Case Study: Vanguard Charitable achieves 50% cut in manual reporting and optimizes strategic grantmaking with Tableau Software

Vanguard Charitable optimizes strategic grant making, cuts manual reporting by 50% with Tableau

Vanguard Charitable is a large donor-advised fund that helps more than 20,000 donors give strategically and has granted over $10 billion since 1997. The Research & Strategy team was bogged down producing 150+ customized, manual reports—spending roughly 80% of their time wrangling data—which limited donors’ access to timely insights and forced the organization to balance analytics needs with keeping fees low.

In 2018 they piloted Tableau dashboards with 30-minute refreshes, shifting reporting to interactive, current-data visualizations and launching tools like the NAVi COVID-19 mapping tool. The change cut manual reporting by 50% in year one (now below 30% and aiming for zero), reduced one person’s monthly reporting from four full days to about three hours, and flipped their analytics effort so staff spend far more time analyzing insights that guide donor philanthropy.

Vanguard Charitable

Vicky Kelberer

Research and Strategy Group Manager