Introducing Childline Thailand
A quick trip to Childline Thailand’s (CT) website reveals their value statement in bold above the fold: “Every child has a right to feel safe.” It’s hard to think of a more worthy cause than supporting kids in need. CT have been on the other end of the line supporting Thai kids tens of thousands of times since their genesis. They provide a 24/7 contact service (voice and online), a physical safe-space hub, and are active in campaigning for children’s rights. Childline Thailand is the Thai arm of the global Child Helpline International group.
Data Need
A quick trip to Childline Thailand’s (CT) website reveals their value statement in bold above the fold: “Every child has a right to feel safe.” It’s hard to think of a more worthy cause than supporting kids in need. CT have been on the other end of the line supporting Thai kids tens of thousands of times since their genesis. They provide a 24/7 contact service (voice and online), a physical safe-space hub, and are active in campaigning for children’s rights. Childline Thailand is the Thai arm of the global Child Helpline International group.
Our Process
As always, our first step is to host workshops with the client to elicit what’s important. Beyond the primary purpose of easy data visualisation, we determined this solution would need to be ultra-low-cost and secure. It was also desirable for the solution to be low-maintenance wherever possible.
With the requirements in hand, we were on our way to designing a solution. We leveraged CT’s existing cloud estate in Google, making use of GCP’s generous free-tier offerings in our design. Once we had a fair idea of what the solution would look like, we needed to source the data.
We spoke often with a group called Tech Matters, who operate the Aselo CRM on CT’s behalf. Tech Matters were instrumental in helping us to securely land sensitive data from the CRM system in another cloud environment to our warehousing environment.
We then built data pipelines, the warehouse itself, and a dashboard to embed on CT’s website. All the while playing back our progress to our key CT SME, and to Infoxchange, the sponsor of the project who connected us to Childline Thailand.
Logistically, this was truly a global project for us. Our Infoxchange representative and GDI volunteer team were spread across three time zones (Aus, UK, US), the client was in a fourth (Thailand), and the representatives from Tech Matters were in a fifth (Europe).
The Solution
Here’s what we built for CT: An end-to-end BI solution in Google cloud, pictured below.
In words, data is piped into a landing zone from the Aselo CRM, which has files stored in Amazon’s S3. On successful copy, a Cloud Function is triggered courtesy of a message from Pub/Sub and a trigger in Eventarc. The function transforms the landed data to a format consumable by BigQuery, and also translates some data from Thai to English. BigQuery is used to virtually structure relational tables to reduce the copying of data, and allow for querying in SQL. We brought in some of CT’s historic statistical data via Google Sheets. All of the data is then visualised in a dashboard in Looker Studio. Childline Thailand then embeds this Looker dashboard in their website.
The data pipeline runs monthly and automatically, and data is secured both in transit and at rest.
You can see the dashboard hosted on the Childline Thailand website at: https://www.childlinethailand.org/statistics/
The Outcome
Childline Thailand now has a powerful and accessible way to communicate their impact to the community. This solution enables deeper data analysis than ever before, all presented through an intuitive tool. Impressively, the entire system operates at less than 5 Thai Baht a month—about 15 US cents!
We've now handed the reins over to Childline Thailand, allowing them to explore and build upon their new capabilities. As always, we'll remain available for a while to answer questions and resolve any issues that arise.
The broader Child Helpline International network expressed interest in this project, so we'll continue to collaborate with them to explore how this solution can be adapted to support others helping children worldwide.
By Dave Cole (GDI Fellow)
About GDI:
The Good Data Institute (established 2019) is a registered not-for-profit organisation (ABN: 6664087941) that aims to give not-for-profits access to data analytics (D&A) support & tools. Our mission is to be the bridge between the not-for-profit world and the world of data analytics practitioners wishing to do social good. Using D&A, we identify, share, and help implement the most effective means for growing NFP people, organisations, and their impact.
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