kaldero
Consulting + Tech for Greater Impact
As resources shrink and complexity grows, we help mission-driven teams stay effective and move faster by combining decades of collective tech and social impact experience.
Why should for-profits have all the good tools?
You have a lot on your plate, and learning new software or AI tools is just another item on the list. Working with Kaldero helps you reduce that cognitive load and focus on what really matters to you.You get the benefits of powerful tools commonly used in tech startups and other for-profit companies without having to become an expert in them. We always keep transparency, security, and human judgment at the center. Together we can put these tools to use for good.
Solutions that Meet You Where You Are
Click below to view examples of how Kaldero can help your team leverage technology to move faster. These scenarios are grounded in real-world problems the Kaldero team has encountered.
What Can Kaldero Help With?
Design with people, not just for them
We start with the people at the heart of your work: the participants, partners, and staff who make change possible. By understanding their experiences and priorities you can design programs that fit real needs and build lasting trust.We can help with things like:
Creating narrative-based models, capturing the diverse perspectives of your target group in the planning phase when you can easily pivot.
Facilitating co-design sessions, capturing feedback and action items for you and producing useful summaries and to-do lists.
Reflection workshops to review what works and what doesn't and identify "so what" insights. Helps turn experience into learning and adaptation.
See how change really happens
Big challenges don’t exist in isolation. Systems thinking helps you see how people, programs, and policies interact so you can focus where your effort will make the biggest difference.We can help with things like:
Stakeholder mapping to visually identify all of the people, groups, or organizations that affect or are affected by a program, and to understand their relationships, interests, and influence.
Goal setting with a focus on data collection planning and monitoring so that you can detect early on if your program is off-track.
Ecosystem mapping to capture the broader context in which a program operates, helping you to understand system-level influences and leverage points.
Use technology to elevate, not replace, your expertise
We use modern design and AI tools to make strategy and learning more efficient by finding patterns, surfacing evidence, and helping teams collaborate.We can help with things like:
Ingesting disparate resources like reports, notes, datasets, and research articles and creating proposal drafts, summaries, or logic models.
Creating interactive, sharable dashboards for your team and stakeholders.
Helping you plan an AI strategy for new RFPs.
Bringing It All Together
Clarity, confidence, and progress that lasts
Together, these approaches help you design more intentional programs, adapt as you learn, and make decisions with confidence.It’s about seeing the whole picture and knowing where to focus next.
WHERE IMPACT TAKES SHAPE
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Thank you!
We appreciate you reaching out and look forward to learning more about your project!You will hear from us in the next few days to schedule a time to chat.
About Us
Vanessa Lynskey
MBA, MPH
Product Management Leader
Co-FounderWith a background that bridges public health, business, and technology, Vanessa approaches every challenge through a uniquely interdisciplinary lens. She helps mission-driven teams harness innovation to amplify their impact and create meaningful, lasting change.Vanessa began her career in public health, designing and evaluating programs to address complex social challenges. After earning her MBA she moved into the tech sector, leading teams that built data-driven, human-centered products from concept to launch. Across every role she has maintained a focus on translating complexity into practical solutions that empower teams to create measurable social good.Vanessa believes that the creativity and innovation shaping the tech world should be harnessed to tackle society’s most pressing challenges, and she’s excited to bring that vision to life with Kaldero.
Heather Hendy
MA, Ed. Policy
Software Engineering Leader
Co-FounderHeather’s work sits at the intersection of technology, equity, and systems change. With a career that spans education, engineering, and data science, she’s focused on building tools that make organizations more transparent, accountable, and fair.After a decade in education program design and management, Heather shifted into software engineering -- driven by the conviction that data, when used responsibly, can accelerate structural change. At Bitly and Syndio, she led teams that translated complex analyses into actionable, human-centered products. At Expel her focus was using technology to bring operational efficiency to non-technical teams. Heather's leadership combined technical rigor with a focus on clarity, access, and measurable outcomes.Now, she’s co-creating a new company built on that same belief: that when people can see their systems clearly and have access to the tools they need, they can make an even greater impact.
Hello! Please tell us a bit about yourself and what you are working on. We'll reach out to schedule a time to chat.
Case Study Examples
Below are hypothetical case-studies based on real conversations we've had with people like you - people trying to do more with less. What would your case study look like?
Case Study Example #1
Rethinking an Existing Program for Greater Impact
A program manager at a nonprofit focused on women's health was preparing for the second year of a community education event. Last year’s event was well received, but feedback had trickled in from many directions — misplaced survey forms, informal emails, and hallway conversations — making it hard to see the full picture of what to change.They wanted to make this year’s event more strategic: clearer goals, stronger alignment with community priorities, and sessions that met the needs of different participant groups.They could work with Kaldero to gather and synthesize the feedback they already had, identify key audience personas using existing community data, and use a narrative-based modeling approach to design a program flow that delivers value for each persona.Using Kaldero’s structured, design-informed process, they could test ideas for the agenda before committing, ensuring the event advances both learning and connection across the organization's initiatives.
Case Study Example #2
Turning Academic Expertise into a Fundable, High-Impact Proposal
A principal investigator leading a multi-university research team was preparing a large grant proposal. Each collaborator brought valuable studies, data, and ideas but the group struggled to turn that collective expertise into a clear, compelling proposal that met the funder’s expectations and promised real value for the communities it aimed to serve. The evidence lived in separate folders, inboxes, and notes, and no one had a full picture of how it all connected.They could work with Kaldero to bring everything together — the RFP, each investigator’s research, and supporting documents — and make sense of it as a whole. By analyzing the content through both a systems lens and the perspective of the funder and end users, Kaldero could help surface a cohesive narrative, identify alignment with the RFP, and outline a theory of change that clearly links activities to meaningful outcomes for the intended audience. The result: a proposal that’s compelling, strategic, and grounded in real impact.
Case Study Example #3
Understanding Program Impact in Real Time
An executive at an education nonprofit was leading a large network of volunteers delivering programs year-round. The work was deeply valued, but when funders — and even volunteers — asked whether the programs were making a measurable difference, the answers came too slowly. Their traditional evaluation cycle took years to complete, leaving the team with data that was outdated by the time it arrived and with little understanding of how the results were derived.They could work with Kaldero to design a lighter, more continuous approach to learning. By mapping out what outcomes mattered most, identifying existing data sources, and creating quick feedback loops, Kaldero could help them see patterns and insights sooner without adding heavy reporting burdens. This kind of real-time learning would let the organization adapt programs as they go and share credible, up-to-date stories of impact with funders and their volunteer network alike.