From Excel to Real-Time: How Excentia Transformed Board Reporting With Align’s SmartPulse

The Challenge: Manual Reporting at Scale

Karen Fitzgerald has spent her career in service to others. As Chief Strategy Officer at Excentia Human Services, she is rooted in its 60-year mission to walk alongside children and adults with developmental disabilities, autism, and behavioral health needs from early childhood through a lifespan of services.

Across 8 departments spanning early childhood programs, community and day services, behavioral health care, and residential services, Excentia’s work is deeply personal: honoring the unique essence of every person they serve and empowering them to thrive at home, at school, at work, and in the community.

Karen managed the organization’s strategic plan through a complex Excel spreadsheet. It had served them for years, but as Excentia grew and the board evolved into a more strategic, fiduciary-focused body, the limits of that approach became harder to ignore.

Preparing the board package took a minimum of three days: chasing department chiefs for updates, verifying dates, fact-checking, and assembling a final 50+ page document.

Karen is also the Executive Director of The Aspire Foundation for Excentia Human Services. Her time is pulled between these two positions, so developing a document that could quickly provide the key elements important to the Board was what she needed.

For an organization now navigating its first five-year growth plan, with ambitions to expand across Pennsylvania, open new residential homes, and grow its direct care workforce, that was time Karen couldn’t afford to lose.

When Karen finally walked into those board meetings, the room reflected the limitations of the process. Board members worked through dense, static pages of departmental reports — information that was already aging by the time it was printed.

The progress was real. What was missing was a way to show it accurately and confidently, without costing Karen and her team multiple days every quarter.

The Impact: Measurable ROI Across the Organization

When Excentia came to Align, the goal was not board package efficiency. The team wanted the platform to bring structure and visibility to their strategic plan: aligning departments around shared goals, tracking progress, and building the accountability rhythms a growing organization needs. A system to further the momentum they started.

They saw momentum fairly quickly, but when SmartPulse released a year into their journey, it changed what was possible. SmartPulse is Align’s automated board reporting tool. It pulls live strategic plan data directly into a polished, presentation-ready report, eliminating the manual assembly that had been consuming Karen’s time every quarter. It turned a year of internal progress into something the board and Karen could trust.

Strategic Execution: SLT Alignment Before the Boardroom

SmartPulse didn’t just change what the board saw. It changed how Karen and Excentia’s senior leadership team showed up to the meeting.

For many executive directors, the board meeting is where the pressure peaks. But the real work of effective nonprofit board reporting happens before anyone enters the room, in the conversations where leadership gets honest about what’s working, what isn’t, and what story they actually want to tell.

Before every board meeting, Karen now runs a preliminary SmartPulse review with her five-person senior leadership team. Together, they assess collective progress, identify gaps, and decide what to bring forward. It’s not a rehearsal. It’s a moment of shared accountability — and shared recognition.

“It gave us the opportunity to really think about what we wanted to share with the board. And it also gave all of us the ability to say, ‘Hey, we’re doing this right — let’s take a moment and be proud of it.’ That’s important.”

That pre-meeting review also functions as a live quality check. If Karen wants to shift emphasis and spotlight a financial stability metric or surface a specific milestone, a revised report is back in her hands within hours. For a team navigating a five-year strategic plan across multiple departments, that kind of agility is extremely impactful.

Visibility Into a Five-Year Plan

For a nonprofit 60 years into its mission and just beginning its most ambitious chapter, SmartPulse didn’t just solve a reporting problem. It gave Karen the space to lead the work that matters most.

SmartPulse gave Karen back 3 days each quarter and replaced a 50+-page manual report with a clean, accurate board package she can present with confidence — freeing her to focus on the mission.

“From an Excel spreadsheet to this — it’s amazing. It has saved me a hell of a lot of time, and the board walked out able to talk eloquently about what we do.”

Nonprofit executives looking to improve board reporting often start with the same question Karen had: how do you give the board meaningful reports on a complex plan without rebuilding your entire reporting process from scratch every time?

SmartPulse answers that question, pulling live data from your strategic execution into a board-ready presentation, so the story your board sees is always current, always accurate, and never costs your team three days to produce.

Excentia’s story is a nonprofit story, but the underlying problem shows up just as often in founder-led and family-owned businesses as it does in mission-driven organizations with boards to answer to.