Scaling Mission-Driven Work with Smart Systems

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Industry

Nonprofit/Charity

Challenge

Managing complex operations, data, and communications across horses, adopters, donors, and volunteers—with a small, overextended team

Results

The new system saved the organization an estimated 25–50 hours per month in administrative work by automating data entry, veterinary evaluations, and adopter communications. All horse, donor, and adopter records are now centralized in a single platform, allowing for lifetime tracking, streamlined reporting, and tailored messaging to each stakeholder group. The improved data structure also enhanced grant reporting and provided valuable insights into equine welfare outcomes—giving the team more time to focus on what matters most: the horses.

Admin Hours Saved Monthly

Horses Served Annually

Unified Source Of Truth

This system was built to reflect the complexity and care that define equine aftercare. By centralizing data and automating time-consuming tasks, the team can now focus on the horses, not the spreadsheets. It’s about giving every stakeholder—from adopters to donors—a better, more transparent experience.

Chrissy Laughlin

Founder, Remedy Bloom

About Caribbean Thoroughbred Aftercare

Caribbean Thoroughbred Aftercare (CTA) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit and Puerto Rico 1101.01(a)(2) entity, recognized for its unique role as the only organization exclusively focused on the retirement and rehoming of Thoroughbred racehorses in the Caribbean. CTA provides a critical bridge between the end of a racehorse’s career and the beginning of its next chapter.

CTA partners with stateside rescues, regulatory bodies, and industry stakeholders to ensure retired horses receive proper medical evaluation, rehabilitation, and the opportunity to find lifelong homes.

Driven by a deep respect for the equine athlete, CTA is committed to fostering long-term change in how racehorses are retired across the region.

The Challenge

This equine aftercare nonprofit is responsible for helping retired racehorses transition into second careers or permanent retirement. Their work involves multiple stakeholders—adopters, donors, volunteers, veterinarians, media, and racing industry contacts—and every horse that enters the program must be tracked for life.

But with no unified system in place, essential data like medical histories, intake evaluations, training progress, and adoption timelines were scattered across paper forms, Excel files, and individual inboxes. Veterinary assessments were filled out by hand and manually re-entered into spreadsheets, leading to errors, time loss, and frustration. With 27 horses typically active at any time—and 40 to 60 transitioning through the program each year—the nonprofit needed a centralized solution that could scale alongside their mission, without exhausting the already-thin volunteer and admin team.

The Solution

We built a fully customized system in HubSpot, designed to serve as a single source of truth for every horse, adopter, and donor in the organization. With careful mapping of relationships and workflows, we created an ecosystem where data flows securely, transparently, and efficiently between teams.

Key elements of the solution included:

Digital forms for veterinary evaluations, automatically routed and linked to individual horse profiles
Custom object usage, treating each horse as a “Company” record for full lifecycle tracking
Automated workflows that move each horse through defined “deal stages”—from intake, rehab, training, to adoption
Templated communications to streamline responses to adopters and reduce admin lift
Segmentation and email automation to communicate appropriately with different audiences (e.g., donors vs. volunteers)
Automated follow-ups to keep adopter engagement high and ensure lifetime tracking commitments were met

The end result was a system that centralized operations, improved team transparency, and made data work for the mission instead of against it.

When you're managing animals, people, donors, and data—all on a shoestring—every minute and every misstep counts. This system didn’t just organize our client, it empowered them to grow without burning out.

The Results

The new system replaced disconnected spreadsheets and paper forms with a unified, cloud-based platform, saving the team an estimated 25–50 hours each month in manual admin and data entry. It enabled lifetime tracking for every horse, even through changes in ownership, and improved communication with segmented audiences through automated email tools. With structured, easily accessible data, the team could generate reporting for grant applications and track equine welfare outcomes more effectively. Most importantly, the system was built to scale—supporting future growth without placing additional strain on an already limited staff.

Our Approach

This wasn’t just a CRM build—it was an operational transformation. We worked closely with stakeholders to map real-life animal welfare workflows into a flexible digital infrastructure. By understanding both the emotional and logistical demands of the work, we built a solution that reduced overwhelm, created visibility across teams, and ultimately allowed this organization to better care for the horses at the heart of their mission.