We’re thrilled to celebrate our nonprofit customers who continue to provide critical services through their agility and dedication. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
At Workday, we’re inspired by our customers’ ingenuity and commitment—and we delight in celebrating their success. That’s why we take time at Workday Rising, our flagship customer event, to celebrate our customers’ work to tackle pressing business challenges and create a better future.
Our customers in the nonprofit community must be especially cognizant of maximizing their time and money to better serve their communities and causes. And while they are accustomed to doing more with less, nonprofit leaders have increasingly worked to bring greater efficiency to their operations and drive digital transformation to better deliver on their mission. That’s why we were especially proud to present our annual Nonprofit Innovation Awards at Workday Rising in Las Vegas. Read on to learn more about our winners’ journeys.
Catalight knows a thing or two about overcoming obstacles. Since 2012, Catalight has been breaking down barriers and biases to create a more equitable world so people with developmental disabilities can choose their path. Catalight’s family of companies is one of the largest behavioral health networks in the nation, with more than 14,000 practitioners serving 20,000 clients and families every day. Backed by more than a decade of experience and a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, Catalight is reimagining the way people with developmental disabilities and their families experience healthcare. Catalight’s goal is to ensure that individuals and families receive timely access to evidence-based treatment, including naturalistic developmental and language-based services, applied behavior analysis, occupational therapy, and speech therapy.
And just as the organization breaks down barriers for its clients, the Catalight leadership team also recognizes the need to unite its technology silos to enable continued growth and impact. Its existing technology was doing the opposite, as teams were struggling to juggle more than a dozen disparate systems, resulting in a fragmented view of its finance and workforce and a productivity black hole for staff members.
Through a multiyear partnership with Workday, Catalight has eliminated manual processes and implemented a strategic approach that has increased efficiency, automation, and integration capabilities, allowing the human resources team to shift its focus from operational tasks to strategic work—increasing the time dedicated to strategic initiatives from 10% to 25%.
Within the first year of Workday deployment, Catalight:
Integrated several new employee benefit vendors without increasing administrative support
Decreased time to implement organizational changes by 50%, from 4 weeks to 2 weeks
Reduced the average time required to create and approve a job requisition by 9 days
Significantly cut down the time it required to complete mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures from 6 months to 2 months
In addition, the Catalight team improved processes related to compensation and benefits enrollment while improving its data security with Workday’s single security model. After adding Workday Learning in 2024, the organization is looking ahead to future implementations to further increase its agility.
“Workday has provided a technological foundation that is scalable for growth and allows us to continue to innovate,” says Charlotte Turecek, Catalight’s vice president of operations. “This allows us to focus on creating a more equitable world so people with developmental disabilities can choose their path.”
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, commonly referred to as The Met, is the largest and most visited museum in the United States, boasting a collection of 2 million works spanning 5,000 years of human history.
As a member of the Workday family since 2013, The Met has already unified its finance and HR systems and modernized its business processes across the museum. More recently, it worked to increase its use of Workday Time and Absence Management among hourly employees, taking a phased approach to increase self-service, drive efficiency, and ensure compliance with union regulations.
The Met’s Workday technology team first zeroed in on the museum’s 600 security officers, who were reluctant to move from their longstanding manual processes for calling in sick and requesting vacation time. The employees and their managers worried that a new digital system might fail or be too complex. Moreover, a self-service solution had to be able to meet the security guards’ complex absence thresholds based on shift, location, position, and periods of high museum attendance or special events.
Still, the process desperately needed a transformation. Daily security staffing was managed on a whiteboard with a paper calendar for vacation requests. Approved time-off requests had to be manually entered into Workday, a tedious process that made it tougher to ensure correct staffing levels and time-off balances.
The self-service transition was so successful that The Met hopes to expand it to 260 additional employees in the same union, with plans to soon include as many as 500 additional hourly workers.
