Force for Good

JP Morgan has a CSR initiative called Force for Good. Every year, 1,000 technologists sign up to partner with 100 NGOs around the world for 8 months, where they develop a technical solution.

In my first year at JPMC, I signed up for this initiative. In a team of 6 (which later dwindled to 4) we supported Sathya Sai Social Services (4S), Singapore. 4S provides pastoral care to folks in Singapore who need help with daily tasks e.g. grocery shopping, medicine collection, trips to the hospital, etc.

Problem

• 4s was collecting volunteer registrations over an Excel form.
• Data was immense; they were matching volunteers to tasks manually.
• This lead to overwork by administrators; these tasks could definitely be performed manually.

Ideation and Process

• We first gathered their problem statements; this data could obviously be migrated to a CRM, and the 4s admins agreed.
• We evaluated different CRMs and storage solutions - e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot
• Salesforce emerged as the clear winner; moreover, we were able to apply for a license to get free hosting for our NGO!
• We iterated our solutions on Salesforce for several months
  • Used Agile to develop MVP, took feedback and changed models
  • I was in charge of creating the data fields, volunteer form, testing, and migrating it to production

Solution

• At the end of 8 months, we were able to deliver a fully-functional solution to 4S.
• We migrated all of their data to Salesforce.
• We created a comprehensive guide for them to use this system.
• This saved them over 1600 hours of manual labour in a month!

Wins

• FFG Singapore received annual APAC CEO Awards in JPMorgan (a $15,000 cash prize!) which we donated back to our NGOs.