Case Study: DonorsChoose.org achieves self-service analytics and scalable data pipelines with Fivetran

DonorsChoose Makes the Right Choice With a Modern Data Stack

DonorsChoose.org, a US nonprofit that connects donors to classroom projects, struggled with an inefficient analytics process driven by Excel and ad‑hoc SQL that stalled a very small data team (one data scientist and one business analyst). To modernize, the organization adopted Fivetran alongside Amazon Redshift and Looker to automate data ingestion and move away from manual reporting.

Fivetran provided managed connectors (Heroku, PostgreSQL, Salesforce, Zendesk, S3) into Redshift and enabled Looker dashboards, allowing DonorsChoose.org to migrate its production database to AWS RDS, automate pipelines, and surface daily metrics like revenue, acquired users, and year‑over‑year changes. The result: elimination of stale weekly Excel reports, faster stakeholder access to insights, improved scalability, and 100 active Looker users out of 167 staff — benefits the team says would have otherwise required hiring an additional engineer.

DonorsChoose.org

Mohammad Radiyat

Data Scientist