has partnered with Databricks Global Orphan (GO) ProjectA nonprofit organization that connects families to resources and communities that can prevent children from falling prey to systemic tragedies.
Through Databricks for Good, an initiative providing pro bono professional services for social impact, the Databricks team helped the GO Project strengthen its data foundation and accelerate its mission and impact.
Data Challenges and Limitations
In 2025, GO Project’s local partners will serve approx 122K children in 43 US states and 53K children in 6 countries internationally. with more than 1,600 active partner agencies Submitting a request in the US and 8,200 response teams Responding in almost real time, data was housed across all systems, making reporting a challenge. As a result, important questions, such as “How much does it cost to facilitate each request (i.e. platform data) (i.e. finance data)?” Spreadsheets often contained calculations outside of automated reporting systems, making data availability and consistency not as efficient as they could have been.
The GO project needed a tool that could easily pull data from multiple sources into a single trusted data layer to drive reporting and increase overall data consistency and availability. While consolidating data into a unified data platform, there was also a need to ensure that data governance, access, and permissions were tightly integrated so that all types of users, from internal staff to agency partners to church volunteers, had access to the appropriate subset of data for their purposes.
To address these challenges, the GO Project chose Databricks for its ease of setup Serverless Workstationseamless integration with cloud platforms, unity list Governance capabilities, and the ability to integrate data engineering, analytics, and AI on a single platform.
Modernizing Data Architecture with Databricks
During the Databricks for Good engagement, the GO project partnered with two Databricks Delivery Solutions Architects (DSAs) and a Databricks Project Manager over a three-month period to design and implement the modern data architecture shown below.
The solution was designed around a medal architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) to provide a scalable and reliable foundation for analytics and AI-powered use cases. Raw data from third-party APIs and AWS RDS MySQL was efficiently incorporated through both open source and Databricks-managed facilities, enabling rapid onboarding of new data sources while keeping pipelines flexible as volumes grew. Data quality and reliability in the Silver Layer was enforced through pipeline expectations (using spark declarative pipeline), enabling early identification of downstream data issues and establishing a standardized data quality framework.
Finally, the data was aggregated into gold foil, which served as a trusted source for downstream consumption. metric view Powered centralized dashboards that democratized access to insights for different teams, eliminating reliance on manual reporting or specialized technical support. Additionally, these curated datasets enabled personalized, AI-generated newsletters without redefining key business metrics or creating parallel data silos.
Behind it all, the Unity Catalog served as a unified governance layer across all data and AI assets, enabling GO Projects to confidently scale self-service analytics and AI projects.
Solution and result
The following sections highlight the solutions delivered through Databricks for good engagement and the measurable results achieved for the GO project.
Centralized KPI Dashboard
A primary challenge facing the GO project was the lack of a single, accessible view of organizational performance across its network of partners. Key metrics were stored across multiple data sources, requiring teams to manually collect and interpret information. This process was time consuming and inconsistent.
Through the Databricks for Good program, Databricks partnered with the GO Project to transform this fragmented reporting model into a centralized, automated KPI dashboard built on the Data Lakehouse architecture.
Instead of relying on static exports or manual updates, new data was automatically ingested and processed, enabling the dashboard to reflect changes much closer to real-time. This ensured that leadership and field teams were always working based on the latest information available. The end result was a unified source of truth that brings together operational data from across the organization into one updated dashboard.
This dashboard leverages the following key Databricks features:
- metric view Standardizing KPI definitions and ensuring consistent calculations across all reports and dashboards. No longer needs to send SQL snippets to GO projects hoping to get the WHERE clause correct.
- AI/BI Dashboard To enable the creation of intuitive, drag-and-drop visualizations tailored to the operational needs of a GO project.
- Databricks One Allowing business users to securely consume and interact with AI/BI dashboards without requiring direct access to the Databricks Workbench or underlying datasets.
As a result, the GO Project achieved the following business and technical results:
- operating efficiency: Reporting cycle reduced from days to minutesAllows users to monitor the health of regional metrics on demand rather than waiting for email reports.
- faster productivity and learning: Enables team members to quickly write and iterate complex analytical queries using data science agentAccelerating insight creation without the need for deep SQL expertise.
- Scalable Reporting Foundation: Reduce reliance on one-off, ad-hoc reports by establishing a standardized reporting foundation directly within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
Overall, the integrated KPI dashboard provided the GO project with timely, actionable insight into outreach performance. With real-time visibility into key metrics, the organization can respond faster, allocate resources more effectively, and ultimately strengthen its ability to prevent more children from falling victim to systemic tragedies.
Personalized AI-Generated Donor Outreach
With a data-driven view of performance through a centralized KPI dashboard, the GO project focused its efforts on activating those insights through more effective stakeholder engagement. The GO Project sought to produce timely and personalized content at scale in an effort to appeal to donors using personal data for their local community.
Previously, the GO project depended largely on the manual process. Data for each stakeholder had to be individually extracted from a MySQL database, then formatted and woven into communications by hand, making it difficult to send repeated messages to all prospects.
Through the Databricks for Good initiative, the team designed and implemented an automated system to generate personalized, AI-powered newsletters directly from curated datasets on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. By combining controlled data with built-in GenAI capabilities, the solution transformed operational metrics into stakeholder-ready narratives with minimal human intervention.
For this deliverable, the following key Databricks features were used:
- databricks notebook And Databricks AI Functions (ai_query) Dynamically generating stakeholder-specific narrative summaries based on notebook widgets (to drive segmentation logic), avoiding manual configuration and custom scripts.
- Foundation Model API Integrating GenAI directly with the data platform, enabling data preparation and transformation as well as content creation.
- Unity Catalog Volume To securely store unstructured, AI-generated newsletter output as PDF in cloud storage, simplifying downstream distribution and access.
This resulted in the following commercial and technical outcomes for the GO Project:
- Quick Content Creation: Personalized donor marketplace snapshot draft generation now occurs seconds Instead of days, GO Project’s marketing team was allowed to focus on refinement and storytelling rather than manual content creation.
- End manual data collection: The team no longer needs to pull monthly impact data from multiple systems. Instead, users can select a stakeholder, and pre-configured widgets automatically filter relevant data and generate personalized content using the ai_query function.
- Scalable, Data-Driven Donor Marketing: Tight integration of notebooks, data science agents, and trusted data pipelines allowed GO Project to rapidly build donor marketing products tailored to local markets. Fundraising teams can now produce customized, data-backed reports on demand across all US geographies in a fraction of the time required to produce a single report.
Together, these capabilities enable the GO Project to move beyond static reporting and into personalized, AI-powered storytelling, strengthening stakeholder relationships while increasing the visibility and impact of its mission.
At this early stage, the solution relied on Databricks AI functions to generate newsletter content. Looking ahead, the GO Project plans to leverage Agent Bricks to introduce domain-specific agents responsible for different sections of newsletters. This approach will reduce early tuning overhead, improve consistency in output, and enable more scalable optimization of the underlying large language models (LLMs).
effects and consequences
Through the Databricks for Good program, the GO Project transformed its data capabilities from disparate reporting to a modern, scalable data and AI foundation built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
Corey Voodoo, Chief Data and Information Officer at the Global Orphan Project, shared the following perspective on the partnership:
“The all-in-one nature of Databricks is great for a small team of our size. Instead of spending time learning and connecting different tools together, we focus on the problems at hand and are confident that the features we need are already present in the tools we choose. We look forward to working with Databricks on more projects in the future.”
If you are a nonprofit organization or work closely with nonprofits and are interested in learning how Databricks can serve as a force multiplier for social impact, please contact us here. (email protected).
