How Palmera automated donor engagement and its field-to-sponsor content pipeline
From a fully documented Zapier backend to n8n pipelines that carry letters, audio and video from the field to sponsors — with checks on every AI step.
Client
Palmera
Industry
Non-profit (Australia & Sri Lanka)
Engagement
Ongoing IT advisor & automation engineer
The challenge
Palmera delivers education and community development programs across Sri Lanka. With a small team and limited technical resources, donations, donor communications, auditing and reporting ran across disconnected tools.
Its sponsorship programs rely on regular multilingual updates from the field, which took significant manual effort to process before they could reach sponsors.
What we built
End-to-end Zapier automation for donations, auditing, reporting and notifications — documented in a manual for handover
n8n pipelines for field content: upload, AI transcription and translation, logging and review
Validation on every AI step, so failed outputs raise an alert instead of slipping through
Automated video compression for field footage
Hands-on Claude training for staff, plus AI tools for localised community content
Results
Automated backend
Donations, auditing, reporting and notifications running without manual intervention
Field-to-sponsor pipeline
Multilingual updates move from upload through translation to review automatically
Human-reviewed AI
Checks and review steps keep AI output accurate before anything is published
Team upskilled
Staff trained to use Claude in their day-to-day work
“SmoothSailor streamlined our entire backend workflow automation through Zapier — donations, auditing, reporting, notifications, and donor engagement all run seamlessly now. The introduction of AI tools transformed how we create localized content for our community projects across Sri Lanka.”
Abarna Raj
CEO, Palmera
Stack
Want results like Palmera?
Book a free 20-minute call and we'll map out how automation can transform your non-profit's operations.