Strategy, systems & operations
Your team's best hours shouldn't go to busywork.
I build the systems and automations that quietly hand those hours back — usually inside the tools you already have. Senior strategy, systems, and hands-on build for nonprofits and mission-driven teams, done by someone who has actually run the operation.
How I can help
Automation audit
I map how your team actually works and find the eight-hour, manual, soul-deadening processes hiding in plain sight. You leave with a clear, prioritized plan — and a sense of what's possible.
Build & automate
Custom Salesforce solutions — Flows, Apex, automations — plus integrated tools that reach beyond the platform when a project calls for it. The manual becomes one click. The error-prone becomes reliable.
A senior partner
For teams without a full-time systems person: steady admin, data governance, and continuous improvement. A reliable, senior set of hands on call — without the cost of a full-time hire.
Recent work
From eight hours to one click.
A fundraising team was spending most of a workday each cycle manually formatting donor profiles — copying data, placing photos, fixing layouts — into a polished document. I built a tool that pulls clean records and headshots straight from Salesforce and generates the finished, designed document on demand. Self-serve, always current, and hours of skilled time returned to the mission.
Financial assistance, made auditable.
A program issuing direct financial assistance through gift cards was tracking it by hand — slow, error-prone, and a real compliance risk given the sensitive data involved. I built a native Salesforce solution that automates issuance and delivery with a complete audit trail, designed around PII and fraud concerns from the very first line. Faster for staff, cleaner records, lower risk.
Before Ryan built the lookbook, my team spent the better part of a workday before every major meeting hunting down donor data and trying to make it presentable. She turned that into a single click, and the version it produced was better than what we'd been doing by hand. What I appreciated most, however, was that Ryan asked the right questions before building. She really understood what we actually needed. I really appreciate that kind of thinking!
Why work with me
I've done the job
Not just consulted on it. From running education programs and museum operations to leading data and technology at a national nonprofit, I've worked the operator side of this sector for years. I scope from lived experience — and I know which problems are actually worth solving.
Built to be safe
When you handle donor records, beneficiary data, or financial assistance, a careless build is a liability. Compliance and data protection aren't an afterthought in my work — they're the starting point.
Beyond the platform
Native Salesforce when that's right, custom-built applications when it isn't. Most consultants can't code beyond the platform; most developers don't know Salesforce. I work fluently across both.
About
I came to data the long way — through museums, classrooms, and the operations of mission-driven organizations that needed to run better.
For more than a decade I've built the data and Salesforce systems that nonprofits and mission-driven teams quietly run on — currently as a director of data and technology at a national nonprofit, where I built the data function from the ground up. Before that, I spent years on the operations side of the sector: managing programs for an environmental education nonprofit, directing an education center and coordinating public programs at a major national museum, and serving in volunteer leadership for a local historical society. I once planned to be a museum director. The work I do now is, in many ways, the same work — making mission-driven organizations run better — just with different tools.
That long route shapes how I work. I know how nonprofit budgets, boards, volunteers, programs, and field staff actually behave — not in theory. I scope from lived experience, and I build things that fit the way these organizations really operate.
Selected experience
- Director, data & technology·National nonprofit
- Education center director & public program coordinator·Major national museum
- Program manager·Environmental education nonprofit
- Co-director, volunteer leadership·Local historical society
- Public history training·American Association for State & Local History (StEPs program)
Tell me what's eating your team's time.
If there's a manual process you dread, a messy org you've been meaning to fix, or a report that takes hours it shouldn't — that's exactly my kind of problem. Let's talk.