JCC already had monday.com. What they didn’t have was a system — a coherent structure that connected their data, automated their processes, and gave every team across five locations a single place to work from. Their staff knew the tool could help. They just needed a partner who could show them how to build it right.
This is what OrangeDot built for them, and what the team gained when it went live.
What We’ll Cover
- About JCC and the breadth of their community programming
- Challenge 1: Sprawling spreadsheets across grants, donations, childcare, and reservations with no unified visibility
- Challenge 2: monday.com purchased but not fully utilized — the team needed strategic guidance to get started
- How OrangeDot built the nursery, donation, and grant management boards that made the biggest difference
- How cross-collaborative workflows, automations, and dashboards connected five locations
- The combined impact: 3 hours of weekly prep down to 5 minutes, 60% faster admin, and full team independence
→ 5 min
About the Client
JCC is a pluralistic Jewish community center offering childcare, preschool, after-school programs, summer camps, family programming, and holiday events across multiple locations. Inspired by Jewish values, JCC welcomes all families regardless of background — building the kind of community connections that help young families make friends, find belonging, and create their own path.
Behind the programming that makes that possible is a team managing a significant volume of operational data: student and classroom records, grant applications, donor relationships, room reservations, and more. Across five locations, keeping all of that organized and accessible — without a system designed to hold it — had become one of the organization’s biggest operational challenges.
Two Challenges, One Underutilized Tool
JCC’s challenges were interconnected. The first was a data problem: the organization was running on a patchwork of spreadsheets across multiple teams and locations, making reporting time-consuming, collaboration difficult, and continuity nearly impossible to maintain as data changed constantly. The second was a tool problem: JCC had already purchased monday.com, believing it was the right solution — but without the strategic guidance to set it up effectively, the platform sat underused while the spreadsheet chaos continued.
JCC was working with a large and varied set of operational data: grant applications, donation records, childcare and nursery enrollment, room reservations, and program administration, spread across teams at multiple locations. Each team managed their own spreadsheets, and because none of them were connected, information couldn’t easily be shared or aggregated across the organization.
That fragmentation made reporting slow and labor-intensive. Team leads were spending upwards of three hours per week manually compiling data before weekly meetings — time that came directly out of their already demanding workloads. And because the data was constantly changing, any report was potentially outdated the moment it was produced.
Collaboration across JCC’s five locations was equally difficult. Teams couldn’t easily see what others were working on, share context on shared programs, or communicate without resorting to email threads that added to the noise rather than reducing it.
Spreadsheets are built for data storage, not for collaboration, automation, or real-time visibility across multiple locations. When a community organization is managing grants, donations, nursery enrollment, and program data through separate, static spreadsheets, every reporting task is a manual project and every cross-team update is a conversation that should be happening in a system instead of an email thread.
JCC had already taken the step of investing in monday.com, recognizing it as the right platform for their needs. But recognizing the right tool and knowing how to configure it for a specific organization’s workflows are two different things. Without a strategic implementation partner to guide the setup, the team found themselves struggling to use the platform effectively on their own.
The result was a platform that sat underutilized while the spreadsheet-based processes it was meant to replace continued. The team knew what they wanted — simple, user-friendly boards that housed their data, gave them visibility, and helped them collaborate across locations — but they needed a partner who could take that vision and build it into something the whole organization could rely on.
monday.com is a powerful platform with significant configurability — which is exactly why it can be difficult to set up without guidance. The flexibility that makes it so effective for complex organizations also means that the wrong starting point leads to boards that don’t quite fit, workflows that require workarounds, and teams that default back to what they already know. Getting the architecture right from the beginning is what turns the tool into a system the team can trust.
The Solution Part One: Nursery, Donation, and Grant Management Boards
Nursery board organized by classroom
OrangeDot built a dedicated nursery board that houses all data on JCC’s students, organized by classroom. Allergies, emergency contacts, invoices, enrollment status, and other key details are all accessible in one central location — giving staff at every location immediate access to the information they need without having to search through spreadsheets or contact colleagues at another site. Data that had previously been maintained inconsistently is now structured, current, and easy to find.
Donation board with full donor history across all locations
JCC’s donation board consolidates all donation-related data across every location into a single view. Staff can see information about individual donors, track the history of their contributions, and view cumulative lifetime donation totals from one record — eliminating the time previously spent aggregating donation data from multiple spreadsheets before reporting. Everything is in one place, always current, and always accessible.
Grant management board for end-to-end visibility
The grant management board gives JCC’s team a complete project management view of every active grant application. Staff can see all outstanding tasks, track the progress of each grant through its stages, and confirm when submissions have been completed — replacing the informal tracking that had made it difficult to know exactly where each grant stood at any given time.
