Better Sustainability Through Data: How Crossroads Foundation Proves the Benefits of the Circular Economy

In the commercial space, it's common for organisations to tackle large IT projects with equally large IT budgets. But in the cash-constrained non-profit world, pursuing IT ambitions can be a much heavier lift. How can non-profits punch above their weight with the limited resources at their disposal?

I've been asking—and answering—this question for more than 20 years. Two decades ago, I left a corporate career in Australia to lead IT for a Hong Kong nonprofit. Technology has played a transformative role here, building our operations and capabilities to reach far more people than we ever thought we could.

At the intersection of needs and resources sits Crossroads Foundation. Founded in 1995 as a relief effort for victims of a major flood in Northern China, Crossroads Foundation has grown to a team of more than 70 employees and hundreds of volunteers, with various services designed to connect people in a broken world. These services include GoodCity.HK, an app that allows people and corporations in Hong Kong to donate physical goods. Charitable organisations can also use an app to view and request donated items both from Crossroads’ warehouse and directly from donors.

As requests began to come in from outside Hong Kong, another service, Global Hand, was born. Like GoodCity.HK, Global Hand refers in-kind donations to trusted partners, but on a global scale. After our success with Global Hand, the United Nations asked us to create a similar mechanism for them to match corporate partnerships in support of their sustainable development goals. For 12 years we operated Business.un.org as a portal to connect business resources with projects across the UN system.

We Generated Lots of Data but Couldn't Dig Deeper

Years of continuously developing IT services meant we were generating oceans of data. We knew that gold lurked amidst that data but could not afford to allocate sufficient money or human resources to systematically extract meaningful insights from our many datasets. I'd launched “business intelligence” projects in the corporate world, but corporate giants benefit from giant IT budgets. While it is possible for non-profits to raise funding for particular projects, boosting fundamental IT infrastructure and business intelligence is a harder sell because few donors appreciate the huge value potential it represents.

We developed various ad-hoc solutions to visualise and present data to the Crossroads team, but it was never quite enough. As soon as users saw some data in a comprehensible format, they would say "That's so interesting! Can we please try looking at it in this slightly different way?" or "Can we add a different dimension to it?" or "Can we drill down into that data point a bit more?" It was great to see people immediately engage with data because that's how it's supposed to work: you ask questions of the data, the answers lead to insights, those insights lead to further questions, and on and on.  

But it would all end in frustration when we had to tell them that we couldn't go any further because we couldn’t keep allocating more developer resources to an endless process of data exploration. Conversations would end with, "Maybe we can find it in the budget next year."

Qlik Offers User-Generated Insights—Exactly What It Said on the Tin

Crossroads is driven by passionate people who are always restless to increase the organisation’s impact. To empower this kind of drive, I wanted to find a tool that would allow users to discover their own data insights, remixing and drilling into the data freely in order to discover the value locked within. The old players in the market I was familiar with simply didn’t offer this level of flexibility. So, I took a closer look at some emerging players and discovered that Qlik existed to solve our exact problem. That was over 12 years ago, and it was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

Qlik is exactly what it says on the tin: an analytics and data integration platform with the best visualisations on the market. When we adopted Qlik, we had just implemented Global Hand, and our UN project was very active. With these two projects on the go, we got stuck into Qlik very quickly, using it to offload substantial portions of our back-office software development. Instead of building a bespoke backend management dashboard for the UN platform, for example, we implemented substantial portions of it in Qlik. Dashboards that would take weeks or months to develop from scratch in code took mere hours to roll out using Qlik. This approach allowed us to move much faster and focus our energies on the public-facing aspects of the system.  

Not long after, we embarked on the development of our GoodCity service. We'd received a major grant from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust (one of the largest private grant-making bodies in the world) to develop apps that would make it easier to donate and receive items throughout the city of Hong Kong. Despite this grant, we were still resource-constrained and had to pick and choose what capabilities to build. In particular, we weren't sure if we would have the resources to reimplement our internal inventory management system so it could better support the real-time transactions GoodCity would introduce. Crossroads has a huge volunteer workforce, and because off-the-shelf enterprise warehouse management systems are not a good fit for our workforce, we wanted to continue working with a bespoke system. 

