Case Studies
For confidentiality purposes, client identities and sensitive details have been anonymized. References related to these projects are readily available upon request.
Filing Systems Clean Up,
Restructuring & Documentation
Client Type: 501(c)(3) National Nonprofit
Services:
Department Policy Guides
Change Management Documentation
Project Management
Standard Operating Procedure Documentation
Timeframe: 3 months, and included bi-weekly stakeholder updates, project timeline tracking via Asana, and feedback loops to identify improvements and cleanup opportunities.
The Challenge: a fundraising strategy team was managing projects across multiple teams in a singular shared drive, with accompanying project management collaboration tools. Relevant project information and active working docs were organized inconsistently and hard to locate, and there was no structure or protocol for organizing work over time. The space needed to be organized for both internal working teams and external team stakeholders across varying departments, with role-based access control and guidelines to standardize the structure of this large filing system as it expanded over time.
The Strategy: Design and roll out a role-based information architecture and governance framework for the fundraising team’s shared drive, supported by clear change management resources to ensure long-term adoption.
The Work: Solicited workflows and identified priority files from legacy and archive candidate files to design functional file structures for multiple audiences. Created change management resources to support the transition from the old structure to the new structure. These resources included an internal and external future file location decision tree, file governance documentation with standard naming conventions and file hygiene policies, and clear sharing rules and policies around role-based access.
The Outcome: The team gained clean internal and external-facing shared operating systems for its work: external stakeholders knew where to find what they needed, and team members had clean and reorganized working spaces. It was easier for all stakeholders to identify relevant files at a glance and understand the logic around how work progressed from active to archived. This reduced confusion, made overall project management easier, supported smoother onboarding for new team members, and gave leadership and project stakeholders clearer visibility into in-progress projects.
Untangling CRM Data webs
& Streamlining Fundraising Campaigns
Client: The 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) arms of an Affiliate Nonprofit
Services:
Donor Prospect Research
CRM Data Clean-Up
Donor Communications Templatizing
End-to-end Donor Cultivation Event Planning
Standard Operating Procedure Documentation
The Challenge: a small fundraising team lacked a dedicated role to manage the fundraising CRM systems and operations following the transition from a legacy CRM to a new database. There were no documented procedures for gift processing, annual reconciliation, or affiliate-specific instructions on standard operating procedures within the database, creating uncertainty about reporting accuracy and data integrity. This resulted in unclear data and fractured reporting of donor history. These challenges were impeding efforts to improve data accuracy and increase programmatic funding.
The Strategy: Designed and implemented a CRM and data operations framework to restore confidence in fundraising data and reporting. This included instituting weekly data audits and monthly reconciliations, standardizing gift and pipeline workflows, and embedding consistent donor communication practices. Together, these changes turned a fragmented database into a reliable engine for decision-making and revenue growth.
The Work: Regular assessments of the organization’s data systems and administrative procedures were implemented, along with an annual reconciliation process to analyze and align multi-million-dollar transactions across financial systems. Donor database records were routinely scrubbed to remove duplicates and correct inaccuracies. Comprehensive workflows for gift processing, solicitation tracking, and pipeline reporting were developed and documented to ensure consistency and accuracy. Donor communications and mailings were conducted weekly, often with handwritten touches.
Outcome: At the end of each annual cycle, the organization achieved clean, reconciled financials and maintained reliable data, empowering leadership decision-making. The fundraising team now operates with a functional, documented system for tracking donor activity and revenue that no longer relies on institutional memory for continuity.
Operations Assessment
& Sustainability Roadmap
Client Type: 501(c)(3) Regional Nonprofit
Services:
Operations assessment
Workflow analysis and shadowing
Organizational capacity analysis
Team-structure and role evaluation
Process-improvement planning
Strategic implementation roadmap
Timeframe: 3-months
The Challenge: During a period of staff transition, the organization needed a clearer understanding of how its systems, staffing structure, and day-to-day workflows were affecting organizational capacity and employee wellbeing. Essential responsibilities had become difficult to sustain, with interconnected work often relying on limited staff capacity, informal knowledge, and processes that needed greater clarity.
