Sattva Consulting Drives Impact with the Data Cloud

Actionable data is critical to the work of Sattva Consulting, an India-based impact consulting firm that partners with governments, companies and NGOs around the world to create societal change at scale. In 2019, it launched the India Data Insights Platform to help produce insights from vast Indian government data sets, which enables clients to make data-led decisions, and measure impact and progress across a range of socioeconomic indicators.

Sattva uses data to support its clients in program implementation, strategy planning, policy-making and capacity-building. But data hasn’t always driven these things in the social impact sector. Veda Kulkarni, Sattva’s associate principal lead of India data insights and data platform, explains, “The social sector has predominantly made decisions based on empathy. Now, what we are doing is using data to back all kinds of decisions that lead to a big impact.”

As the sector has moved toward data-based prioritization, organizations like Sattva can give clients the opportunity to understand and act on social issues at a granular level. But as it lacked data management expertise, Sattva still needed support to streamline its data, making it easily accessible — and understandable — for its teams.

Initially, Sattva maintained its data within spreadsheets, but as the number of data sets rapidly increased, that became unsustainable. Sattva was unable to share data widely across the organization to process it and glean additional insights. It needed to not only give access to different users, but also allow them to write their own queries.

With no in-house tech engineering team, Sattva knew it was crucial to choose a user-friendly, cloud-based solution. They wanted to make their data much more scalable and universally usable within the organization, without dependencies on just a few people. This led them to switch to the managed services of Snowflake. 

Snowflake was chosen for its ability to host multiple types of databases, its data security credentials and the option to run its platform on a pay-per-use basis. Crucially, Snowflake also integrated well with the business intelligence and cataloging tools that Sattva was already using, including Tableau and Power BI. 

Cloud consultancy partner BluePi helped Sattva set up the platform, creating a database structure for the entire organization, defining the right data structure and establishing access controls.

“The challenges on the project were a little different,” says Anjna Bhati, director of data analytics and AI at BluePi. “The data sources for the same data were varied, and everyone had their own formats. Bringing that together and making it consistent was the main challenge. Building consistent views of the KPIs and enabling business with those formats and [the] process of loading was one of the key aspects of the implementation.”

By implementing Snowflake’s Data Cloud, Sattva has enabled a solution that will be a single source of truth for different types of data held in one place. The solution has been designed to connect Snowflake to other internal systems, so all the data flows into Snowflake. Based on access privileges, users of Sattva’s data platforms can explore its data sets, download a data query and use the resulting insights for curated output. 

Centralizing all of Sattva’s cleaned and structured data has allowed employees to shift their focus from data collection and transformation to more analytical tasks and the generation of valuable insights. The extract, transform, load (ETL) process has been refined and is now primarily managed by the data specialist team at Sattva.

“The searchability of data has been greatly enhanced, making it easier for users to find the specific data they need,” says Kulkarni. “This consolidated and streamlined approach has improved efficiency across our operations.”

Sattva’s team of impact experts include researchers, entrepreneurs, healthcare advisors and investment specialists. Now, thanks to the implementation of Snowflake, they are also data wizards; everyone is able to access and analyze data and contribute to a central repository. Synthesizing that data will help Sattva’s clients create more informed policies and investments.

“It’s kind of like crowdsourcing data within the organization,” says Kulkarni. “That is what we want, so that others also start contributing various data sets, and it all sits in one place, so the larger community can benefit. It has connected all the teams.”

Widespread adoption of Snowflake’s tools was a key metric during the initial implementation. “Snowflake has become our central and reliable source for data,” Kulkarni says. “Our users can now effortlessly download clean, structured data without the hassle of having to process it themselves. Snowflake ensures data security by providing access permissions based on roles, and it has substantially simplified the task of querying and joining tables.”

Introducing Snowflake has made it much easier for Sattva to pitch for new business. Previously, giving project estimates was difficult due to a lack of awareness of the available data and needing to collect it from different sources. But now, with all the data in one place, Sattva’s teams have confidence in better estimating and planning projects.

The data specialist team takes advantage of Snowflake's feature to construct complex queries that join multiple tables for data analysis. This capability has helped Snowflake prominently display its data capabilities in project tenders.

“The implementation of the Sattva Data Platform has brought about a shift in both our employees’ and clients’ perspectives toward data-driven decision-making,” says Kulkarni. “This transformation has allowed us to effectively demonstrate our work and capabilities. It has also opened up possibilities for us to juxtapose public data with primary data captured in our system, thereby broadening our analytical scope.”

As Sattva continues to grow, it is looking to broaden the scope of implementation from secondary data to include primary, business and system data. The business also wants to integrate its enterprise resource planning with the platform. 

At the same time, Kulkarni is considering how Sattva can bring in additional layers on top of Snowflake to help with data cataloging. She is looking at how the company can expedite discovery and analysis even for non-data and non-tech users.

“The majority of our organization belongs to that data group, so whatever solutions we build on top will be catering to that community. We envision creating data products designed to boost efficiency and equip our users with the tools necessary for making effective, data-driven decisions.”