# How American Friends of Magen David Adom Reclaimed 16 to 30 Hours a Month and Prepared for Emergency > When emergency giving surged in 2023, American Friends of Magen David Adom (AFMDA) was suddenly managing hundreds of thousands of gifts manually, across multiple regional designations, without increased headcount. Sandra Liberty, Director of Data Strategy and Transformation, shares how Chariot Gift Processing helped transform her team’s operations so they can maintain their focus on stewardship and notifying leadership before the funds even land. - Canonical: https://givechariot.com/resources/customer-stories/how-american-friends-of-magen-david-adom-reclaimed-16-to-30-hours-a-month-and-prepared-for-emergency - Published: 2026-07-16 --- [American Friends of Magen David Adom \(AFMDA\)](https://afmda.org/) is the American fundraising arm of Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency medical, disaster relief, and blood services organization. Often described as the Red Cross meets 911 dispatch, MDA deploys ambulances, manages blood logistics, and coordinates emergency response across the country. AFMDA's US\-based team raises the funds that power everything from vehicles and blood services to paramedic equipment, and emergency response infrastructure. Donors can direct their support to any of these initiatives, which means every gift carries not just a dollar amount, but a designation that has to be tracked, coded, and reported accurately to the right regional program. ## **The Problem** Before 2023, AFMDA managed gift processing manually, a workable approach when volume was steady. When emergency donations surged, that changed overnight. The team nearly doubled in size, gift volume jumped into the hundreds of thousands in a single year, and the manual processes that were viable before were now completely underwater. Files arrived from different sources in different formats. A single "name" field might contain a title, first name, last name, and middle name all together, requiring manual parsing before any coding or matching could begin. Donor addresses were often missing entirely. With no system to flag which files had already been processed, duplication risk was constant. "There was no indication at all that a file had already been processed," Sandra said. "So there was a high risk for duplication — from financial to actual data." The regional complexity compounded everything. AFMDA's donors can direct gifts to specific initiatives across multiple regions. Getting the right code to the right regional fundraiser required deep institutional knowledge that had to be retrained into every new admin who touched the data. At peak volume, Sandra's team was months behind. AFMDA tried to solve it internally. They hired a programmer to standardize file formats, build donor matching lookup tables, and create validation logic to track which files had been processed. Sandra reflected, "I'm now a development software house, not a not\-for\-profit organization." The bigger concern was that the entire operation was dependent on a single person. If that person left, the infrastructure went with them. ## **The Solution** When Sandra learned what Chariot had built, a gift processing platform that receives gift files from any source, normalizes them into a consistent format, applies coding rules automatically, and exports CRM\-ready data, her reaction was immediate. > "You guys came to solve a huge problem." *Photo: Sandra \(third person from the left\) with the Chariot team in NYC.* AFMDA worked with Chariot's team to configure the platform around their specific complexity: regional assignments, fund designations across multiple initiative types, and rules for handling incomplete donor records. Sandra described the onboarding as a genuine collaboration. > "Our absolute favorite is, 'Just tell us about it.' The Chariot team really truly listened, understood, and provided the correct setup for all our intricacies." The initial skepticism from the team — "Show me; I need to see it to believe it" — dissolved quickly. Once the first files came through with coding already applied, the questions stopped being about whether it would work and started being about what else it could do. For Raiser's Edge users, the final step of getting data back into the CRM is often the most painful part of the workflow. For Sandra's team today? "A push of a button." ### **How Chariot Gift Processing works for AFMDA:** - **Automatic reconciliation** — Deposits arrive with donor data already reconciled, eliminating portal\-hopping and manual aggregation - **AI gift coding** — Chariot automatically applies regional assignments, fund designations, and initiative codes based on AFMDA's rules; staff review exceptions rather than code every gift by hand - **CRM\-ready exports** — Configured for Raiser's Edge, exports are correctly formatted without manual reformatting - **Supports donor stewardship** — With accurate and timely gift data available, the stewardship team now knows exactly who their donors are and can steward them appropriately - **Real\-time gift notifications** — Sandra receives email alerts when gifts arrive, giving her visibility into incoming funds before they're even deposited ## **The Results** Before Chariot, Sandra's team was processing gifts weeks, sometimes months, behind. Today, they close the month on a fast turnaround with no backlog. The visibility shift alone has changed how the team operates. Finance was previously the sole keeper of the payment portal. Now Sandra gets notified the moment a significant gift arrives. > "Development seeing their gift right there as soon as it comes in — that visibility is key. Now I get notified, and as soon as I see a major gift coming in even before we receive the funds, I can already start research, pre-warn stewardship, and send a notification to my CEO. We didn't have that before at all." The time savings are equally significant. On a typical mid\-month period — outside of an emergency spike — **Sandra estimates the team has gone from 16 to 30 hours of processing work \(on a normal month\) down to a couple of hours.** Across 713 donations and $1.7M in gift volume processed through Chariot in the first 4 months, those hours compound fast. The freed capacity has gone toward work that had been perpetually deferred: building policies and procedures, revamping operational manuals, and cleaning the database. "We were always behind because of our volume," Sandra said. "Now there's no worry." And when another emergency hits, AFMDA's gift processing infrastructure is built to flex with it. *Photo: AFMDA Instagram.* ## **Advice to the Field** Sandra's recommendation to peers considering a gift processing platform: start small and let the results speak. "You have the choice of how many organizations you can turn on. If you just want to test with one to see what it's like, you can test it very easily, and quickly see the impact." She's equally direct about the limits of building in\-house. It's easy to rationalize a homegrown tool. You know your own rules, your own CRM, your own edge cases, but the hidden cost is dependency and maintenance. "Reinventing the wheel just puts you so far back," she said. "Why not partner up with somebody that has already done all that grunt work for you and can walk you through step by step what you should expect?" There's also the knowledge compounding effect that comes from a shared platform. "You have the knowledge and expertise as other organizations come in and start using it. That knowledge transfer is very valuable, because we only know what we know." --- Ready to streamline your team's gift processing?[ Talk to our team](https://www.givechariot.com/contact?utmsource=afmda-casestudy).