Case study · Strategy & consulting
CHIRLA
A fundraising strategy for one of California’s largest immigrant-rights organizations.
- Role
- Project Manager
- Team
- Five consultants · 180 Degrees Consulting
- Client
- CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights)
- Website
- chirla.org
Why this project
As the son of immigrant parents, I look for ways to put my education to work for the Latino community. CHIRLA serves immigrant families across California (legal services, community education, workers’ rights), and its capacity to do that work depends on funding. Leading this engagement was a chance to apply strategy and data skills to something my own family’s story is tied to.
The problem
CHIRLA wasn’t effectively capturing donations from political and philanthropic networks: limited visibility into existing donor relationships, unclear engagement pathways, and no scalable way to present its programs to prospective funders. That put future campaigns and programs at risk of underfunding.
What we built
Modular impact decks
A reusable fundraising deck template with department-specific program modules (legal services, community education, and more) that swap in based on a prospective donor’s priorities, plus a checklist flagging the goals, metrics, and funding needs CHIRLA still had to fill in.
Donor mapping database
A researched database of foundations and political donors aligned with immigrant rights, screened through Form 990s, grantee lists, and public materials for mission fit and giving capacity, then matched to the CHIRLA departments their funding history best supports.
Data recommendations
After analyzing cross-department service data (consultations, hotline calls, workshops), we recommended standardized collection forms and universal case IDs so CHIRLA can track referrals across programs and show funders cross-program impact.
What I learned
Nonprofit fundraising is a storytelling problem backed by a data problem. Funders respond when an organization can mirror their language, quantify its outcomes, and show exactly how new dollars will be used, and getting there required as much work on CHIRLA’s internal data as on the decks themselves. Managing five consultants across research, analysis, and design also taught me how much of leading is keeping the work pointed at the client’s real constraint.