A Technology and Operational Transformation
A growing DAF sponsor was running its program across a patchwork: one system for fund accounting, spreadsheets for grants, a shared inbox for donor service and document folders standing in for a records system. Every process worked; nothing worked together.
The challenge
Fragmentation carried a compounding cost. The same donor data lived in four places, month-end reconciliation consumed a week, and answering a simple donor question meant checking three systems. Growth was making each of these problems worse, and audit preparation had become genuinely painful.
The approach
- Consolidation onto one platform. Funds, donations, grants, documents and donor records unified on DSI’s infrastructure as a single source of truth.
- Workflow automation. Receipting, notifications, scheduled granting and status tracking automated end to end, with human review at defined control points.
- Structured migration. Historical funds, transactions and documents migrated in reviewed, reconciled phases, with parallel running before cutover.
- Operational reporting. Dashboards for volumes, turnaround times and exceptions, giving leadership its first real-time view of the operation.
The outcome
Reconciliation now takes hours instead of days, donor questions are answered from one screen, and audit requests are satisfied with exports rather than archaeology. Most importantly, the program’s operations now scale with its ambitions instead of constraining them.
Every process worked. Nothing worked together — until the infrastructure became one system.
This case study is a representative composite of DSI engagements, anonymized to respect partner confidentiality.