Case study 04

Analytics when the field disappeared.

Marketing and Operations Analyst at The Desai Foundation — a nonprofit running health, livelihood and menstrual-equity programs across rural India. I joined in February 2020. One month later, every in-person program the organization ran was suspended by a global pandemic.

Feb 2020 – Mar 2022 · 25 months Nonprofit · international development Analytics · A/B testing · Automation
Attested
+18%
CTR
Digital strategy refined via Google Analytics + dashboarding.
Attested
−22%
CPC
A/B tests on ad creative and landing pages.
Attested
+30%
reporting efficiency
Automated data tracking replacing manual reporting.

About the organization Context — theirs, not mine

Founded 1997; a public nonprofit since 2014. Today the Foundation reports operating in 8 Indian states across 4,000+ rural communities with 30+ programs, and 13 million+ lives impacted (thedesaifoundation.org, 2026). Those are the organization's numbers across its whole history — not my results. They're here so you know the scale of the machine I was measuring inside. My numbers are the flagged ones above.

The pandemic pivot

The Foundation's model was physical: health camps, vocational training, community programs. COVID suspended all of it — and during my window the organization stood up Heroes for Humanity (2021), its community-facilitator COVID response, while fundraising moved almost entirely digital. Marketing analytics stopped being reporting and became navigation.

MY TENURE — FEB 2020 → MAR 2022 COVID-19 — in-person programs suspended, fundraising goes digital I join world stops Heroes for Humanity launches (2021) I hand over

Dates verified against the Foundation's published timeline. Heroes for Humanity launched during my tenure — the organization's initiative, named here as context for the conditions, not claimed as mine.

What I did

Google Analyticsacquisition + behavior
Exceldashboards + automation
Meta · Google AdsA/B tested campaigns
Mailchimp-class emaildonor communication

Why this one matters

Nonprofit marketing is marketing with the constraints turned all the way up: small budgets, volunteer contributors, two continents, and a "conversion" that funds a health camp. It's where I learned that the analytics have to be honest enough to steer by — the habit this entire site is built on. It's also the origin of the reporting instinct I now use to build ROI dashboards for business owners.

VerifiedOrganization scale, program timeline — thedesaifoundation.org, checked August 2026, cited as context only.

Attested+18% CTR · −22% CPC · ~30% reporting efficiency — my measurements from campaign tools and internal reporting, 2020–22. Artifacts stayed with the organization; the flags tell you which numbers rest on my word, and I'll gladly walk through method, window and baseline for any of them.