Customer story: Operation Smile

When you’re running a charity, you need systems that work as hard as you do. 
 
The team at Operation Smile raise millions to fund their life-changing work every year, relying on individual giving, regular donations, direct mail, TV campaigns, major donors and digital fundraising.  
 
But behind the scenes, their legacy CRM wasn't quite keeping up the pace. The team needed an all-round charity CRM that wouldn’t just store data, but would actively help them save time, connect teams and unlock deeper insights to inform their fundraising and operational strategies. Darren Mooten, Director of Operations, explained: 

“We were looking for something that allowed us to streamline a lot of processes that were manual. We also needed strong integrations and automations that could make our work easier.” 

Operation Smile came to Donorfy looking for charity CRM software that could take repetitive admin off their hands, while being intuitive enough for teams across the organisation - from finance to fundraising - to benefit from.

Integrations with key platforms like Dotdigital were important, too.   

A CRM that works as hard as they do

We’re pleased to say that, after a thorough review of many options, Donorfy was their right charity CRM fit.   

Powerful features offered the chance to tackle time-consuming manual processes, while a clean and intuitive data structure makes it much easier for teams to generate insightful reports and make decisions.   

One key feature is Opportunities for major donor management, which appealed from the start, and they now use to manage grants and major donors more effectively. By tracking funding applications, the Opportunities feature has helped them build a more structured and data-driven approach to securing high-value gifts.

Beyond specific features, they also loved how Donorfy is flexible enough to be customised to their needs - but without becoming difficult to manage. As Darren noted, while some CRMs offer a level of customisation that can become overly complex, Donorfy struck the right balance - allowing them to tailor processes where needed, while keeping everything structured and efficient.   

Most importantly, Donorfy’s development felt genuinely community-driven, ensuring that updates and features were built with real charities in mind. Darren added: 

“The development of Donorfy is very community-based and not just ‘here’s what we think you need’ – it’s purposeful because fundraisers are behind it, and that’s great.”