Every nonprofit collects data. The harder question is whether that data can help in important decisions — when a funder asks for impact, when leadership needs to decide direction, when a programme needs to change course.
Bhumi has been collecting data since 2006. Here’s the story of how they went from having data scattered everywhere to bringing it together in one unified view — and what that made possible.
Bhumi was founded in Chennai in 2006 as a small volunteering programme for children in shelter homes. Nearly two decades later, it runs structured education programmes from Grade 2 through to employment, tracking student progress through baseline, midline and endline assessments, while simultaneously running a civic volunteering network across India.
All of that programme activity generated data — lots of it, going back nearly two decades. And almost all of it lived in Excel and Google Sheets, with the rest scattered across Zoho Creator apps.
The Challenge – Too Many Numbers, Not Enough Insight
Bhumi’s data problem wasn’t a shortage of data — it was the opposite. Years of programme activity had accumulated across the organisation, but the way that data was collected, stored, and consolidated meant nobody could give a confident answer to a basic question.
“Since we grew organically and we work with a lot of volunteers, data gets collected by different people in different formats, saved in different ways. So we did not have any single source of truth when we wanted data.” – Anusha Vishwanath, Executive Assistant to Co-founder, Bhumi
That sentence opens up four distinct problems Bhumi was navigating at once.
- Fragmented collection. Each fellow, trainer, and programme coordinator was maintaining their own sheet, in their own format
- Versioning chaos. Someone would work on a sheet, someone else would copy it, work on the copy, and now there were two versions to reconcile.
- Inconsistent reporting. When data lives in many places, different teams arrive at different numbers for the same question.
“If we just asked, what is the total number of children that we reached in a year, we could come up with two different answers depending on which source of data that you’re looking at. And that’s a very fundamental problem to have.“
But the deeper problem was the loss in decision making. When Bhumi’s leadership sat down for their FCRA renewal — the compliance process that every India-based nonprofit receiving foreign funding must navigate — the questions were direct: How much did you spend on this programme? How many students did you impact? The answers existed somewhere across years of sheets. Getting to them, verifying them, and presenting them with certainty was a different matter entirely. What Bhumi was the ecosystem to make their existing data reliable, flexible, and ready for the questions that mattered.
The Solution – Adopting Dalgo
The constraint Bhumi brought to the search for a solution was non-negotiable: the people doing the work — fellows, trainers, coordinators — could not be asked to change how they collected data. Change management at that scale, with that many distributed users, was a problem harder than the data problem itself.
Dalgo resolved the tension. Field teams kept their Google Sheets. Dalgo sat between the tools people already used and the insights leadership needed — pulling data in automatically, cleaning and structuring it, and surfacing it through dashboards each stakeholder could actually use. The data was clean, combined and contextualised, automatically. Dalgo’s consulting team worked with Bhumi first to map where the data lived and what it needed to say — then built automated pipelines that brought everything into a single warehouse, structured against Bhumi’s actual reporting needs.
From Clean Data to Customizable Charts
Wonder what your data could look like when it’s ready for decisions? Dalgo comes with dashboards built for education programmes — every view you need, for every team. Create once, use continuously for reporting, funding, and daily decision-making.
The Transformation – Data That Is Ready For Decision Making
Sangeeta and Anusha at Dalgo’s 2 day event for Dalgo customers, September 2025
| One source of truth — Google Sheets, Zoho Creator, historical files, all pulled into one warehouse automatically. No more reconciling versions across teams. | Any question, any lens — Data sliceable by programme, grade, city, school, fellow. |
| Funder and compliance reporting — FCRA renewals, donor impact reports, board presentations, all drawn from a single auditable source, with confidence in the numbers. | A team that owns the work — A dedicated capacity-building engagement with Dalgo’s consulting team leaves Bhumi’s tech team self-sufficient, |
Data became ready for decisions. As dashboards update themselves, programme managers can drill down to specific schools, specific cities, see exactly where assessment completion is lagging, and take corrective action mid-cycle.
“We have a single source of truth. It’s easier to get the organization on board to ensure that the data is flowing into this single source of truth, which is also leading to a stronger culture of being data aware — of having that lens that you’re looking at your data and thinking, ‘I need to make this clean, I need to make this consistent, I need to do these things so that my data will eventually work for me.“
What It Means to Make Data Work for You
Bhumi’s story is a familiar one. Organisations across the sector are sitting on years of programme data they can’t fully use to make decisions — because the infrastructure to make that data reliable, flexible and decision-ready simply wasn’t there. Dalgo is built to close that gap.
If Bhumi’s story resonates with your organization’s challenges, let’s talk about what data clarity could look like for you. You can book time with our team using the Calendly link below. And if you’re interested in exploring more stories of how organizations are achieving data-led decision-making, subscribe to our newsletter for updates.
Partner Organization: Bhumi – driving social change by fostering an environment where young adults and children learn, lead, and thrive.
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