Case Study - Operation Smile

charity profile

Migrated from: Raiser's Edge
No of Constituents: 110,000 +
Annual Income: £7,500,000 +
Charity Type: Children's Health
Donorfy Package: Equivalent of Donorfy Enterprise

It’s estimated that a child is born every three minutes with a cleft lip or cleft palate. Operation Smile is a global charity dedicated to providing life-changing surgery for children with cleft conditions.

Founded in 1982, the charity is evolving beyond its traditional fly-in, fly-out surgery model. Today, its focus extends to strengthening local healthcare systems, investing in health infrastructure and training local medical teams to provide sustainable cleft care to the communities they serve.

With offices around the world, including its UK-based arm, Operation Smile is bringing new smiles and brighter futures to children worldwide.

Quick Glance

Hours Saved

The team has automated time-consuming manual processes with Donorfy, freeing up valuable time for fundraising - and doing more of what matters.

Data Driven

Donorfy’s reporting, integrations and features have helped them turn data into useful, actionable information that better informs strategies and decisions.

Centralised Hub

From finance to fundraising, Donorfy has become a central hub across the charity, ensuring streamlined collaboration and a unified approach to data.

CHALLENGE

Scaling Up Without Slowing Down

When you’re running a charity, you need systems that work as hard as your team does.

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.

SOLUTION

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.

Implementation: A Smooth Transition with MAST

Migrating to a new CRM can be daunting, so they teamed up with Donorfy partner MAST, to ensure everything went to plan. Despite a key member of the Operation Smile team leaving mid-project, the transition stayed on track and set them up to hit the ground running.

Working with MAST made a big difference. Everything went to plan, even when it came to usual post-migration teething problems.

IMPACT

More Time to Make a Difference

Beyond streamlining day-to-day processes, Donorfy has given the team the tools to harness data more effectively, ensuring that every action taken is backed by valuable insights.

Smarter, Faster Workflows

Built-in integrations with Dotdigital and other key platforms means data flows seamlessly, improving efficiency and reducing admin overhead. This automation is freeing up valuable time across the organisation - the team now saves dozens of hours each month that can be reinvested in high-impact fundraising activities - or developing their use of Donorfy even more.

Reliable Financial Insights

Finance and fundraising teams now reconcile income faster and with greater accuracy. Improved financial reporting is giving them a clearer picture of donor contributions, helping them make more informed strategic decisions.

More Meaningful Supporter Engagement

With automated workflows in place, the team ensures every communication is timely, relevant - and personal. This makes it easier to engage supporters in ways that matter, strengthening relationships and giving donor retention a boost.

A Unified Approach to Data

Donorfy has become a centralised charity CRM hub, breaking down silos between supporter services, partnerships, fundraising, finance and other teams. By having all data in one place, the charity has improved collaboration and streamlined reporting. Underlining the overall benefits achieved, Darren emphasised,

Donorfy has streamlined most of our processes across the board. It’s made workflows and reporting so much easier. Automations and integrations have enabled us to save dozens of hours per month. We can spend more time building the things we need to. It’s freed up the team to evolve the database further and take us on a better journey.”

The Future: Lots to Smile About

With their CRM firmly embedded, the team are focused on putting the time saved to good use.

Along with broadening their use of Donorfy, they’re expanding their regular giving programme with better donor insights and launching a face-to-face fundraising campaign – backed by accurate and real-time data.

Already using Access PaySuite, they’re excited how further integrations with Access Group products can create a fully connected, end-to-end non-profit software platform – ensuring every piece of data is working harder.

At its heart, Operation Smile is all about changing lives with something as simple as a smile. Their incredible team now has the time, insights and technology to focus on what really matters - helping more children around the world smile with confidence.

What really stands out is how Donorfy allows us to squeeze every last drop of value from our data. It’s embedded across the organisation, supporting every department, and enabling us to work smarter. We’ve been able to automate processes, reduce admin, and use data to drive decisions in a way that wasn’t possible before.

The Power of a CRM for Charities

How Operation Smile Save Dozens of Hours with Donorfy