcomes for SDMF can be replicated for any organisation looking to make cost savings on data storage, access and availability to set them up for success in future analytics.

For more information about this project or to learn how Altis can help your organisation leverage data and AI, contact us today.