When I originally crunched the numbers, I couldn't see us reimplementing this system within the project budget. However, further analysis revealed that a substantial set of capabilities could be modelled and delivered rapidly using Qlik. This approach, in fact, made it financially feasible to include an overhaul of our inventory management system within the project.

Measuring Our Sustainability Efforts

Qlik helps us zoom into data, but it also allows us to zoom out and evaluate our impact on the environment. There are two key facets to sustainability at Crossroads that Qlik helps us understand and visualise. First is the role our in-kind services play in the circular economy. By extending the useful life of quality goods, Crossroads reduces landfill and even reduces the need for new items to be manufactured. For example, by refurbishing thousands of laptops each year, Crossroads reduces the quantity of rare earth metals and other materials that are used up in manufacturing and ultimately dumped into landfill.

Many of our corporate donors now use triple-bottom-line reporting, examining their environmental impact and social responsibility alongside financial performance. It's valuable to them to have a reliable measure of how their in-kind donations reduce their carbon footprint. We are leveraging Qlik to tackle complex carbon footprint modelling for the full range of donated items moving through our operations. We will then be able to feed this data back to our donors.

The other way Qlik helps our sustainability efforts is by measuring the impact of our solar energy system. Crossroads’ 200kW solar PV system is one of the largest installations among charitable organisations in Hong Kong. This has a substantial impact on our carbon footprint. Solar also offsets our energy costs as we take advantage of the Hong Kong government's feed-in tariff scheme, which incentivises solar by buying the energy we produce at a preferential rate. Qlik helps us present these savings to donors, who appreciate our efforts to keep operating costs to a minimum so that their financial contributions can further the causes they care most about. 

Rethinking What's Possible

Today, I'm as excited about Qlik as I was at the beginning. We have dozens of Qlik apps in place, and a wide variety of staff and volunteers using them daily. Whether it's to check our available stock, generate customs documentation, or print barcodes, it's all done in Qlik.  

We continue to find places to improve and Qlik is unique in the way it can empower each part of the systems’ development lifecycle. For example, we’re using Qlik to analyse thousands of real-time chat messages in our public-facing donor app. This helps us define a future chatbot we plan to implement to automatically handle frequently asked questions, reducing the administrative burden on our staff and volunteers. Qlik is also the platform in which some of our solutions are developed. Qlik allows the development process to move extremely quickly, shortening the development cycle from weeks or months to as little as a day. This ability to get ideas into production quickly shifts the goalpost in terms of what we can consider possible.  

As an IT leader, it is hugely satisfying when we provision a system that users proactively and eagerly adopt because they can readily see the value it is adding to their role. I have routinely been in meetings where staff unaffiliated with IT have presented material using Qlik apps they created themselves, building on the foundation IT put in place. They just wanted to see the data differently, and they could do that easily in Qlik without waiting for IT to get involved. In another instance, one of our departments hired an intern solely to build onto existing Qlik apps. These little moments make me proud of how we've embraced Qlik, and they demonstrate the value our teams see in the platform.

Closing the Gap Between Our Resources and Our Goals

Qlik has played a key role in stretching our resources, improving efficiency, and increasing throughput. In recent years, our efforts in IT have decimated the median time from when someone offers goods to when those goods arrive in our warehouse—from 14 days to less than two. We've gone from being an asynchronous organisation to one operating in near real-time, and this is only possible if data visibility and analysis can move it real-time too. Qlik is a big part of that.

The Crossroads Foundation only exists to help people. We get excited about metrics like the one above, but it bears thinking about what those metrics mean on the ground. Of course, it means we are moving more items and donations through our warehouse than ever before. But that only matters because of the human impact: each item means one more person has a bed to sleep on, one more kid has a computer to participate in virtual school, one more person has a washing machine and no longer has to wash clothes by hand. Adopting Qlik keeps our team going more sustainably without requiring more resources. It's about real people, and the metrics are how we identify our overall impact.

Our Qlik partnership helps us address the acute problem that all non-profits face: how to close the gap between our resources and aspirations, and punch far above our weight.