Meet Unbound

In 1981, two young missionaries traveling in Latin America came up with an audacious dream: launching a nonprofit that would transform the way families in need get sponsored. Unbound is an international nonprofit that strives to help the marginalized and vulnerable. With a presence in 19 countries, the organization manages sponsorings for more than 300,000 children and works with families living in poverty, empowering them to become self-sufficient and fulfill their desired potential.

The challenge

As Unbound grew and thrived, a challenge arose: managing internal documentation across 19 countries for thousands of sponsors, children, and staff without multiplying admin costs. The team ultimately chose Atlassian’s Confluence to host the documentation.

For Tim Brigham, IT and Systems Engineer at Unbound, synchronizing data was a priority to keep track of the organization’s various architectures. Updating a list in one place but not another meant the information got out of sync. This required a tremendous amount of time and effort to rectify. It was clear the team needed additional functionality beyond what Confluence offered out of the box.

Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence by Appfire has exceeded my expectations. The templates save time and energy, and combining them with Reporting for Confluence by Appfire makes our lives easier to complete our mission. It’s awesome.
Tim Brigham, IT and Systems Engineer, Unbound

The solution

To address this challenge for Unbound, Tim turned to Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence by Appfire and Reporting for Confluence by Appfire, in part because their seamless integration with one another allowed for custom solutions. He immediately saw workflow improvements and, after building the optimal structure for a given page, he could instantly duplicate that template for a number of applications.

With Reporting for Confluence, Tim could extract important data from multiple places without losing track of the original sources. In fact, as the nonprofit grew, both add-ons became widely adopted by other teams.

Unbound now relies on dozens of live templates to store and manage large lists of IP addresses, make live updates to architecture information, and keep track of software mappings in use across the entire organization. “Different teams can create reports using tags from multiple spaces,” Tim says. “The fact that it’s cross-categorical means everyone can be independent and automate their work without having to do it by hand.”

Keeping data in sync helps Unbound be more efficient and precise, enabling them to focus on reaching their goals. Centralizing internal documents has also benefited other departments. The help desk, for instance, can be more confident in their knowledge base when they pull information from Jira.

Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence and Reporting for Confluence have helped Unbound leverage the full power of Confluence and grow as an organization: as every department saves time and effort on manual admin, their focus can remain on reaching more families in need worldwide.

We have only one place to enter data. And we can always see where it came from. Using Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence and Reporting for Confluence reduces the number of errors due to manual data entry, which is a big time saver in the long run.
Tim Brigham, IT and Systems Engineer, Unbound

How nonprofit Unbound centralizes internal documentation and eliminates out-of-sync data with Scaffolding & Reporting

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