How SAP’s Social Sabbatical Project Team Helped Us Solve our Data Dilemma

Recently, the Learning Disabilities Society (LDS) had the honour of taking part in a project with SAP, a global leader in enterprise application software. Facilitated by PYXERA Global, the SAP Social Sabbatical Project is a pro bono program that aims to connect mission-driven organizations, like LDS, with a team of skilled SAP employees to help address their strategic challenges.  

When LDS initially applied to be a part of the project, our strategic challenge was clear—our data management practices were not scalable; in other words, our practices were holding us back rather than helping us grow.  

To give a bit of context, the number of students we serve doubled over the course of one month after the start of our new summer programming. In addition, we have expanded our relationships with funders, sponsors, and new collaborators. To help sustain this type of growth and meet our long-term goal of serving all students with learning differences, our data management practices needed to evolve.  

Before participating in the project, we referred to the management of our contacts as “The Excel Tornado” because much of our information was stored in a series of spreadsheets. Our hope was that the SAP Social Sabbatical Project Team could source a Client Relationship Management system (CRM) that would help our organization track and manage our relationships to help us affect systematic change in order to help our students succeed. 

Throughout the month of July, we worked with our amazing SAP Team—Hitomi, Joshua, and Jashan—to define our problem, brainstorm possible solutions, and research potential CRM candidates. We met daily to discuss our progress and work through any challenges we encountered. After extensive research and discussion with both the staff at LDS and the SAP Project Team, we decided on a new CRM system—Keela. 

Keela is a Canadian-based non-profit management software that works to support and empower organizations to affect positive change within society. Now that we have chosen Keela, the team at LDS is excited to get the software up and running so we can further our mission to empower all children and youth with learning disabilities to recognize their unique strengths and develop the tools to achieve life-long confidence and success.   

We would once again like to give a huge thank you to SAP, PYXERA Global, and our Project Team for supporting LDS throughout this journey. Hitomi, Joshua, and Jashan devoted countless hours to making our project a success—we cannot thank them enough!