Making a nonprofit’s tech add up

When Jennifer arrived, ATS’s Google Tag Manager had grown the way most nonprofit tracking does: one vendor at a time, each making its own rules. Ad pixels and the retired Universal Analytics tag were hard-coded into the website. Other tags couldn’t be traced to an owner, and triggers no longer matched the current site. Agencies were adding tags straight into the tag manager with names like “facebook – vendor 1,” and a round of changes had even sat unpublished for months.

Tagging isn’t new territory for her. Her career started at The Wall Street Journal, where she was promoted into managing tagging and tracking, and she has followed this technology for more than a decade since.

Ahead of the What If campaign, Jennifer audited every tag, removed what was stale, and moved the hard-coded scripts into one managed setup. She renamed each tag by owner so anyone could see what fires and why. Then she set up donation tracking, so every gift reports to Google Analytics with its amount and transaction ID. Before a million-dollar-plus ad campaign went live, she tested tracking from every angle so results could go straight into one spreadsheet showing ROI and conversions.

She became the go-to for the tracking leads at each of ATS’s marketing agencies: the person they came to for answers, and the one who kept everyone working from the same playbook.

The result was faster pages, cleaner data, and fundraising the team could trace back to the campaign that drove it. ATS kept running and building on that setup, from the naming shorthand, brackets and prefixes to the clean triggers.

Before the monthly report, ATS’s marketing numbers lived in separate places: email in one platform, social media in another, website traffic and donations somewhere else, each measured its own way. Jennifer pulled them into one monthly marketing report covering email, social media, the website and fundraising, built on the conversion tracking and campaign tagging she had set up.

The report was only half of it. Jennifer paired it with a monthly workshop where the whole marketing team sat down with the data together: editors, the email manager, the social media manager, PR, advertising and leadership. Everyone asked questions about the numbers and about each other’s roles, so each person could see how their work connected to the rest of the team’s. The numbers came alive, and every meeting ended with something to try next.

The report proved useful enough that it went to ATS’s senior leadership each month, and later to the Board’s marketing committee. It changed how the team worked: decisions started with the data, and the people closest to each channel learned to read it together.

One report, one room, every channel at the table.

ATS works with several agencies to buy media across podcasts, website display, programmatic, video, Meta and YouTube, lookalike audiences and special segments. Every channel reports delivery its own way, and across that many partners the details can slip.

Jennifer’s job was to make sure ATS got what it paid for. She built a monthly tracker that lines up each signed order with what actually ran, and flagged gaps to the agency with the numbers attached. In one month alone, a small setup error had three lines running at 11–37% of what was contracted: more than a million paid impressions that never ran.

None of it was done in bad faith. These were small slips that are easy to miss. Catching them recovered more than $25K in ad spend through make-goods and credits.

$25K+ in ad spend recovered, and 1M+ unrun impressions caught.

Software costs creep the same way ad spend does: a seat here, a plan upgrade there, a renewal nobody revisits. Jennifer audited ATS’s licenses, removed what wasn’t being used, and kept seat counts matched to the people actually using each tool.

When renewals came up, she negotiated. For Hotjar, she tested the tool on a free agency account before ATS committed, then secured a discount on top of the standard annual rate. For Airtable, she moved ATS onto nonprofit pricing, which cut the per‑seat cost in half. Together, that saves ATS thousands every year.

Before the Master Calendar, tours, events and marketing priorities lived in separate spreadsheets and inboxes. Teams found out about overlaps too late, and the same details were re-entered in several places.

Jennifer built the Master Calendar in Airtable as a dynamic database, not a static calendar. Each event is entered once and carries its details: region, speaker, audience, type. From that one record, fundraisers see their region, programs see their speakers, and leadership sees the full picture. Each view filters itself, and nothing gets retyped. Events also sync into Outlook, so the calendar shows up in the place people already look.

As word spread, everyone wanted something added. She ran it in phases: launched the core first, trained fundraisers and program staff in live sessions, then expanded to the rest of the organization. The result is one source of truth for what’s happening across ATS, which cuts duplicate work and leads to better planning.

When ATS moved to Microsoft Teams, the tool was the easy part. The harder part was changing how people communicate. Jennifer worked between ATS’s IT vendor and HR to plan the rollout, then built training for every comfort level: a 101 for getting started, a 201 for organizing work into Teams and Channels by project, and recorded sessions plus how-to guides people could come back to.

She also added Teams training to onboarding, so new staff learn the tool and ATS’s way of working together from their first week. Adoption stuck because people knew how to use Teams well, not just how to log in.

SEO isn’t Jennifer’s specialty, and she’s upfront about that. What she is good at is getting the right people moving in the same direction. When donor research showed that too few people knew about ATS, organic search became a priority. She brought in an outside SEO firm and managed the work from start to finish: scoping, vendor management, monthly check-ins, and keeping editors, web developers and colleagues across departments aligned.

Together they restructured key pages on the site, built a process for optimizing new content as it was published, and used AI to speed up the output. Within two months of the changes going live, organic search sessions for April and May were up 21% over the same period a year earlier.

The lesson she takes to every client: you don’t need to be the expert in every discipline. You need someone who can coordinate the experts, keep the work on track, and connect it back to the organization’s goals.

At ATS, Jennifer wrote 45+ how-to guides and SOPs, plus recorded video walkthroughs, so no process lived only in one person’s head. Together they cover email marketing, event registration, donation pages, Airtable user management, Google Analytics donation reporting, and the monthly marketing report from start to finish.

That library made onboarding faster and made handoffs painless. When she stepped away for leave, the team had everything they needed to keep things running.

Good documentation matters even more now. A clearly written guide is something an AI assistant can walk a new staff member through step by step, so a well-documented process keeps paying off long after it’s written.