We're hiring! View open positions →
Case Studies>Inland Empire Community Foundation

Building Capacity: How the Inland Empire Community Foundation Is Investing in the Future of Fundraising

Inland Empire Community Foundation logo

“Having DonorAtlas as an easy, AI driven alternative to traditional wealth screening tools is critical for profile analysis. It makes the most of our team’s time.”

Brie Griset Smith

Brie Griset Smith

Chief Development Officer, Inland Empire Community Foundation

Weeks → Hours

to build comprehensive donor profiles

$250M+

in grants awarded over the past two decades

This case study is based on insights shared on the Give Better Get Better podcast.

Inland Empire Community Foundation logo

About Inland Empire Community Foundation

For more than 85 years, the Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF) has been deeply rooted in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, working alongside donors, nonprofits, and community partners to expand opportunity and drive meaningful change, awarding over $250 million in grants over the past two decades. Their work spans support for grassroots organizations as well as major regional priorities, including housing, economic mobility, education, and community connection.

Visit Inland Empire Community Foundation →

The Challenge: Insight Takes Time

Like many community foundations, though, IECF must continually balance ambitious goals with limited time and resources.
At its core, the challenge is capacity. What can the team realistically accomplish with the time and budget available, and how can it make the greatest impact?
Brie Griset Smith, IECF’s Chief Development Officer, brings more than 25 years of experience to her role. One lesson has remained constant: effective fundraising depends not only on relationships, but on insight.
Knowing who to engage, when to reach out, and how to build meaningful connections requires a deep understanding of every constituent. Reaching that level of insight, however, has traditionally been extremely time-intensive.
Before they used DonorAtlas, prospect research often required IECF team members to piece together scattered public information, cross check sources, and build profiles manually. For a lean team, this process could take weeks just to produce a few dozen full profiles, limiting how many individuals they could meaningfully prioritize.
In practice, attention tended to focus on board members and highly visible donors, leaving less time to explore the broader network of potential supporters surrounding them.

The Shift: From Searching to Seeing

DonorAtlas changed that dynamic.
Instead of spending hours tracking down scattered internet information, IECF’s team now has access to structured, comprehensive profiles built with AI, all in one place.
What once took weeks now takes hours.
But the real shift wasn’t just speed, it was about clarity.
Brie’s team could see a more complete picture of every constituent: their interests, giving history, geographic ties, and how they may already be connected to IECF through existing relationships. That level of visibility changes how IECF approaches their work.
It also expanded who got attention. Instead of focusing only on board members or the most visible donors, IECF could now identify and engage a broader network: volunteers, community connectors, and emerging supporters who were always there, but harder to prioritize.
With DonorAtlas’ built-in relationship mapping, those connections were no longer scattered across spreadsheets or stuck in someone’s memory. The team could clearly see how people are linked and where warm introductions might exist.
And that kind of visibility doesn’t just make fundraising easier for the Inland Empire, it makes it smarter.

Better Data, Better Decisions

One thing that really matters for Brie’s team is accuracy. Bad information doesn’t just slow you down, it can lead to missed opportunities or misaligned outreach.
Every data point in DonorAtlas is tied back to a public source, which gives the IECF team confidence in what they’re seeing. Instead of wondering if something is outdated or incomplete, they can focus on how to actually use the information.
It shifted the work from “finding data” to “thinking strategically about it” (aka what fundraisers are best at!)

The Bigger Picture

For IECF, investing in DonorAtlas is about building long-term capacity.
It’s about making sure their team can focus on what really matters: directing resources where they’ll have the greatest impact.
To hear more about IECF’s investment in capacity-building, listen to the full Give Better Get Better podcast episode.

Curious how DonorAtlas
can work for you?

Book a Demo