How Ronald McDonald House Charities in Ukraine streamlined processes with Uspacy

As part of an international network present in 65 countries and regions worldwide, the foundation develops family-centered healthcare in Ukraine by opening Ronald McDonald Family Rooms in regional children’s hospitals. These rooms provide families with a place to rest and recharge, manage basic hygiene needs, spend time interacting and playing with their child, and have meals. In some locations, families can stay for weeks or even months in private rooms, for as long as needed for the child’s recovery. Accommodation in these rooms for parents of sick children is completely free.

Each year, thousands of families receive not just services but a sense of support during one of the most challenging periods of their lives.

For a long time, all operational activities at the Foundation were managed in Google Sheets — and there were many of them. Separate spreadsheets tracked visits, overnight stays, and provided service records. Another tracked contributions from partners and donors over the years. In total, there were around ten to twelve spreadsheets, each responsible for only one fragment of the process.

Data was stored separately and wasn’t connected, so reporting or analysis required manually compiling information from multiple files, creating extra work. To determine how many people were actually in a Family Room at any given moment, staff had to check the video monitoring system and literally count visitors through the cameras.

The initial request for a CRM system at the Foundation didn’t come from operational needs, but from donor and partner management. Over ten years, a large contact database had accumulated, constantly being “migrated” from one Excel sheet to another.

"I have a spreadsheet covering all ten years: tracking each donor’s contributions by year. These are very complex and difficult-to-read spreadsheets," says Anna Vlasenko, responsible for strategic partnerships and fundraising at the Foundation.

Invitations to charity events were sent manually, confirmation statuses weren’t automated, and donation histories weren’t connected to other processes. The scale of events was growing — from small gatherings to conferences with over two thousand participants. Managing this manually became increasingly challenging.

At the same time, operational activities were expanding. The Foundation began providing psychological support to parents, full meals, and first-aid hygiene kits. They continually focus on improving services in the Family Rooms, tracking even the smallest details. "We literally count everything — even cups of tea and coffee. We can see if coffee demand increased after replacing the coffee machine, or redistribute leftover supplies between rooms," says Anna. But doing all of this through spreadsheets was time-consuming and inefficient.

The global network uses Salesforce, but for the Ukrainian organization, this solution was too expensive in terms of both licenses and implementation.

The Foundation began looking for a Ukrainian CRM with a simple interface. “I knew that our staff don’t have IT backgrounds. The system had to be as easy to use as possible, so anyone could work in it and adapt quickly,” explains Anna.

Among Ukrainian solutions, Uspacy was chosen for its intuitive interface and flexible customization options.

The Foundation implemented Uspacy together with their system integration partner, Rubicon. The team had a clear vision of how they wanted the final process workflows to look but did not have an internal IT specialist to convert that vision into the system’s technical logic. “We can see the end result, but it’s difficult for us to describe exactly how it should be implemented internally,” explains Anna.

Together with Rubicon, the Foundation configured smart objects, card structures, visit logic, and analytics. The process required constant communication, testing, and adjustments, as some solutions needed to be adapted to real hospital conditions. Certain ideas evolved during implementation, while others were simplified to suit the hospitall staff. This collaborative effort—with the Foundation providing a clear vision and the partner handling technical implementation—allowed a systematic digital model of operational processes to be built.

The implementation started with operational activities—and this is where the fastest impact was felt.

The system was built with its own logic: first, a child’s card is created as the primary beneficiary, family members are linked to it, and each visit to a Family Room is recorded as a separate visit using Smart Objects. During an active visit, staff mark all provided services—accommodation, meals, psychological support, and issued “care packages.”

Part of the team also actively uses tasks, the calendar, and email within the CRM. Some employees have fully transitioned to working in the system.

“One colleague told me, ‘I always thought I loved Excel. But now that I’ve figured out the CRM, I don’t think that anymore,’” recalls Anna.

The most noticeable change was real-time process transparency. Previously, understanding the current situation required manually compiling data or even checking actual attendance through cameras. Today, all information is available in the system. Anna explains that she can now log into the CRM at any moment, filter by city, and immediately see how many active visits there are, how many people are in the Family Room, which services are being provided, and which rooms are occupied. This gives management the ability to quickly assess the situation without additional inquiries on-site.

Analytics have become not only faster but also deeper. The Foundation now tracks detailed statistics on every aspect of its work: the number of families and children, length of stay, volume of meals provided, number of psychological consultations, issued “care packages,” participation in trainings, and additional activities. Data is collected systematically, allowing for clear reporting over any period—from a single day to a full year. According to Anna, this meticulous approach has become a competitive advantage for the Foundation within the international network: they can report on metrics that other countries do not even track.

In addition to analytics, the structure of work itself has changed. Information is no longer scattered across multiple files or stored in isolated spreadsheets. Data is interconnected: child, family, visits, provided services, statistics—all follow a unified logic. This has reduced the risk of errors, simplified report preparation, and made managing regional operations far more predictable.

For the Ronald McDonald House Foundation in Ukraine, Uspacy has become more than just a CRM for donor management—it is gradually turning into a full-fledged operational system for managing charitable activities. The system has unified fragmented processes into a single workflow and provided leadership with a comprehensive real-time overview.

“The Foundation gained control over regional processes, deep and transparent analytics, and the ability to generate reports without lengthy manual data compilation. What previously required hours of work with spreadsheets, cross-checks, and clarifications is now available in a few clicks—quickly, accurately, and without the risk of losing important details.”

Halyna Solovei

Director of the Foundation

Further automation of partner and event management is ahead. Yet even now, the Foundation’s operational activities run systematically and predictably. This transformation has become the most tangible result of the implementation.