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When we first met with Autism Ontario, they were relying on several different legacy systems for different tasks, but those systems had become increasingly frustrating silos. This is a problem that organizations often encounter. We’ve seen it many times, and we’ve developed effective methods for consolidating and migrating data and then establishing new processes. Our first step was to learn about and document core workflows related to donations, memberships, events management, grant administration, and other organizational priorities. Together we evolved a roadmap of required technical and operational changes. Next, JMA dug into the code, customizing CiviCRM to improve workflows. We touched many different processes, but a couple of examples illustrate the payoffs that smart customization can bring.

Autism Ontario staff deliver an impressive variety of services, and there’s a lot of data to manage. Human error inevitably leads to inaccurate data entry, and as those errors accumulate they can have a significant downside. We mitigated this by creating locked-down templates to limit the range of possible inputs, making the work easier and dramatically increasing data accuracy.

We also engineered custom workflows that led to significant improvements in one of Autism Ontario’s key services – events management. Some of the events that the organization offers are supported by external funding, and Autism Ontario is responsible for documenting and reporting on participants’ evaluations and other metrics. An ad hoc approach worked at first, but proved to be time-consuming and impractical. As a fix, we worked with Autism Ontario to develop standardized surveys and we automated the process to make survey completion easy for participants without staff involvement, and data extraction easy for staff. Now reporting takes far less time, the information has greater relevance, and the reports are more comprehensive – outcomes that have high value to Autism Ontario and its funders.