Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign is one of the most recognized hunger-relief efforts in the country, connecting kids in need with nutritious food through thousands of partner programs. Behind that mission is a development operation managing a growing and complex portfolio of giving channels — DAF gifts, workplace giving, peer-to-peer platforms, and more. At roughly $90 million in annual revenue, with 270 staff members and approximately 2,000 online gifts processed every day, the organization runs at a scale where operational inefficiency has real costs.
Emily Palmer sits at a special cross-section of that organization. As Associate Director of Fundraising Data Management, she works cross-functionally with gift processing operations, fundraising, data analytics, and finance teams. With a team of just five people, she is responsible for the data flows, reporting infrastructure, and donor experience improvements that power No Kid Hungry's revenue operations.
The Problem
For years, No Kid Hungry was managing DAF and workplace giving gifts through a highly manual process. Three staff members were hand-keying every DAF gift into their CRM — a process that generated duplicate records, collapsed individual donor identities into anonymous buckets, and made it nearly impossible to report accurately on DAF giving volume or trends.
The problem wasn't just accuracy, but donor invisibility. A fund named "Turtle Memorial Fund" would arrive, get lumped into the anonymous pile, and disappear from the donor file entirely — making it impossible to acknowledge the gift or thank the donor, let alone track that relationship over time.
On the workplace giving side, processing Benevity data would have required an estimated 10 hours per month of manual work. That wasn't feasible, so No Kid Hungry simply couldn't capture individual donor-level data from workplace giving at all. Gifts from Benevity arrived as a single lump sum each month — $100,000 from thousands of donors, logged as one line item, with no path to stewardship.
The team also managed a sprawling list of over 200 platform logins across third-party giving channels. Staff turnover — including three controllers and two revenue operations directors in a two-year period — meant credentials were constantly at risk of being lost or abandoned. In the past, one dormant platform account was still tied to a former volunteer's credentials — not an active concern, but a loose end No Kid Hungry was glad to have the opportunity to address.
The operational ceiling was clear. Emily's team had reached a point where they were seriously considering a policy to stop accepting gifts from any platform they didn't already work with.
"We were actually considering a policy: if it's not one of the platforms we already work with, we just won't take the money. Which is insane for a nonprofit to say. But it was getting to the point where we just didn't have the capacity."
The Solution
Emily saw Chariot's solution to the problem — a unified portal that receives, reconciles, and automatically codes gifts from DAF providers and workplace giving platforms like Benevity, then exports CRM-ready files. Her reaction was immediate: I want this.
To get started, No Kid Hungry simply described their gift processing rules to Chariot's AI agent in plain language — how to categorize different gift types, handle DAF soft credits, and assign fund designations. Chariot then manages the gift coding automatically.
What stood out to Emily wasn't just the technology; it was how Chariot's team approached the work. "They sat down with us and said, how do you think about this? How do you code your gifts? And then after we implemented, they came back and said, this is coding 75% of your gifts right now — what do we need to do to get the next 25%?" That kind of active partnership, she noted, is rare.
Today, No Kid Hungry processes DAF and Benevity workplace giving data on a twice-monthly pull. Emily handles it herself, and it takes only 30 minutes per session. And as the organization continues to grow — adding new platforms and new giving sources — that workload doesn't scale proportionally. "If we add 50 more platforms or 50 more donations, that's not an increase in workload," Emily said. "We're ready for continued revenue growth in a way we weren't before."
How Chariot Gift Processing works for No Kid Hungry:
- Automatic reconciliation — Gifts from Fidelity, Benevity, and other platforms arrive with donor data and deposit data already reconciled, eliminating portal-hopping and manual aggregation
- AI gift coding — Chariot automatically applies campaign codes, fund designations, and appeal IDs; staff review exceptions rather than code every gift by hand
- CRM-ready exports — Configured to No Kid Hungry's Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT spec, exports arrive correctly formatted every time
- Transformed donor stewardship — With payments and donor data unified, gift acknowledgments go out sooner and DAF donor records, including from workplace giving, are now tracked individually
- Reduced platform sprawl — Fewer logins to manage means lower security risk and smoother staff transitions
To learn more about how Emily and other innovative nonprofit leaders are using Chariot to auto-code their gifts, check out our AI & Gift Processing webinar recording.
The Results
The most immediate win was time.
A process that once involved three staff members handling ongoing manual entry now takes one person 30 minutes, twice a month.
Emily estimates 15 hours saved per month on core gift processing work, including the time it would take for recoding manually-coded gifts. The Benevity workplace giving workflow — estimated at 10 hours per month if done manually — was eliminated entirely.
But the downstream effects have been more significant than the time savings alone. As DAF volume at No Kid Hungry has grown from roughly 10% to 20% of total contributions, the team hasn't needed to add staff to keep pace. The capacity freed by Chariot has gone toward building out automations, deepening analytics work, and developing new functionality — higher-leverage work that wouldn't have been accessible before.
Perhaps most importantly, gift processing has stopped being a ticket queue and started being a value-add function. Emily shares:
"The amount of instructions and training that you have to give someone to read a gift and know where it should be coded is a lot. And you don't get it right all the time because you're human. If you can take care of that on the front end, that's really going to change the game for a lot of operations teams."
Where individual giving, corporate partnerships, and major gifts teams once came to Emily's team with requests — recode this gift, fix this record, pull this report — those teams are now coming to her with data she surfaced first.
- The corporate team is using workplace giving data to generate leads for corporate partnership outreach.
- The individual giving team is using DAF data to build more targeted donor segments.
- The major gifts team is identifying donors who had been giving through DAFs for years without anyone knowing.
"Rather than it becoming a request from them to us," Emily said, "it's becoming: hey, here's how we can help."
Advice to the Field
For gift processors who feel buried in manual work, Emily's message is direct: the problem isn't your team's capacity — it's the system you're working in.
"I think so often it feels like operations folks are going into a platform that was designed to fix a fundraiser's needs, and the operations component is kind of an afterthought. What's interesting to me about Chariot is that they do seem to take an operations focus first. That's so infrequent — a platform that takes that step."
For teams managing high volumes of DAF and workplace giving gifts without auto-coding, she points to the hidden cost of training: every new gift processor needs to learn your coding logic from scratch, and human error is inevitable. The requests for re-coding, the duplicate records, the anonymous donors that should have been known — those costs accumulate quietly. "Rethink what's been a norm just because there was no other way to work around it," she said. "Now there is."
Another practical tip for teams getting started: don't self-limit. "Ask the 'what if' question and try it," Emily says. "The more you push the platform, the more you'll realize how much it can do for you."
And for anyone who feels like they don't have the buying power to make it happen, her advice is to build a coalition. "Our fundraisers were excited because donors can give through their DAFs. Our finance team loved the reconciliation. And from an operations perspective, we knew it would be a game changer. You don't have to sell everyone on the same thing — you just have to find what the linchpin is for each team."
Ready to streamline your team's gift processing? Get in touch.