Save the Children Germany

Creating a world where all children can fulfill their potential

Save the Children organization logo

If we canceled Talend right now, we would have to hire at least two full time employees so that they can just type in the data and bring it all from A to B — and the data accuracy could suffer.

Tim Winkelsett

A young, smiling girl wearing a black hijab and yellow dress stands with her arms folded in front of a corrugated metal wall.A young, smiling girl wearing a black hijab and yellow dress stands with her arms folded in front of a corrugated metal wall.

Build a scalable data infrastructure to keep up with a growing number of external partners

2x

fundraising agencies supported (from 2 to 4)

7x

faster data delivery to Salesforce

2+ FTE

worth of manual effort saved


“Save the Children is the world’s largest independent child’s rights organization,” says Tim Winkelsett, Data Engineer at Save the Children Germany.

The organization receives donations through agencies with fundraising street teams. As they grew, their system for processing financial data did not scale. “We needed to collect the data from the agencies, download it, have a look to see if it's all right, maybe manually get into the data, correct it, save it again, and then upload it into Salesforce.”

Now, integration and quality are automated with Talend as data moves to and from their staging environment, a Microsoft SQL Azure Database. “Before we send the data into Salesforce, it's stored at the staging environment. Then, we run some data quality checks.”

“For example, is the IBAN correct? Is the spelling of the email address correct? When the check is successful, it goes immediately into Salesforce. And when it's not, we are getting an email from Talend, so we know that there is an error and we need to check the data again.”

“Stitch is helping me to save some time as well. It's quite an effort to work with the different data sources here. For example, I tried to implement a Facebook connection via Java and this was quite a hassle. Stitch is just more intuitive. I just need to click.”

The future is bright for Save the Children Germany. “Nonprofit organizations are not so data-driven yet compared to other companies in other areas, but we are going in a good direction.”