Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition (GSCN)
An integrated solution helping make fresh fruits and vegetables more available
About GSCN
GSCN is a Nebraska-based independent non-profit research institution that focuses on providing expertise and resources to nutrition-related programs. In 2019, through a competitive grant opportunity, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded GSCN a $31 million cooperative agreement over four years to lead the GusNIP NTAE Center. GSCN leads the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program Training, Technical Assistance, Evaluation, and Information Center (GusNIP NTAE Center) was established as a program to support financial incentives (e.g., nutrition incentive and produce prescription programs) among low-income groups designed to make fruits and vegetables more available and affordable. Individual grants are awarded to non-profit organizations that then bring in and manage firms or sites that carry out the grant’s objective. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the 2018 Farm Bill.
GSCN partnered with Fair Food Network and assembled a coalition of partners with a wide range of expertise, known as the Nutrition Incentive Hub, that supports GusNIP grantees in the implementation, reporting, and evaluation of financial incentives (e.g., nutrition incentive and produce prescription programs). Together, GSCN and Fair Food Network are:
- Dedicated to supporting program applicants and grantees
- Strengthening and uniting the best thinking in the field
- Increasing access to and affordability of fruits and vegetables
- Improving the health outcomes of participating households
The GusNIP NTAE Center is funded through a cooperative agreement and is supported by Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program grant no. 2019-70030-30415/project accession no. 1020863 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
The challenge
GSCN had been using a collection of disconnected tools to manage information and content about their program and members. This led to challenges with data management, consistency, reporting, security, and information availability for users.
GSCN desired an integrated solution that allowed users to access resources on a public-facing website, and also an authenticated portal for their partners and grantees to track grant details, manage data access, and track metrics for their programs.
Some key features of the solution include:
- Bulk import/export of monthly or annual metrics data
- Firm and Grantee Reporting Status
- Reporting dashboard
- Event Scheduling
- Discussion Groups
- In-app and email notifications
- Searchable Resource Library
- Interactive Grantee Map
It was also very important for the success of the project that the GSCN team was comfortable with the administration of the new platform, making sure they knew how to take full advantage of the flexibility of Umbraco. RBA wanted GSCN to feel truly empowered to manage the content on their website themselves.
Envisioning a new Umbraco Solution 🚀
RBA first engaged in an envisioning phase to better understand the current state of systems and processes at GSCN. This helped to shed light on potential integration points and to establish a vision for the solution.
A big part of RBA’s initial envision phase was to understand how the process of implementing a grant works in their system - who would need access, and what type of access was required. GSCN utilizes a range of complicated and nuanced data collection methods (i.e., using a manual spreadsheet to record and track their data,) and RBA needed to determine how to represent it within the website.
After getting to know their client’s needs, RBA decided that the best solution for consolidating the website and the portal would be a content management system (CMS) that would provide out of the box functionality for managing content while also allowing customization to support the complex reporting requirements and hierarchy of partners and grantees conducting the nutrition programs.
When choosing the CMS, RBA took into account that GSCN is a non-profit organization and the GusNIP NTAE was a part of a four-year cooperative agreement/grant. With no start-up and license fees, and predictable costs on top of great flexibility and ease of use, Umbraco was simply a great match. In addition to the core functionality provided in the CMS, RBA researched the Umbraco community and chose to use Uintra, a news, event scheduling, and discussion group framework designed to work with Umbraco.
On the public-facing part of the website, the team focused on design and content organization so users can easily find the information they are looking for. This includes a searchable resource library as well as an interactive map of the United States, which displays the national distribution of grantees and provides detailed information on the grants.
For the authenticated portal, GSCN needed to be able to create profiles for grantees, assign respective grants and firms to those grantees, and track all the data required for reporting to the federal government, such as the dollar amount of incentives distributed and redeemed, and other nutrition program characteristics.
RBA customized the Umbraco solution to capture all the grantee and program data in SQL Server in Azure. RBA then developed a Microsoft Power BI solution to do more sophisticated reporting for the GSCN internal team. RBA also leveraged Azure Search as part of the solution to all users to search and filter through the many nutrition resources that GSCN has collected and published.
Embracing change with impressive results 🙌
With any big technology change, there is also an impact on how an organization works - and the Nutrition Incentive Hub network, transitioning from various platforms, spreadsheets, and systems, was no exception.
“One of the elements we wanted to bring to the solution was to help the client embrace the changes. We incorporated organizational change management (OCM) to bridge the gap between developing the solution and communicating it to the network.”
Rachelle Epley, Director, Digital Experience and Commerce at RBA
In addition to including elements of organizational change management to the solution, getting early feedback from key players helped RBA create a positive experience. As part of the continuous improvement efforts for the solution, RBA implemented Hotjar Incoming Feedback to receive real-time feedback from users, address issues, and fine-tune the experience.
Today, the Nutrition Incentive Hub website boasts a 99.98% availability, and is home to:
- almost 200 grants spanning 47 states.
- 134 grantees, managing nearly 5,000 firms
- 2.74 million monthly metrics captured
- almost 450,000 annual metrics captured
- nearly 200,000 page requests per week
“The redesigned, public-facing website and secure portal lay an important technical foundation to increase collaboration and interaction across nutrition incentive and produce prescription stakeholders. By leveraging integrated platforms and automated processes, the website and secure portal has not only improved efficiency for reporting, evaluation, and technical assistance and innovation but also brought GusNIP grantees together through discussion groups and webinars while grantees and their participating firms now have streamlined access to data collection, reporting, and dashboards for enhanced visualization of their own projects.”
Moving from manually tabulated spreadsheets to validated, consistent data capture meant increased credibility for the organization. Before the change, the grantees and the firms could not be sure current or accurate the information was. Today, they have a single source of truth for the real-time data which live on the website, and leveraging the Power BI solution has decreased the time spent data checking by the data analytics team by at least 50%. Processing data analysis requests was also reduced from 45-55 hours to just over 10 hours. However, the biggest impact the portal has made to the Data Analytics team is regarding scale. The time required for data analysis was a linear progression in the original system, based on the number of grantees who were reporting data. Using the portal, the amount of time required for data analysis is independent of the number of grantees. This means that GSCN has been able to nearly double the number of grantees from whom they collect data, without having to add additional analysts.
Internal users have embraced the new interactive, consolidated website and have leveraged key features such as metrics import/export, Power BI solution, discussion groups, and events scheduling. When RBA trained them in the new CMS, there was hardly any learning curve for content editors who immediately grasped the easy-to-use Umbraco backoffice 💪