Leadership needed a collaborative assessment that could identify immediate operational risks while also creating a thoughtful, people-centered strategy for strengthening the team’s long-term ability to deliver its core services.
The Strategy: Grounded in Russell & Co.’s Operational Sustainability Framework, our multi-phase Operations Assessment examined the relationship between workflows, role clarity, team structure, and staff capacity. The approach centered both organizational effectiveness and the conditions employees need to perform their work sustainably.
Recommendations were prioritized by urgency, risk, and potential impact on employee wellness and service delivery. This created space to address immediate concerns while considering multiple longer-term pathways for improving how work was distributed, supported, and managed.
The Work: The engagement began with collaborative information-gathering sessions and workflow shadowing with the interim Operations team. These activities helped document current practices, surface pressure points, identify workflow dependencies, and understand where responsibilities were unclear, overly concentrated, or difficult to maintain.
Findings were organized into immediate, short-term, and long-term opportunities for improvement. Multiple remediation scenarios were developed for leadership consideration, including potential changes to team structure, role transitions, workflow design, process improvements, and job descriptions.
The work concluded with a 12-month process-improvement roadmap. Designed as an implementation guide, the roadmap sequenced recommended actions to support both vertical and horizontal restructuring of the Operations team and its workflows.
The Outcome: The organization gained a strategic sustainable foundation for strengthening its operations. Leadership received prioritized options for reducing operational risk, clarifying accountability, and making more informed decisions about staffing, roles, and workflow ownership.
The final roadmap transformed the assessment into an actionable path forward; supporting a more sustainable distribution of work, greater clarity for staff, and stronger organizational capacity to deliver core services over time.
New Department
Systems Development & Integration
Client Type: Global Strategy Firm
Services:
Subject-Matter-Expert Research
Evergreen Strategy Guides
Project Management
End-To-End Event Planning
Vendor & Client Coordination
Standard Operating Procedure Documentation.
Timeframe: 18 months, included daily meetings with analysts, department teams, and vendors, & regular client communications.
The Challenge: a policy-focused consulting firm brought on Adina for reliable operational and project support to keep complex client work organized across multiple fast-moving projects. The required needs were to coordinate moving pieces between internal team members and external stakeholders, maintain accurate documentation, and support deliverables with both strategic and logistical components.
The Strategy: Built a structured operations layer that centralized project documentation, streamlined stakeholder coordination, and managed event logistics so the firm’s analyst team could focus on detailed policy work.
The Work: Provided structured coordination and administrative operations that underpinned client work. This included maintaining organized project documentation, supporting subject-matter expert research, coordinating in-state and out-of-state events from end to end, and vetting and engaging vendors for specific events.
Outcome: The team benefited from a 40% year-over-year increase in productivity, with projects completed 128%of goal by EOY. Analysts' research was more comprehensively supported, enabling them to focus more on client reports and other content-related deliverables. Client events, which were planned and organized end-to-end, were highly praised and consistently quoted as the best in the industry.
Data Privacy
& Security Processes Audit
Client: 501(c)(3) State-Based Nonprofit
Service Areas: Process Assessment + Remediation plan
Timeframe: 2.5 months, with minimal leadership time commitment outside of the kickoff, asynchronous updates, and readout meeting.
The Challenge: The organization had pre-existing formal policies governing how staff stored or shared sensitive data with internal and external partners. Leadership was concerned about the consistency of their data-handling policies across teams, which created fear among their community members and partners regarding data privacy and security. Leadership needed a clear picture of their potential exposure to risks and a practical path to support and reinforce better data-handling practices.
The Strategy: Develop a realistic, risk‑based view of the organization’s data privacy and security practices, then align day‑to‑day workflows with formal policies. This meant surfacing vulnerabilities through interviews and audits, prioritizing them in a clear risk matrix, and proposing capacity‑appropriate policy, system, and training improvements. The focus was on strengthening protections and trust incrementally, without disrupting core operations.
The Work: Conducted an audit of the organization’s data privacy and security practices, reviewing existing documentation, and conducted a series of group and individual interviews to learn about the variances in workflows regarding interactions with different levels of sensitive data and how the data is handled internally and externally to identify and prioritize potential vulnerabilities. Compiled a risk matrix to identify the areas of highest concern and priority for remediation. Delivered a detailed findings report deck with actionable recommendations for improved security systems, policies, and staff training, while highlighting which policies held legal liability versus which were primarily good faith promises to consumers and clients in their published data privacy policies. Recommendations were tailored to the organization's capacity and designed to be implemented incrementally without disrupting operations.
The Outcome: Leadership received a clear, honest assessment of their data privacy and handling risks, along with concrete remediation recommendations. This included department-specific risk levels based on their exposure to PII, role-specific risk levels, and trends in data privacy training attendance and follow-up tracking. From this report, the organization had the foundation needed to begin reinforcing its existing data governance policies by analyzing how that documentation is practically supported and enforced by management and staff.
Executive Sabbatical Coverage
& Knowledge Transfer
Client Type: 501(c)(3) Regional Nonprofit
Services:
Executive transition and sabbatical planning
Knowledge capture and documentation
Task and responsibility mapping
Interim coverage coordination
Workflow guides and cheat sheets
Direct administrative and operational coverage
The Challenge: As an Executive Director prepared for a sabbatical, the organization needed to protect continuity without placing unnecessary strain on the remaining team. Much of the role’s institutional knowledge—including recurring responsibilities, decision-making context, tools, relationships, and workflow details; needed to be captured and translated into usable guidance for interim coverage staff.
The project also created a longer-term foundation for the Executive Director’s anticipated departure approximately one year later. The central need was not simply to list tasks, but to clarify ownership, identify support systems, and make complex work more transferable across the organization.
The Strategy: The engagement used a structured knowledge-transfer process designed to turn lived, often undocumented expertise into a practical coverage system. Through facilitated knowledge-download sessions, the work identified what needed to continue during the sabbatical, what could be temporarily deprioritized, and where team members would need clear instructions or backup support.
This approach supported both immediate continuity and organizational capacity-building: reducing dependence on a single leader while giving staff a clearer understanding of responsibilities, expectations, and escalation paths. The work was informed by an established approach that uses facilitated sessions to capture responsibilities, resources, and process gaps before a transition.
The Work: Three 60-minute knowledge-download sessions were held with the Executive Director. Each session only required verbally guided prompts and collaborative note-taking to capture relevant materials, files, recurring duties, active responsibilities, and operational context.
The resulting information was synthesized into a comprehensive Task & Responsibility Guide that served as both the sabbatical-coverage plan and the baseline for a future Executive Director knowledge-transfer document.
For each responsibility, the guide identified:
The task and its interim owner
Required tools, materials, and access
Coverage frequency and timing
Work that could be deprioritized during the sabbatical
A designated support person or escalation path
Links to related instructions, reference materials, or process guides
Complex responsibilities and multi-step workflows were paired with detailed guides and quick-reference cheat sheets, enabling the coverage team to navigate work without needing to rely on informal, last-minute explanations. In addition to designing the coverage materials, Russell & Co. provided direct coverage for a defined portion of the Executive Director’s responsibilities during the sabbatical.
The Outcome: The organization entered the sabbatical period with a clearer, shared system for sustaining leadership responsibilities. Interim owners knew what they were responsible for, what resources they needed, when work was due, and where to go when additional support was required. By documenting responsibilities in a structured, usable format, the organization reduced single-person dependency and created an early foundation for a more intentional future leadership transition. The project strengthened continuity during leave while giving the team reusable tools for role clarity, onboarding, and long-term organizational resilience.