Alistar is deeply rooted in society, and our employees are happy to contribute to this. They are given the opportunity to apply their expertise to organizations that serve a social purpose. These are smaller organizations that would benefit from better insights but lack the resources to pay for them. We’re happy to help these types of organizations with the same high quality—but at no cost.
STIL-Utrecht
The staff at STIL-Utrecht work every day to support undocumented immigrants. STIL’s mission is to safeguard the freedom of choice and rights of people without a residence permit. Their primary task is to provide individualized support in the medical, social, and legal spheres.
In recent years, STIL-Utrecht has doubled in size, and its accountability to its largest grant provider and donors has grown significantly. To address this, a digitization initiative was launched, utilizing Exact Online to streamline administrative processes.
Information from this accounting software is valuable to various employees—whether to check if payments have been made or received, to assess budget flexibility, or to prepare a new budget. That’s why we’ve developed a Power BI dashboard that brings all this information together in a clear, organized way. Because everyone has access to this information, employees can often find answers to many questions on their own. This saves a lot of time. In addition, data spanning multiple years is available, making trends clearer more quickly.
Wakibi
The nonprofit organization Wakibi works to combat poverty and promote sustainable self-reliance by providing loans to entrepreneurs in more than seventy developing countries. A single microloan has a tremendous impact on an average of five people in the borrower’s immediate circle, such as family members and any employees.
What percentage of loans goes to women, how much is repaid, and how quickly do people take out another microloan with the money they’ve repaid? These are all figures from Wakibi that can now be retrieved with a single click. We equipped Wakibi with business intelligence software to enable it to operate even more effectively. The data tool we used to make the most of this data is Power BI.
Let’s start with the question: What do you want to know? Then we’ll look for the data. Fortunately, a lot of it is digital these days—even at Wakibi—but it’s still like opening up cabinets and finding a big box of accounting records on one shelf and a small folder of addresses on another, and so on. We combine all that into a clear dashboard. The first version is always rough; then we work together to refine it. It’s always a challenging process, but it yields great results.
For interim director Amarens Schuurmans, the first rough draft of the dashboard was a real eye-opener. “I immediately saw that we could use the tool to create great reports—not just for ourselves, but also for our business partners. These reports are also very useful for communication.”
