The person behind Mission Simplify
My name is Dan Lombardi. My background is in fundraising. I trained as a Certified Fund Raising Executive and spent years doing donor relations, annual giving, and development work directly inside nonprofits before shifting my focus to the operational layer underneath all of it.
I know what it feels like to manage a donor portfolio, run annual giving campaigns, and try to keep retention numbers moving in the right direction without enough time or staff to do it properly. I did that work for years.
What I kept running into was the same problem everywhere. The fundraising strategy was fine. The people were committed. The problem was that the underlying systems were broken or nonexistent. Donor communications that should have been automatic were manual. Data that should have been surfacing insights was sitting untouched. Staff were spending significant portions of their week on tasks that had nothing to do with why they got into the sector.
At some point I started spending as much time fixing the systems as doing the fundraising work. Then more time on systems than fundraising. Then I realized that was the work that actually needed doing.
Mission Simplify exists because most small nonprofits have a systems problem disguised as a fundraising problem. The fix is not hiring more people or finding a better strategy. It is building the right infrastructure and keeping it running.
What I actually do
I build donor systems and AI agents for small nonprofits. I work hands-on inside your CRM, your automation tools, and your communication platforms. I have worked with Bloomerang, Raiser's Edge, DonorPerfect, and Salesforce. If your system has an API, I can almost certainly work with it.
I design workflows that run automatically and AI agents that make decisions within those workflows, including knowing when to flag something for a human rather than acting on their own. Everything I build is specific to your organization. There are no templates.
A few things worth knowing
I am platform-honest and vendor-neutral. I do not have partnerships with software companies and I do not earn referral fees. When I recommend a tool, it is because it is the right tool for your situation, not because someone is paying me to say so.
I work with a small number of clients at a time. The ongoing retainer model exists because systems need monitoring and improvement over time, and that work requires someone who knows your organization well enough to make good judgment calls on your behalf. This is not a volume business.
I am based in Canada and work primarily with Canadian nonprofits, though the work is not geography-dependent.