01 A foundation run on WhatsApp, Excel, and heroic effort
The chaos before
When we met Europe Aid Foundation, a Dutch humanitarian charity, everything ran on manual effort. Thank-you certificates were designed by hand and sent to donors over WhatsApp. Sacrifice videos were uploaded to YouTube one at a time and emailed around. Regular giving barely existed, because becoming a recurring donor meant physically visiting a bank branch to sign a direct debit, and cancelling meant the same trip. Almost nobody bothered.
Sacrifice season was the worst of it. Donations came in through the website and were downloaded into Excel. A staff member manually balanced donors across animals: a large animal carries seven shares, so if one donor gave in the names of themselves and their parents, those three names had to be read over the same animal, while a five-name donation had to go elsewhere and the remaining shares redistributed. Someone else designed the name plates for each animal in Canva or Adobe, one by one, and emailed partners a list of which plate belonged to which animal. Then the videos came back and someone matched each one to its donors, dug their contact details out of another Excel file, and sent them manually. Work that the system now finishes in a day took five or six people one to two weeks.
02 From a small trust-building demo to full digital transformation
One system for the whole foundation
The relationship started small and deliberately so. Ahmet Mihmat had been burned before by an outsourced team, so we began with modest demo projects, like generating tree-donation plates as PDFs instead of designing them by hand. Once trust was earned, we built the foundation management platform, and over five years of daily work it has become the operating system of the entire organization.
Every humanitarian program lives in it: orphan sponsorship, sister families, sacrifice, water wells, cataract surgeries, tree planting, emergency relief, Ramadan, construction, education programs and scholarships, festive gifts, charity meals, and healthcare. Around the programs sits real infrastructure: donor, partner, volunteer, and staff management, a serious finance module with bank movements, cash desk, accounting-code-to-project mapping, incasso collection and expense tracking, detailed reporting down to individual receipts and campaigns, granular permissions, and utilities like PDF and photo optimization and invoicing that even external partners use. The mobile app is managed from the same place, and messaging integrations deliver WhatsApp and email automatically. Ahmet jokes that if this system shuts down, the foundation shuts down with it.
- Fourteen humanitarian programs managed end to end
- Finance module: bank movements, cash desk, incasso collection, accounting-code mapping
- Donor, partner, volunteer, and staff management with granular permissions
- Detailed reporting: finance reports, receipts, per-campaign analytics
- Certificates, orphan letters, and sacrifice videos delivered with one tap
03 Recurring giving went from a bank branch visit to five seconds
The app that changed who donates
The donation app rebuilt the donor relationship. Card storage made recurring giving a five-second decision: one donor set up his sadaqah as an automatic weekly charge every Friday, another sponsors an orphan with an automatic monthly donation. Cancelling takes one tap, which paradoxically makes people far more willing to start. Push notifications, instant certificates, orphan letters, and sacrifice videos arrive on the phone without anyone at the foundation lifting a finger.
The demographic effect surprised everyone. Donors used to come mainly through volunteers making personal visits, which skewed the base older. With the app, the donor profile visibly diversified and got younger: the youngest donor cohort more than doubled compared to the same period a year earlier. Donations overall rose more than 20 percent after launch, and the app recouped its own project budget within the same year. A category of donor that simply did not exist before, the app-native regular giver, is now a pillar of the foundation's income.
04 Every question had an answer that was already in the system
The audit
In 2024 and 2025, following heightened scrutiny of international aid flows, Dutch authorities and ING ran a detailed financial audit of the foundation. Every donation was examined: who gave it, which partner received it, what was delivered in return, and where the paperwork was.
In the old world this would have been an unwinnable conversation of verbal explanations, bank statement requests, and emails begging partners for documents. Instead it went like this. Who are your partners? Ahmet opened the partners module and answered on the spot. Are they legally registered, where are the documents? Already uploaded, officially certified, exported in seconds. How much did you send them, when, from which account? The finance module filtered by partner and showed everything. You sent tens of thousands of euros for sacrifices, how do we know animals were actually slaughtered? Here is the partner's livestock purchase invoice, here is the service fee invoice, here are the donor names, and here is a video of every single sacrifice, because before each one the shareholders' names are written on a board and read aloud on camera.
The audit finished three to four times faster than anyone expected, and the verdict was clean: no irregularities of any kind. Ahmet's own words say the rest: if we had not moved to this system, we could not have explained ourselves, and we probably would have been fined.
05 A doubled donation pool, run by four or five people
The outcome
Over five years of working together, the foundation's donation pool has roughly doubled, and an operation that once could never drop below ten staff now runs on four or five people. Certificates, letters, videos, receipts, and recurring charges flow automatically. Sacrifice season, once a two-week ordeal for six people, resolves in about a day.
Asked why the relationship has lasted, Ahmet's answer is trust plus domain fluency. A local development team would have cost multiples more and needed the charity's world explained from zero, starting with why a sacrificial animal carries exactly seven shares. We built that logic in before he ever mentioned it. He also likes to say that he used to worry what would happen to the foundation if something happened to him, because everything lived in his head. Now the system carries the knowledge, and he says whoever comes next, human or, as he jokes, an AI, will find everything already in order.
