Strategic Tech For Meaningful Change.
Data Behind the Mission: Building a System to Support Strong Partnerships
The Hurdle: When Manual Processes Mask Meaningful Impact
The Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy (the Alliance) is building indigenous sovereignty through clean energy. Acting as expert advisors, they work alongside first nations to scope projects, vet contractors, and secure funding to build renewable energy infrastructure on tribal lands. Behind the scenes, however, their internal capacity of the fundraising team was getting bottlenecked by layers of manual processes. Important relationships with philanthropists and sponsors were hindered by manual exports and mail merges. Staff “touch points” were siloed in email threads instead of a shared system that would help to ensure 360 degrees of care. For a team scaling at lightning speed, their CRM felt less like a tool and more like a digital paperweight.
The Strategy: Automation as Empowerment
Undaunted Consulting does not believe in set-it-and-forget-it services. We believe in building an organization’s internal power. For the Alliance, our consultants Mike Baker and David Dunn provided a strategic mix of technical automation and deep-dive education to turn their CRM into a functioning asset. We began by auditing their manual donor processes and replacing their copy-paste templates with the Alliance branded Salesforce templates. Merge fields pulled information directly into each message, ensuring accuracy and saving time on manual edits. A custom automation notified staff immediately when an online donation was made, ensuring that "thank you" notes were timely and professional. We also worked to integrate their system with event planning platforms and built out the architecture needed to differentiate between various sponsorships and opportunities, ensuring the data looked like the work they actually perform.
"Working with Undaunted helped us set some processes and keep track of information that’s really important for the organization."
— Gwen Torres, Manager of Fundraising & Development, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
The Shift: Autonomy over Agency
We focused on education as empowerment, spending significant time in one-on-one coaching sessions showing Gwen, Ruby, and the team how to navigate the back end, create their own lists, and send bulk messages independently. Our approach prioritized autonomy: equipping the team with the knowledge and tools to manage the system internally, rather than requiring (and having to pay for) ongoing external support. This collaborative approach turned a static database into a living source of truth where the team felt comfortable asking clarifying questions to better communicate their needs. Gwen stated:
"It has helped to have someone as knowledgeable as David ask the right questions so that we can better communicate what we need. Sometimes we don't even know what we need or what that looks like in Salesforce. David seems to have a good knowledge of what nonprofits need and [is] also very sensitive to the nuances that our organization has."
Ruby Merritt, the Alliance’s Development Coordinator, saw the immediate impact on her capacity, noting that the custom build allowed the software to finally work for the team rather than against them:
"It's just made it more efficient. It's made it easier. It decreases your workload in the sense of it being faster and working more for us and for what we needed. It’s just very much catered to what we do. So that helps us be able to navigate it quicker and more tailored to just what we need from it."
The Result: Protecting Data and Reclaiming Time
By moving the history of their relationships out of inbox silos and into a centralized system, the team protected their most valuable assets while ensuring transparency. We helped them capture critical data that was previously being lost in "the mess" of email threads, allowing them to track the history and progress of specific projects with a few clicks. This has streamlined their internal reporting, moving from a situation where looking for data could consume a whole day to one where information is "live" and accessible. Chéri Smith, the Alliance’s President & CEO, shared:
"As the Alliance's chief fundraiser, I used to spend precious time chasing down information that should be at my fingertips. Now it is. Having a system that works the way we work has freed me to focus on what matters most – building the relationships that power our mission."
— Chéri Smith, President & CEO, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
"A lot of our data is sensitive and I just feel like [Undaunted] upheld the data integrity when working with it."
— Ruby Merritt, Development Coordinator, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
"There's less loss of data. Training to understand that these are available tools helps us capture data that we need when we need to track the progress of certain projects."
— Gwen Torres, Manager of Fundraising & Development, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
This newfound clarity has fundamentally changed how the development team reports their impact. By building out custom dashboards and reports, we gave the team the tools to analyze their successes and refine their donor outreach based on real-time performance metrics.
"To have it live, analyzing our successes and then customizing the types of opportunities we have, the types of donors that we have, and then being able to put that in a report, it really helps us see which aspects of our work are growing and what needs attention. It's streamlined our work and provides insights on where we need to improve."
— Gwen Torres, Manager of Fundraising & Development, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
The Conclusion: A Foundation for Growth
The Alliance is now equipped with a live engine for social change that allows them to focus on where they are needed most. By streamlining their workflow and increasing overall efficiency, the team has transitioned from managing administrative friction to analyzing their successes in real time.
This success has triggered a larger effort within the organization, as other teams see the value of centralized data and are beginning to expand how they use Salesforce to support the other pillars of the Alliance’s work. With a system that is catered to their specific needs and a team trained to manage it, the Alliance has the autonomy to scale their impact across indigenous communities.
"It helped us streamline our workflow. It just increased our overall efficiency. Teaching us the automations that he did and just the quick processes that he did definitely increased my day-to-day productivity."
— Ruby Merritt, Development Coordinator, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
We’ve had other consultants before but there was the most progress with… Undaunted."
— Gwen Torres, Manager of Fundraising & Development, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
Produced by-Undaunted Consulting
