Robin Hood is Leveraging Data in Rollup Helper to Fight Poverty in NYC & Empower Local Nonprofits

As the largest poverty fighting organization in New York City, Robin Hood has been supporting families by building and fueling nonprofits across all five boroughs for 30+ years. Robin Hood’s mission is to build pathways out of poverty for New Yorkers, and they invest over $140 million every year to fund impactful poverty-fighting programs to help those who are in need.

Challenge: Manual Data Aggregation Inefficiencies

Robin Hood was experiencing inefficiencies with their data aggregation process that was being done manually. Users were running reports, exporting data into spreadsheets, and creating pivot tables, which made working with new data time consuming and repetitive.

Solution: Streamlining Data Aggregation and Reporting

They needed a solution that would streamline their data aggregation and reporting. During their research and discovery phase, Robin Hood also looked at the Salesforce NPSP Custom Rollup, but chose Rollup Helper from Passage Technology based on the following strengths:

• Excellent customer support
• Easy configuration
• Flexible filters and advanced settings
• Intuitive rollup and exception management
• Robust, accurate solution that promotes best practices

“We transitioned from using Declarative Lookup Rollup Summary (DLRS) to Rollup Helper,” said Hao Lyu, who is Robin Hood’s Associate Manager, Database Administrator. An eight times certified Salesforce Application Architect, he oversees the Salesforce implementation and advancement at Robin Hood.

“Unlike DLRS, which requires some understanding of SOQL and Object API, Rollup Helper’s configuration is declarative and user friendly. For example, when configuring rollups that have multiple lookups on the source object to target object, Rollup Helper makes it easy to select the right lookup field while making sure the correct fields are being aggregated and populated to,” said Hao.

“Filters in Rollup Helper are reusable and can be cloned, which we find extremely helpful, especially when a large number of rollups are set up in the system. Many times, rollups set up on the same object also share the same filter—a reusable filter means you can just select it instead of having to create a new one every single time. And you can clone an existing one to apply for other similar use cases, which increases the efficiency,” continued Hao.

Advanced settings also allow Robin Hood to tackle more complex cases, like preserving current values, and populating unique values. Hao says Rollup Helper offers solutions for almost every use case they have.

Hao said, “We have rollups fire real-time, scheduled or triggered manually. Different modes are clearly labeled and distinguished on each rollup record, which are super straightforward to manage.” When rollups are in the queue, it allows them to see the real time status and how many records have been processed or will be processed.

Rollup Helper Aggregates Data for Robin Hood’s Customized Grants Management System

In support of their mission, Robin Hood built a highly customized Grants Management System on top of Salesforce, using Rollup Helper to understand the funding history of partners and programs they have funded.

The criteria they review includes the grant amount and number of grants Robin Hood has made to an organization, funding history broken out by year and categorizations, along with payment history and contact information. “Many rollup fields are also incorporated into workflows and validations to power process automations and ensure data accuracy,” says Hao.

Before Rollup Helper, their data aggregations were time consuming. “With Rollup Helper, data is automatically aggregated and manipulated by predefined rules, and users only need to run and refresh reports for the results they want. It greatly increases business efficiencies. And as a data-driven organization, Rollup Helper allows us to make business decisions faster and more accurately,” explained Hao.

“It also has a robust exception handling system built in where we can find issues and take actions,” he added.

“Based on my experience with other tools, I appreciate how Rollup Helper promotes system best practices. For example, only one field can be used as a target field, which prevents the same field from being constantly overwritten. There are many implementations in the tool that encourage users to follow the best practices to ensure data accuracy and process continuity,” he said.

Results: Streamlined Workflow Helps Them Make Decisions Based on Data

“Rollup Helper simplifies and streamlines our workflow and processes, allowing us to make better and more accurate decisions based on the data we have. More importantly, it opens up opportunities for us to gain insights from our data by manipulating and analyzing it in ways that were previously impossible,” said Hao.

“This is the best customer support experience I’ve ever had with a solution provider with consistent quality all the way from the discovery to post-implementation phases. Passage Technology offers customers peace of mind knowing they are always in good hands and any needs will be taken care of,” he concluded.