And so The Met worked to roll out self-service requests for the security officers’ sick and personal business leave, followed by requests for annual leave. The modernization has already achieved resounding success, with 100% of annual leave requests and 30% of sick “call outs” in 2024 managed fully in Workday. Officers can now let their managers know they will be out sick via the Workday app, allowing managers to create daily post assignments much sooner. Additionally, annual vacation time bids were completed 5 months earlier than compared to the previous process.
“That means that each officer knew five months sooner when their vacation would be for the next year, leading not only to a sigh of relief but also cost savings in travel expenses, better options for their time, and less exasperation from their vacation buddies,” notes Sharon Sargent, The Met’s manager of Workday technology. “For the timekeepers, this was also five months less of their time—time they can use toward keeping the museum safe and well managed.”
The self-service transition was so successful that The Met hopes to expand it to 260 additional employees in the same union, with plans to soon include as many as 500 additional hourly workers.
The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a world-renowned research institution that has pioneered biomedical discoveries for more than 40 years—but until recently, its administrative system “did not meet the level of excellence that our scientists regularly achieve,” says Patrick Klupa, the institute’s manager of business information systems.
The old system, which needed laborious updates that took up to two years to complete, complicated even simple day-to-day processes. Learning how to order supplies, for example, required hours of training
After looking for a flexible solution that was easy to use and maintain, the Whitehead team worked with Huron Consulting Group to implement Workday for all of its core administrative functions. The institute implemented Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Financial Management, Workday Payroll, Workday Procurement, and Workday Grants Management at the same time.
Since adopting Workday and creating a single source of truth for its finance and HR functions, the organization doesn’t have to worry about hardware, backups, or upgrades.
The old system, which needed laborious updates that took up to two years to complete, complicated even simple day-to-day processes. Learning how to order supplies, for example, required hours of training.
Whitehead’s procure-to-pay process is mostly electronic now. Routine orders are immediately sent to suppliers without needing intervention from procurement. Invoices are matched automatically. “The jobs of our procurement buyers and accounts payable clerks have gone from keying paper forms to just focusing on the out-of-the-ordinary orders,” says Klupa.
The Whitehead Institute also has realized major efficiency improvements, such as being able to immediately grant new hires permission to order supplies and to enroll in benefits. Another plus? “Our auditors love Workday!” says Klupa, because every transaction now has a detailed audit trail.
Overall, Whitehead’s Workday transition has already proven well worth the effort. “Although the change was significant, so were the benefits,” Klupa notes. “The system is state of the art, and always will be.”
As a global humanitarian organization that works to improve the lives of children, families, and communities around the world, World Vision International employs 34,000 team members across more than 100 countries. The complexity of managing legacy systems and disparate data across multiple regions wasn’t sustainable, so the organization decided to work with Enterprise MarketDesk to adopt Workday in a phased implementation that began with HR processes before moving on to advanced analytics and reporting capabilities.
Today, the organization has achieved an 85% Workday adoption rate among its staff, marking a major milestone in its journey toward a more cohesive and agile structure. This journey has also significantly improved employees’ work experience in many ways, from the creation of a comprehensive employee directory that fosters better collaboration to the introduction of real-time metrics and analytics that facilitate more transparency and improved decision-making.
Workday has also improved World Vision’s accuracy and timeliness in time tracking, leading to better resource allocation and project management. These advancements have optimized the organization’s operations and reinforced its commitment to accountability and efficiency—which ultimately enhances its ability to fulfill its mission.
Beyond transforming World Vision International’s operations, Workday has also significantly impacted the organization’s strategy and culture. “By leveraging Workday, we have reversed the traditional model of operations leading strategy and now let strategy drive our operations,” explains Victoria Wang, World Vision International’s senior director of people and culture operations. “This approach ensures that every operational decision aligns with our long-term strategic goals, creating a more cohesive and purpose-driven organization.”
Furthermore, this Workday transformation allowed World Vision International to prioritize its strong organizational culture, which also contributes to its strategic direction.
“This culture-first approach fosters a more engaged and motivated workforce, enhancing overall productivity and innovation,” Wang says.
A report from Huron and Workday explores how nonprofit research institutions can digitally transform to reimagine their future.
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