Case Study: DonorsChoose.org achieves a centralized, ETL-free data stack for faster insights with Fivetran

DonorsChoose.org - Customer Case Study

DonorsChoose.org needed to centralize data from many third‑party systems (PostgreSQL, Salesforce, Zendesk, Heap, ExactTarget, logs/CSV, etc.) so its Data Science and BI teams could build predictive models and get a single view of teacher, donor and partner interactions. To simplify its stack and avoid managing custom ETL, DonorsChoose.org engaged Fivetran to ingest and centralize those sources into a Redshift warehouse (with S3) and to support CSV uploads.

Fivetran streams Salesforce, Google Analytics, Zendesk and Postgres (and handles CSVs) into Redshift, and—paired with Looker’s Persistent Derived Tables for modeling—removed the need for custom ETL and script maintenance. As a result, DonorsChoose.org now has a simplified, centralized data warehouse, organization‑wide access to analytics and the ability to link touchpoints (e.g., Zendesk, Heap, ExactTarget, Postgres) to surface patterns and respond more effectively to teachers and donors.

DonorsChoose.org

Smith

DonorsChoose.org