Hospital Pequeno Príncipe increases fundraising by 100% with Pipefy

More than half of Hospital Pequeno Príncipe’s budget comes from donations, which makes the New Projects department a critical pillar of the hospital’s clinical operation. Until 2016, that department ran on an outdated CRM and processes held together by spreadsheets, email, and paper. Each donor’s history lived inside the inbox of whoever owned the account. When that person went on vacation or moved into a new role, the relationship with the investor went with them.

As the donor base expanded, the manual model became the ceiling of the operation. Sales pipeline, accounts receivable, and investor onboarding all lived in separate tools that did not talk to each other. Communication broke down, work was duplicated, and fundraising capacity was capped by how much the team could push through by hand. Scaling meant hiring more people to do the same work.

In 2017, the team adopted Pipefy to bring the entire operation into a single platform. Today, more than 40 workflows run inside the tool, connecting fundraising, relationship management, finance, and HR in one place. Every signed partnership automatically triggers the next teams in line: finance issues the contract and manages receivables, while the relationship team runs investor onboarding with all the data already integrated.

Pipefy’s no-code flexibility let the team design and refine its own processes without depending on IT. Monthly invoicing, once handled by hand, became fully automated. Recruiting and selection moved from paper to digital forms and a single funnel, with clear rules governing how each candidate advances through every stage. The operation gained end-to-end traceability, and every donor’s history became an asset of the institution rather than something locked inside an employee’s inbox.

Automating repetitive tasks gave the team back the time that actually moves the needle on fundraising: relationship-building with donors. Finance cut operational routines by 65%, and the hiring team cut its time-to-fill in half, a decisive gain at a moment when the New Projects area was growing 30% every six months.

Doubling fundraising in five years translated directly into expanding the hospital’s capacity to treat children and adolescents through Brazil’s public health system without compromising clinical excellence. For leadership, the most strategic win was something else entirely: the institution moved away from depending on the personal memory of individual employees and started operating on processes, data, and a consolidated history, the foundation it needs to sustain fundraising growth in the years ahead.

Founded in 1919, Hospital Pequeno Príncipe is the largest pediatric hospital in Brazil, with more than 288,000 outpatient visits and 20,000 surgeries per year. Together with Faculdades Pequeno Príncipe and the Pelé Pequeno Príncipe Research Institute, it forms the Pequeno Príncipe Complex, a national reference in high-complexity care for children and adolescents.