Cancer Support Community is a nonprofit organisation that provides professional support services to people affected by cancer and their families, including counselling, education, and community programmes delivered through a network of affiliates and programme sites across the United States. The organisation's staff are committed to ensuring that no one faces cancer alone, and the HR team is responsible for supporting the wellbeing and effectiveness of the professionals who deliver that mission.
Before BambooHR, Cancer Support Community's HR administration was fragmented and time-consuming. Employee data was maintained across a combination of a legacy HRIS, spreadsheets, and physical files. Producing compliance documentation, completing I-9 audits, and responding to employee enquiries all required manual effort that drew time away from the strategic and supportive HR work the team most wanted to do.
The organisation's compliance obligations extended beyond standard employment law. As a nonprofit operating in the healthcare-adjacent space, Cancer Support Community was required to maintain rigorous records of staff qualifications, training completion, and background check results. Managing this documentation manually created risks that the organisation could not afford to accept.
BambooHR was implemented to consolidate all HR data into a single, searchable, access-controlled platform. Employee records were migrated from the legacy system and supplemented with the qualifications and compliance documentation that the previous system had not been structured to hold. Custom fields were created to capture the specific information requirements of the organisation's sector, and automated alerts were configured to flag upcoming training renewal deadlines before they were missed.
The improvement in compliance documentation was immediate and material. Audit responses that had previously required hours of manual file searching could now be completed in minutes. The organisation's ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance with confidence reduced the time and stress associated with periodic reviews and gave leadership greater assurance about the organisation's risk profile.
The HR team's capacity for proactive, supportive work increased as administrative tasks were automated. Staff wellbeing check-ins, development conversations, and programme support activities that had been crowded out by administrative demands could now be prioritised. For an organisation whose mission was built around support and wellbeing, this shift in the HR team's capacity was directly aligned with its values.
