Biggest Notion fan over here. I've run Kwanda on it since the day we launched, and honestly, without it, we couldn't keep our impact data anywhere near as transparent as we do.
Our quarterly impact report used to take me about a week to pull together. Now it builds itself in 10 to 15 minutes, and I only touch the intro, the outro, and a final review.
The same is true for every number on our website. People reached, money deployed, and monthly running costs. Nobody types any of it in.
How it works
Everything lives in Notion, and the numbers keep themselves up to date. A partner sends us their monthly update through a form. An AI assistant reads it, works out how many more people were reached, and adds that to a running count. Our bank feed does the same for money: when a grant goes out, it lands in our payouts table, and recurring charges show up as fixed costs. All of it flows straight to the website.
This system is a real point of pride. It's taken months of tweaking to get it right, and I recorded a short demo of it all working together. You can watch it here.
How I built it
- I started with one home for the numbers. Everything sits in Notion, one table per thing we track: people reached, payments out, and monthly costs. Everything else reads from here.
- I connected the tables via relationship fields, so each table knows about our countries, projects, and partners. I enter a number once, and it shows up everywhere it belongs, totalled by country or by project. This is the part that killed manual entry.
- I made updates arrive as structured input. Partners submit their progress through a Notion form, so updates land in one place instead of being scattered across email.
- I set up an AI assistant (Claude) to read each update, work out how many more people were reached, and add it as a dated entry to the count. The sum of those entries is the live figure on our site.
- I connected our bank and accounting (Wise and Xero), so money tracks itself. When a grant is issued, it is added to our payouts. When a charge recurs monthly, it is flagged as a fixed cost.
- I push live numbers to our website automatically via our CMS (Storyblok), so the public figures are always up to date.
- I put a date on every entry. It's what makes reporting trivial: I can pull any quarter on demand.
- Once a quarter, the assistant pulls the numbers, adds the project updates, crops and places the images, and fills out our template. I write the intro and outro and review the rest.
What I've learned building it
The relations do most of the work. Entering a single number and having it appear per country, per partner, per project is what makes Notion, as a database, so powerful.
Tools used
- Data hub: Notion
- Scheduling: Claude Code
- Accounting: Xero
- Website CMS: Storyblok
If your organisation reports numbers to anyone, a board, a funder, customers, or the public, this is worth setting up. The data maintains itself, and creating reports stops being a dreaded task.
Bonus: you can talk to your data and pull little insights that double as content to share.