The organisation’s mission is to ensure that excess goods and services produced by businesses flow to people in need, rather than go to waste. The result is a Circle of Good that supports 15,000 people every week, reducing need and waste so that everyone benefits – people and our planet. Within the last decade, over 4,500 charities and disadvantaged schools have used Good360’s e-commerce platform to order over 44 million items for 4.8 million people in need. How does a lean nonprofit on a tight budget scale to achieve such feats?
Shawn Peters, Chief Technology Officer at Good360 Australia, has the answer. It has to do with orchestrating across an extensive technology stack, to get the right goods to the right people at the right time. But their story first starts with a series of disappointments.
Rigid, unscalable integrations
To ensure beneficiaries receive the goods they order, product and user data needs to be captured accurately and swiftly synced across all internal systems. However, rigid integrations prevented Good360 from scaling to meet the needs of a vast network of nonprofits and their evolving needs.
Despite already owning an integration tool, Shawn’s team struggled to connect their Netsuite ERP to the content management system, Magento. The lack of flexibility made end-to-end connectivity impossible, and Good360 could not afford to eat up their lean IT team’s time to hardcode a fix each time.
Delivering the right goods to the right people at the right time
Good360 Australia now uses Workato to sync product and user data across all core systems. Whenever a new order is made, Workato captures and stores both user and product data in their Salesforce CRM and NetSuite ERP. This flexible, bi-directional sync allows Good360 to track beneficiaries’ orders, stay on top of inventory counts, and make arrangements that allow even unique orders to be fulfilled in a smooth and timely manner.
Here’s how it works:
Doing more with less
Taking just 8 weeks to go live with Workato, Good360 achieved:
- 8x faster data updates: Staff went from spending over 2 hours on manual data entry to accessing accurate user data in less than 15 minutes. This frees up time for them to focus on core projects to find new donor organisations and help more beneficiaries.
- Lower IT overheads: By building in-house on Workato’s intuitive interface, Good360 optimised resources, kept overheads down and improved agility.
- Seamless end-to-end experience: Consolidated multiple tools into one seamless experience for all users to track and deliver on orders.
Expanding on the good
With Workato serving as the lynchpin for Good360 Australia’s technology-driven growth, Shawn and his team are exploring opportunities to scale their impact further. This includes integrating AI agents to help leverage better, collecting better data to aid in disaster recovery, and building workflows to get products to the right people more efficiently in times of crisis.
Shawn concludes: “We’re connecting donors and donations to people in need. We now have the right tool in Workato to expand on the good we can achieve. I’m excited to see where it goes.”
The Workato Australia team volunteers with Good360 Australia, sorting and packing 72 boxes of donated goods for people in need, >21,500 individual items
