MurphsLife Foundation
We rebuilt a foundation's fundraising engine. Monthly donations went up nearly 6×.
A full donor platform with an AI-first support desk, donor intelligence on every gift, and attribution on every campaign. It launched at the end of June. Since then, every month has beaten anything they'd raised since December 2024.
- Platform engineering
- AI support
- Donor intelligence
- Growth & attribution
- murphslifefoundation.com ↗
| Month | Donations |
|---|---|
| Jun | $31K |
| Jul | $83K |
| Aug | $110K |
| Sep | $183K |
| Oct | $167K |
- Monthly donations, June → September
- 5.9×
- Raised in the first four months after launch
- $543K
- Months above $80K. They'd had none since Dec 2024
- 4 for 4
The challenge
MurphsLife runs a huge, emotional, always-on operation. Donors come in through Stripe, PayPal, email and social, and every one of them has questions about receipts, recurring gifts, billing and access. The team was buried in support work and knew almost nothing about who their donors were. They hadn't had a month over $80K since December 2024.
What we built
- 1
An AI-first support desk
A support assistant answers donors around the clock. It handles donations, recurring gifts, receipts, billing and account access in the foundation's own voice. It only hands a conversation to a person when there's a real reason, and the ticket arrives with the context and a translation. Self-serve accounts cover billing, receipts and cancellations, so most requests never reach a person.
- 2
Donor intelligence on every gift
Every transaction syncs from Stripe and PayPal into a single donor record. Parallel enrichment workers research each donor, score them, and drop them into segments the team can filter and act on. MurphsLife now knows who its donors are, what they give, and who to call next.
- 3
A growth engine with receipts
Donate-page A/B experiments, segmented email campaigns with open, click and conversion tracking, and server-side conversions to Meta, Google Ads and X. Every dollar traces back to the campaign that earned it.
- 4
Two payment rails, one record
Stripe and PayPal one-time and recurring gifts are handled by webhooks, retention repair and refund safety holds. Seasonal campaign sites like Christmas run on the same donor graph.
How it works
- 01Donor givesStripe & PayPal, one-time or monthly
- 02SyncWebhooks + background sync workers
- 03Donor graphOne Postgres record per person
- 04Enrich & scoreParallel AI research workers
- 05ActSegments, campaigns, attribution
The results
- 01
June, the month we launched: $31K. July: $83K. August: $110K. September: $183K. October: $167K.
- 02
Every month since launch has cleared $80K, a level they hadn't reached since December 2024. It's now their floor.
- 03
Most donor support is now resolved instantly by AI and self-serve tools, which sharply cut the human support load.
Technology
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- Turborepo
- Supabase Postgres
- Stripe
- PayPal
- OpenAI
- Python workers
- AWS SES
- PostHog
- Meta CAPI
- Google Ads API
- HighLevel
- Kenoo Workflows
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!
An example Dr. Pickle video with word-by-word captions.