dp.cx blog

I've been working for the last six months to build a long-term roadmap for the products at my nonprofit technology company in North Carolina, and one of the products I discovered during my research into data segmentation and analytics tools was Segment.com.

I was pretty sure when I found it that I had found something substantially valuable to nonprofits, but it took me a free trial and few months to really wrap my head around the value it brings to any startup or small business struggling with "app fatigue". In a world where most online companies have been convinced to buy into tools like Intercom, Google Analytics, Fullstory, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc, technologists are burning out trying to maintain integrations and make it possible to report on data from a hundred different sources. Segment.com helps with that (a lot).

With Segment.com, you can connect a database that you already own to a centralized integration hub in the cloud (Segment.com's platform), which then connects to all of your cloud apps and services. Segment.com's platform sucks in all of the data from each of these apps and services, normalizes it, and organizes it all neatly in your database (which we can call a "data warehouse" at this point.) All of this can be done with (almost) no coding and just an hour of your time.

What this means is that the data from a hundred or more different sources can now be made available in single database in consistent formats, which makes it possible for technologists (and less-technical data nerds) to dive in to the data (using SQL or business intelligence tools like Tableau) to gain a more holistic view of their customers/users/donors/constituents.

I could go on-and-on about the benefits and potential applications of Segment.com's autonomous, federated data warehouse (and I will if you reach out directly), but I'm ultimately just excited to see that someone is finally making possible what every CRM has attempted to do for the last ten years.