Every advancement office has a version of the same list. The report that goes out every Monday. The lapsed donor pull that takes two hours each quarter. The gift acknowledgment that someone has to remember to send. The batch of constituent records that need updating after an event.
Nobody assigned these tasks because they were interesting. They exist because the work requires them, and until recently there was no way around doing them by hand.
That list is where I start.
What I actually do
I’ve spent fifteen years working inside Raiser’s Edge and Raiser’s Edge NXT, most of it in advancement operations at independent schools. That means building queries, cleaning data, running reports, and learning exactly which parts of the job are meaningful and which parts are just friction.
The friction is what I work on now.
When I sit down with a new client, the first conversation isn’t about technology. It’s about pain points: what takes longer than it should, what gets forgotten, what requires a specific person because nobody else knows how. Once we have that list, we ask a simple question: can a tool do this instead?
Often the answer is yes.
How the builds come together
Most of what I build connects Raiser’s Edge NXT to tools your office already uses (Google Sheets, Gmail, Outlook, Slack) through Microsoft Power Automate and direct API integrations. The automations range from simple (send a summary email when a gift posts) to complex (pull query results from Raiser’s Edge NXT, filter by fund and solicitor, format a report, and deliver it to the right person every Monday at 7am without anyone touching it).
I design these workflows from a deep familiarity with how advancement offices actually operate. I know the Raiser’s Edge NXT data model, I know which API endpoints are reliable, and I know where the edge cases hide. The technical implementation is built with the help of AI coding tools, which means solutions that would have taken weeks to develop a few years ago now come together in days.
The work is collaborative. You know your office. I know the tools. Together we figure out what to build and how to build it so it actually gets used.
What you get
The goal isn’t automation for its own sake. It’s time. Time your major gifts officer spends on donors instead of spreadsheets. Time your database manager gets back from running the same report every week for three years. Time your director of development has to think strategically instead of reactively.
The workflows I build run in the background. When they work well, you stop thinking about them, which is exactly the point.
What makes it stick
Building automation that holds up means understanding the work at the operational level before touching any tools. What triggers the task, who owns the output, what a correct result looks like when nobody’s checking. That kind of context comes from years of working inside advancement operations, not from reading documentation.
That’s why I don’t start with tools. I start with the list, and I work through it carefully before anything gets built.
Independent school advancement offices are a specific environment. Donor relationships are long, teams are small, and the margin for error is low. The automations I build are designed for that context.
What’s next
This blog is where I document the work. Each post walks through a specific automation: the problem it solved, how it was built, and the one thing that almost broke it. If you work in advancement operations and recognize any of the pain points above, you’re in the right place.
If you’re ready to talk about your specific situation, reach out. The first conversation is just a conversation.