Case Study: CAUSE + EFFECT Strategy and Marketing achieves 60X improvement in development time with Sisense

Marketing Firm Sees 60x Improvement in Development Time

CAUSE + EFFECT Strategy and Marketing (CESM), founded by Michael Sutton to help nonprofits turn data into marketing strategy, was hampered by slow, inflexible Excel-based analysis. CESM needed to dig into time-series donor data—renewal and acquisition rates, attrition, seasonality, and program shifts—but static spreadsheets made it difficult to uncover actionable insights quickly.

By adopting Sisense, CESM built interactive dashboards that blend CSV, Excel, and Salesforce sources into 3D views and time-series analytics, making it easy to compare departments and years. The change cut development time by 60x (from about a week to roughly 30 minutes), revealed hidden patterns like donor shifts between programs, and put deeper, faster insights into the hands of clients and proposal teams for better decision-making.

CAUSE + EFFECT Strategy and Marketing

Michael Sutton

VP of Client Service & New Business Development