Today I delivered a complete monday.com-based operations hub for a nonprofit that empowers youth and young adults who are grieving the loss of a parent or guardian.
I designed, built, and delivered the system on CRM and Work Management as well as a written Systems Manual that documents every board, form, automation, and workflow.
Situation
When I started the project, data lived in email inboxes. Registrations came in through a website form that delivered submissions as emails. Contact information, case notes, donor records, and resource referrals were scattered across spreadsheets, Google Voice logs, and individual staff knowledge.
They had a monday.com license but hadn’t built anything yet. They needed a single source of truth that their small team— including advisors who work directly with grieving families— could actually use day-to-day.
What I Built
A multi-board CRM architecture. The system is organized around two core CRM boards— Contacts and Accounts— that connect to a series of work management boards covering every aspect of operations. When a new Account is labeled as a “Resource,” an automation creates a corresponding item on the Resources board and links them. Everything connects.
A complete child registration workflow. This was the centerpiece. A public-facing Child Registration Form collects detailed contact information from guardians. When a submission arrives, automations fire in sequence: a new Contact is created for the Registrant, a new Contact is created for each child, an Intake Assessment item is generated, an advisor is automatically assigned, and a welcome email goes out to the registrant. Advisors then monitor the New Registrants view and conduct intake assessments using monday.com’s Item Card view— entering data during live calls with guardians.
A resource referral system. I imported 277 community organizations from an existing spreadsheet— medical providers, youth and family services, financial assistance, dentistry, workforce development, transportation, and more— into a structured Resources board connected to client records. Advisors can match clients to resources directly within the system.
Donor and scholarship management. Separate boards track donors, campaigns (recurring vs. one-time), and custom scholarships. The system connects donation activity back to the Contacts and Accounts boards.
Vendor management for events. The organization runs an annual Resource Fair and other events. I built a vendor intake board with forms for managing event participation.
Employee management. Timesheets, an onboarding dashboard, and an employee onboarding board for managing the internal team.
The Data Migration
One of the trickier challenges was merging the old email-based form submissions with the new monday.com intake structure. The old form collected clinical and social context fields— loss experienced, harm concerns, school information, medication history, insurance coverage— that the new CRM form didn’t ask for. Meanwhile, the new form collected administrative and CRM-style fields— gender pronouns, external IDs, organization affiliations— that the old form didn’t have.
I wrote a detailed field-by-field comparison and merge strategy: direct mappings for names, addresses, phone, and email; transformations needed for splitting full names into first/middle/last, converting ages to dates of birth, and parsing address strings into components; and a plan for keeping clinical context in a separate Case Details group while CRM fields stayed in the Client Profile.
The Systems Manual
The key deliverable beyond the working system itself was a comprehensive Systems Manual— a written document that describes every board, every automation, every form, and every workflow. The manual is designed so that anyone can pick it up and understand how the entire system works.
The manual covers the board architecture, the child registration workflow step by step, the intake assessment process, resource management, donor tracking, advisor workflows, dashboard purposes, and security considerations including private items, form permissions, and conditional forms.
Tools
- monday.com — CRM boards, work management boards, forms, automations, dashboards, Item Card views
- Google Docs — Systems Manual authoring and form diff analysis
- monday.com Forms — public-facing registration, vendor intake, volunteer interest
- Google Voice — integrated into CTG’s communication workflow
- Calendly — scheduling integration for advisor meetings