Why We Started DonorAtlas
Will Schrepferman
My cofounder Aaron Berger and I met via a mutual friend during my senior year at Harvard:
We both grew up working in nonprofits and politics. Aaron grew up in Pittsburgh, where he had recently run data for a judicial campaign and worked for an education nonprofit. I grew up in Indiana, where I helped my school fundraise for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and worked for an advocacy startup.
Aaron and I shared a lot of the same experiences, including major frustration with the way we'd raised money before. Over winter break in 2024, we interviewed hundreds of other organizations and found that we weren't alone in slogging through manual donor research, struggling against archaic software, and wrestling with low-quality donor data.
So we started DonorAtlas to change that. We're on a mission to make it easy for anyone to raise money for things that matter.
Since then, we've raised a $2.75m seed round, hired an amazing team in NYC, and have worked with 150+ organizations to make donor research easier.
Thoughts on this piece or want to get in touch? Send me an email (will@donoratlas.com), I'm always happy to start a dialogue :)