Violet Crown Analytics builds and hosts WordPress sites and makes sense of data for small nonprofits — and for the local businesses we care about.
Most of the organizations we work with have no IT department, no analyst, and nobody whose actual job is the website. There are roughly two million nonprofits in this country and the overwhelming majority of them look exactly like that: a few staff, a board that means well, a site nobody has touched in years, and a donor database that everybody quietly distrusts. That is the work.
We do both halves on purpose. The website is how people find you, give to you, sign up, apply, foster, volunteer. The data is how you find out whether any of that is working. Most shops do one or the other, and you end up managing two vendors who point at each other when something breaks. We would rather be the one person who built the form and can also tell you what the form is telling you.
We also work with small businesses that matter to us — the kind with a real person behind the counter. And we turn down work that runs against what we are for. That is not a marketing line, it is a filter, and it is most of the reason the clients we do take tend to stay.
The name comes from the Violet Crown — the deep purple-and-lavender glow that settles over the Austin, TX hills at sunset. O. Henry called it that in 1894 and the city has been the Violet Crown ever since. Kara is from Austin. The name fit.
The Team
We’re three people. The work is led by Kara. Ari and Zach take on specific pieces — data cleaning and reconciliation, systems and process work, the kind of focused job that’s better done by someone who isn’t also running the rest of the firm. And when a project needs a skill set VCA doesn’t keep in-house — a heavy Power BI build, say, or a specialized data pipeline — we bring in a trusted specialist for that piece. The bench stays small on purpose. Everyone on it has done the work before.
Kara Hudson
Founder · she/her
Kara started VCA in 2026 after two decades turning messy data into decisions at a Fortune 500 communications company. She learned that the difference between a good business and a struggling one is usually whether the right person can see the right number at the right time. She’s spent years in and around the small creative and service businesses VCA works with — photography, weddings, food — so she knows what a small operator actually needs from their numbers, and what they don’t.
Ari Holmes
Data Associate · they/them
Ari handles the cleaning, structuring, and reconciliation work that has to happen before any analysis is worth trusting. If your donor list has 2,847 records and only 2,400 are real, they’re the one who figures that out — and then tells you exactly which 447 went where and why. They hold a nano-degree in data analytics.
Zach Mabe
Solutions Architect · he/him
Zach has spent 25 years getting data and systems to behave — mostly for banks, where the data is messy, the rules are unforgiving, and “close enough” gets you a call from a regulator. He connects the tools that won’t talk to each other, cleans up the inputs, and builds the process so the right number comes out the other end. That includes AI where it actually earns its place, not because it’s the word of the year.
Clients
Organizations we work with:
- First Responders’ Bridge
How we work
We start with a conversation. Most engagements begin with a 20-minute call where you tell us what’s actually frustrating, and we tell you whether we can help. If we can’t, we’ll say so.
Pricing is on the Services page. Everything starts at a posted rate, including the nonprofit rate — no “contact for quote” theatre, and no discount you have to negotiate for. If the work is bigger than a starting rate, we’ll quote it before starting, not after.
We’re based in Johns Creek, part of the north Atlanta metro. Most of our work is remote, but we’ll meet in person for engagements that warrant it.
If your website is embarrassing you, or there is a number you cannot see clearly, or a spreadsheet that is eating your evenings — that is the kind of problem we solve.