The Challenge
Prison Fellowship was using SmartSheet to manage complex operational data, including prisons, volunteers, classes, and inmates. While functional, the system was essentially a collection of flat spreadsheets with no imposed relationships between data points.
This created several problems:
Manual processes that slowed down administration.
No way to execute or validate relationships between entities (e.g., volunteers and the prisons they served).
Difficulty scaling operations and ensuring compliance with the different regulations of prison systems across the United States.
Prison Fellowship needed a custom backend system that would centralize data, enforce proper relational structures, and streamline workflows.
The Approach
Albright Labs worked closely with Prison Fellowship’s administrative team to map out their entire data model. By understanding how prisons, volunteers, classes, and inmates were interconnected, we were able to design a system that enforced data integrity while making day-to-day administration notably easier to manage.
Key components included:
Full management of prisons, volunteers, classes, and inmates.
Relationship restrictions to enforce data accuracy.
Custom workflows tailored to the nonprofit’s unique operating environment.
Import scripts to migrate data from flat SmartSheet tables into a properly structured relational database.
One of the hardest challenges was building import scripts that could automatically infer and create relationships from flat legacy data — a task that required careful planning and iterative testing.
Execution & Delivery
The project was delivered in two-week sprints over the course of development, with a full rollout at the end.
Key features delivered included:
Dashboards for at-a-glance operational visibility.
Role-based access controls to align with user permissions.
Notifications and alerts for important events and updates.
Integrations with relevant third-party systems.
Results & Impact
The new backend system gave Prison Fellowship a dramatic improvement in data management. Staff no longer had to manually cross-reference spreadsheets using keys or legends — the relationships were built directly into the system.
Administrators reported that the system was intuitive, reliable, and easy to use, allowing them to focus on supporting programs rather than managing spreadsheets.
Lessons Learned
This project pushed the limits of data migration and highlighted the importance of persistence. Writing scripts to infer relationships from flat data was exceptionally difficult, but the challenge reinforced Albright Labs’ commitment: to keep working where other agencies might have stopped.
The result was a solution that not only modernized Prison Fellowship’s operations but also proved Albright Labs’ ability to deliver under highly complex data conditions.