The Solution Part Two: Cross-Collaborative Workflows, Automations, and Dashboards
Beyond the three anchor boards, OrangeDot built the connecting layer that turned individual boards into an integrated organizational system. Cross-collaborative workflows allowed teams at different locations to work within the same boards without stepping on each other’s data. Automations handled the routine updates, notifications, and task assignments that had previously required manual intervention. And dashboards gave leadership and program leads a real-time view of operations across all five locations — accessible at a glance rather than assembled through hours of manual compilation.
OrangeDot also worked closely with Raquel Ostrovsky, JCC’s Director of Administration, through an ongoing support engagement designed to build genuine independence. Rather than simply handing over a finished system, OrangeDot focused on giving Raquel the skills and confidence to create and manage boards and automations herself — so the organization could continue evolving its monday.com environment without depending on external support for every change.
The Combined Impact
Weekly Report Prep: From 3 Hours to Under 5 Minutes
Team leads who had previously spent upwards of three hours each week manually compiling data for meetings can now find everything they need in under five minutes through the new dashboards. The data is current, organized, and structured for the exact reporting questions the team asks each week — without any aggregation work required before the meeting starts.
60% Faster Program Admin
With clear, automated processes in place for program management, JCC is completing the administrative work for their programs 60% faster than before the monday.com implementation. Tasks that required manual tracking, follow-up, and data entry across multiple spreadsheets now move through structured workflows that handle the routine work automatically.
Cross-Location Collaboration That Actually Works
Teams across five locations are now working from a shared system rather than isolated spreadsheet files. Communication that previously happened through back-and-forth email threads now happens directly in the boards where the relevant data lives — with context, history, and accountability attached. The amount of coordination email flowing between locations has been significantly reduced as a result.
Full Visibility and Organizational Independence
JCC now has comprehensive reporting that the organization never had with siloed spreadsheets — full visibility into day-to-day operations across all locations and programs, accessible to every stakeholder who needs it. And through OrangeDot’s ongoing support partnership, Raquel has developed the confidence and skill set to build and manage boards and automations independently, giving JCC the ability to grow their monday.com system as their needs evolve.
Five locations on one platform · Nursery, donation, and grant data unified in one hub · Automated processes replacing hours of manual work · Full organizational independence through ongoing training and support
FAQs
Is monday.com a good fit for nonprofit and community organizations managing diverse data types?
Yes — and JCC is a strong example of why. monday.com’s flexibility allows it to be configured for very different types of data within the same workspace: student records, donor histories, grant applications, and room reservations can all live in connected boards that share data where relevant. The key is designing the architecture around the organization’s specific programs and workflows rather than starting from a generic template. That’s where OrangeDot’s implementation work makes the difference.
How does the system handle data that’s relevant across multiple locations?
Cross-collaborative workflows in monday.com allow teams at different locations to access and update shared boards while maintaining clear ownership and structure within each board. Permissions can be configured so each location sees what it needs to see without confusion or duplication, while leadership and program administrators can see the full picture across all locations from a single dashboard view.
What does the ongoing support engagement look like, and why is it valuable?
OrangeDot’s ongoing support for JCC was focused on building organizational independence rather than dependency. Working closely with Raquel Ostrovsky, OrangeDot provided guidance on building new boards, configuring automations, and adapting the system as JCC’s needs evolved. The goal was to give the organization a team member who could own and grow the platform — so that new programs, new workflows, and new reporting needs could be addressed internally without requiring an external consultant every time.
How does monday.com handle sensitive data like nursery records and donor information?
monday.com includes role-based permission controls that can restrict access to sensitive records by team, user, or board. Student allergy information, emergency contacts, and donor financials can all be configured so that only the people who need access can see them. OrangeDot configures these controls as part of the implementation, ensuring that data security is built into the system structure from the start rather than treated as an afterthought.
Final Thoughts
JCC had the right instincts when they chose monday.com. What they needed was someone to help them act on them — to take the platform they’d invested in and build it into something their team could actually use, rely on, and grow with.
The result was more than a set of boards. It was a shift in how the organization operates: from reactive and manual to proactive and automated, from siloed and disconnected to collaborative and visible. The three hours that used to disappear into weekly report prep are now five minutes. The admin work that consumed their team is now 60% faster. And the confidence to keep building — to adapt the system as the organization grows — lives inside JCC now, not just with OrangeDot.
If your nonprofit or community organization is managing complex operations across multiple spreadsheets and locations, we can help you build something that works better. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →