Hey everyone, I am the once co-founder, and often-consultant these days, for a non-profit in the United States who does disaster relief with aircraft after hurricanes.
They were a semi-viral success this past year when a youtube celebrity in the US contributed to their work in assisting people impacted by the hurricanes that hit the US in September of 2024.
The problem they ran into is, going from a few hundred volunteers and donors to tens of thousands creates a logistical problem. They used to be able to send out tax receipts at the end of the year to a few donors manually, but this isn’t feasible when there are 40,000 or more of them.
So we got them set up with a CRM designed for non-profits that can properly invoice the cash donors, but that still left the problem of what to do for the 2,000 to 3,000 pilots and aircraft owners who flew things around storm affected areas for the organization. They are owed tax receipts as well, which the new CRM cannot automatically produce.
So we set up a form in their new CRM with a few custom account fields on it, and let the pilots who donated flight time submit it, like so:
On the back end, N8N…
- Catches a webhook from the CRM with the form submission
- Does some basic validation in a filter
- Does a datetime format transform on the submitted date from the form to make it fit the javascript datetime format that the CRM’s API wants
- Does the math on flight time vs tax deductible cost per hour to operate the aircraft in question from the form submission in a custom code action
- Re-inserts all of the formatted / calculated data back into the CRM as a zero dollar in-kind donation with a “fair market value” to comply with the tax rules on such donations, and triggers a confirmation email on that donation to be sent to the pilot / aircraft owner who flew stuff to hurricane victims.
We’re on day two since sending all of the volunteer pilots the invite to submit the form for their tax receipts, and a free-tier AWS ec2 instance has processed about a thousand receipts without a single miss.
News story with some pics and videos about the youtube guy with the helicopter and the volunteer organization are here: