A community-services non-profit
A registered charity providing settlement and community services across the GTA, with around 80 staff and an annual operating budget in the low eight figures. Their existing CRM was a workable but ageing Salesforce deployment with substantial custom configuration accumulated over six years. A vendor had pitched a full AI-augmented replacement, a different platform, full data migration, retraining, and a multi-year licence, quoted at $202k in year one and roughly $80k per year ongoing.
The board was sympathetic to the vendor pitch, the AI features were genuinely impressive, but the executive director knew that “impressive” and “needed” were not the same thing. Replacing the CRM would mean three to four months of operational disruption during a particularly sensitive seasonal period. The leadership team needed an independent technical read that the board would trust, written by someone with no commercial interest in either keeping the existing platform or selling the new one.
We took a two-week AI Consulting engagement, structured as three working sessions plus a written recommendation. We read the vendor proposal in detail, interviewed the operations team about which CRM functions actually drove their day-to-day work, and mapped which of the vendor's AI features would deliver real value versus which were features looking for a workflow. We then sketched out an alternative path: keep the existing CRM, add three targeted AI integrations through the platform's existing API, and use the savings to fund a database cleanup that had been deferred for years.
The board accepted the written recommendation against the rebuild. The three integrations were delivered by the non-profit's existing dev partner for roughly $22k of additional work, on a timeline that avoided the seasonal disruption window entirely. The database cleanup proceeded with funds that would otherwise have gone to vendor licensing. Six months on, the executive director reports that two of the three integrations are in active daily use; the third was deprecated after a month because the workflow it served had naturally shifted. Net savings against the vendor quote, including the new integration work: approximately $180k.
Published March 12, 2026. Sector and figures are generalised where necessary to keep the client comfortable being represented here. The structure of what we did and what changed is exactly as it ran.
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