American Cancer Society

The Challenge

The American Cancer Society's digital fundraising operation was held together by three disconnected systems: a legacy CRM, a third-party donation widget, and a hand-maintained email segmentation list. Fundraiser coordinators spent more time copy-pasting data between tools than actually building campaigns.

Worse, the donor experience was fractured. Someone who donated via the mobile walkathon app had a completely separate profile from their online giving history. Lapsed donors received identical re-engagement emails to first-timers. The data existed — the infrastructure to act on it didn't.

ACS needed a unified platform that could orchestrate the full donor lifecycle: acquisition, activation, recurring giving, lapse recovery, and long-term stewardship — all from a single interface, built to handle the scale of their national campaigns.

The Solution

Appsurd embedded a 4-person AI-native squad — one product designer, one AI engineer, one full-stack engineer, and a dedicated QA — within the first week. By day two, we had a functional data model and the first screens in front of ACS stakeholders for feedback.

We designed the platform around three core workflows: the Fundraiser Command Center (campaign builder + launch dashboard), the Donor Intelligence Layer (AI-driven segmentation and propensity scoring), and the Companion Mobile App (for event-based fundraising like Relay for Life).

Every 48 hours, a new build shipped to the ACS staging environment. Stakeholders could test, react, and redirect in real time — without scheduling a formal requirements review. Six weeks in, the platform was live in production.

What We Built

• Unified Donor Profiles — merged giving history, event participation, email engagement, and demographic data into a single 360° view per donor.
• AI Propensity Scoring — a model trained on historical giving patterns that ranks donors by likelihood to upgrade, lapse, or respond to specific campaign types. Updated nightly.
• Campaign Builder — a drag-and-drop interface for building multi-channel fundraising campaigns (email, push, SMS) with conditional branching based on donor behavior. Reduced campaign launch time from 3 weeks to under 24 hours.
• Fundraiser Portal — personal fundraising pages for individual supporters, with real-time donation feeds, goal tracking, and one-click social sharing.
• iOS + Android Companion App — event check-in, team leaderboards, in-app giving, and push notifications for Relay for Life and other in-person campaigns.
• Lapse Recovery Automation — triggered re-engagement sequences with dynamic content personalized by donor segment, giving history, and last interaction type.
• Real-time Analytics Dashboard — campaign-level KPIs, cohort retention curves, and a live donation ticker for national campaigns — all exportable to PDF for board reporting.

Results