Rise Against Hunger Reins in Data, Focuses Mission With Splunk

Celicourt is a Haitian sixth grader who dreams of becoming a doctor and plays on his school football team.

But he doesn’t have enough to eat. Rise Against Hunger partner Hands for Haiti delivers six meals a week to Celicourt, who says the organization’s aid helped his football team win the championship last year.

International humanitarian hunger relief organization Rise Against Hunger distributes food and other critical aid to vulnerable populations. In 2018, it delivered 76.9 million meals to 794,000 people in 31 countries. Since 2018, Splunk has partnered with Rise Against Hunger both to help package meals and to meet mission-critical data objectives. Because for Celicourt, and 821 million people facing hunger worldwide, Rise Against Hunger’s mission could not be more important.

Striving to End World Hunger

Feeding almost 800,000 people facing hunger in one year is an amazing accomplishment. But the organization has its sights set on completely stamping out hunger by 2030. To achieve this ambitious goal, Rise Against Hunger helps empower numerous communities in developing countries, largely through projects such as agricultural training and microfinance programs for women that help them become self-sustaining.

The organization provides meals to schools, hospitals and health clinics, and responds to sudden natural disasters and man-made crises by delivering food, clean water, water filters and hygiene kits. From residents of a leprosy center in Burkina Faso to undernourished working families in the Philippines, Rise Against Hunger is changing lives for the better all around the world.

Built on Partnerships

Of course, Rise Against Hunger can’t do all this alone. In addition to 430,000 global volunteers who help create and distribute meals, and in-kind donations of $33.6 million in 2018, the organization relies on corporate partners who commit volunteer hours to package and distribute meals, and contribute funding and other resources, including software donations.

Splunk is one such partner. Through Splunk’s corporate social impact program, Splunk Global Impact, Rise Against Hunger first organized a volunteer activity to package meals as part of an onboarding program for new employees. Rise Against Hunger’s mission inspired the volunteer Splunkers to bring our technology to bear on the organization’s challenges: What if we could Splunk the event and put radio-frequency identification tags on the meals to track them?

“You bring engineers to a hands-on volunteer activity and they literally start engineering the volunteer activity as they’re going,” says Aaron Chrisco,Splunk Global Impact’s social impact program manager.

The result: a much deeper partnership between the two organizations.

The Data Challenge

As with many organizations, Rise Against Hunger tackles several technology challenges, not the least of which center around data privacy, security and compliance. And as Rise Against Hunger onboards more volunteers, attracts more donors and serves more communities, these data challenges will only intensify. To list only a few, Rise Against Hunger needs:

• An effective electronic registration system for volunteer information
• To rationalize and prioritize disparate systems in its IT environment
• To further enhance data privacy and regulation compliance

In Splunk, Rise Against Hunger found a partner that has a flexible platform that would enable the organization to embrace the power of data-driven insights. And perhaps even more importantly, this data will enable Rise Against Hunger to identify those beneficiaries who are in the greatest need of life-saving meals.

“The interactive value of Splunking the data is a fantastic addition to the organization,” says Sheryl Gustafson, Rise Against Hunger’s director of technology solutions and services. “The ability to see insights like that from technology can really energize the organization.”

Driving the Mission Forward

A partnership between Rise Against Hunger and Splunk made a lot of sense. The Splunk Pledge commits company resources — software licenses, training, support and education — to nonprofits taking on extreme poverty, disasters and other humanitarian crises around the world. And Splunk Enterprise easily addressed Rise Against Hunger’s data challenges.

Gustafson wanted to use the Splunk platform to bring all the data from disparate systems into one place, to better report on regulatory compliance and find critical insights. And in the immediate future, Rise Against Hunger is looking to use the Splunk platform to help get all parts of the electronic registration system in place, “so that we get visibility into all the right data,” Gustafson says.

Another use she sees for Splunk is to track the millions of packaged meals on a global scale. In addition to simply tracking, the Splunk platform could create an entire use case around the beneficiaries — why that meal came to them — and reverse engineer its trajectory to see how and where that meal was packaged and transferred from a corporate volunteer to a beneficiary.

“Splunk is helping us work toward a full roadmap to gain visibility across the entire supply chain,” Gustafson says. “The technology and partnership will help to drive the organization forward."