Donor Management & Fundraising Platform for a National Nonprofit

+27%

online donation conversion

500k

donor records migrated, zero data loss

-55%

manual data entry for staff

5 mo

from kickoff to full delivery

The Client

A national nonprofit with chapters across the United States, funded primarily by individual giving — one-time gifts, monthly sustainers, workplace campaigns, and seasonal appeals. A small central operations team supported hundreds of staff and volunteers who fundraise year-round.

The Challenge

Donor data lived in an aging on-premise CRM that only a handful of staff knew how to operate. Chapters kept their own spreadsheets, gifts made at events were keyed in by hand days later, and duplicate donor records made accurate lifetime-giving reports nearly impossible. Development officers could not tell which lapsed donors were worth a call.

The online donation flow was worse: a multi-page form, no saved payment methods, and a checkout that visibly failed on phones — where the majority of appeal-email clicks now arrive. Analytics showed donors abandoning at every step. Leadership wanted a modern donor platform before the year-end giving season, on a nonprofit budget, with a partner who would commit to a fixed scope and price.

What We Did

Dillo delivered the platform as a fixed-bid outsourcing project: a Salesforce architect, two engineers, a data-migration specialist, and a QA engineer, with the client's development director as product owner.

Implemented and customized Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) as the single donor database — households, recurring gifts, soft credits, workplace-giving rollups, and chapter-level access controls.
Ran a staged data migration of 500,000 donor records from the legacy CRM and chapter spreadsheets, with automated deduplication, validation reports at every stage, and a full reconciliation before cutover — zero records lost.
Built a new donation portal in React and Node.js: single-page checkout, mobile-first, Apple Pay and Google Pay, monthly-giving upsells, and employer-matching prompts — writing gifts to Salesforce in real time.
Automated gift processing and receipting — acknowledgment emails, tax receipts, and recurring-gift retries — eliminating most of the operations team's manual keying.
Delivered campaign analytics in Tableau: appeal performance, donor retention cohorts, sustainer churn, and chapter league tables, refreshed daily from Salesforce.
Trained chapter staff and left behind runbooks and admin documentation so the nonprofit's two-person IT team can run the platform without a consultancy on retainer.

The Results

Online donation conversion rose 27% after the new portal launched, with the biggest gains on mobile.
500,000 donor records migrated and deduplicated with zero data loss, verified by full reconciliation.
Automation cut manual data entry by about 55%, freeing the operations team for donor stewardship during peak season.
The full platform was delivered in five months — live well before the year-end giving push.
Development officers now work from shared retention dashboards instead of chapter spreadsheets.

Figures reflect outcomes reported for this engagement; they are project results, not audited benchmarks.