Makaton, a UK Registered Charity, that supports over 100,000 individuals in the UK with learning and communication difficulties through its unique communication system of symbols, signs, and speech. In 2021, Makaton began its digital transformation by moving its social enterprise operations online and growing its membership to over 160,000 individuals.
To support their growth, Makaton adopted IMIS as their Association Membership system, enabling us to develop a range of plug-and-play solutions. However, this introduced a significant challenge: effectively understanding their data model and having a full picture of how their users interact with the charity.
Organizations like Makaton manage data from various sources such as membership registrations, event attendance, donations, and engagement metrics. This data typically comes from different systems and databases, making it challenging to store, analyze, and manage effectively.
Despite seeing significant growth and improvements in their operation after adopting iMIS as their core member management system, Makaton still had a fragmented view of their business and had to stitch it together through a series of manual and error prone steps that were only growing in complexity.
Makaton turned to Objeto for help to consolidate, not just iMIS but all their core data streams into a single, linked, and cleansed data lake to support their business operation.
While iMIS is effective in several areas, it is not designed for advanced data analytics and data visualizations. To bridge this gap, Makaton started to use Microsoft Power BI but was struggling with the manual process involved to refresh the data every time. Data solutions need to be automated to effective at scale. The Objeto solution enabled a fully automated data flow from iMIS to PowerBI.
After meeting with the Makaton to understand their needs and their current data landscape, the Objeto team immediately started to prototype a solution using our iMIS EMS connector to make iMIS data available in Makaton's Azure Data Lake. As part of this process, Objeto performed a methodical and thorough analysis of Makaton's core CRM data and existing reports which allowed us to uncovered various data issues and nuances that were not previously visible. This resulted in cleaner data and an elevated understanding if their iMIS data.
The Objeto team implemented a data solution to enable Makaton to consolidate their different data sources in a single, automated, and cleansed data lake that will support their business operation and having a complete view of their user base.
"We are now on a journey of discovery with Objeto, expanding our data environment and exploring the use of AI to better understand our personas and events. Additionally, we are developing new, user-centric reporting tools to further our mission." Stephen Hall, Chief Executive, makaton.org
