About

How VCA became what it is

Violet Crown Analytics started as a boutique data-analytics practice: spreadsheets, reporting, dashboards for people who couldn’t justify an in-house analyst. Then a small nonprofit hired us to clean up a spreadsheet. The cleanup became a web form, the form became a hosting conversation, and the hosting became a full website redesign.

That wasn’t scope creep. It was the actual business trying to be born. Small nonprofits don’t need a data person or a web person; they need one trusted team that does both, because the website captures the data and the data proves the website works.

So that’s what VCA is now: a merged web-and-data practice for mission-driven small nonprofits, and, as it’s always been, for the small local businesses that mean something to us. The name comes from O. Henry’s nickname for Austin, and the crown-star has been on everything since day one.

We work with a small number of clients deeply, not many shallowly. And we openly decline work that cuts against the mission-driven values this practice is built on. In this market, that isn’t a constraint. It’s the point.

The people

Kara Hudson

Founder · Web & Data (she/her)

I’ve spent twenty-plus years making messy data make sense, and VCA is that craft aimed at the work I care about most. I lead every engagement personally: the reporting, dashboards, and CRM work, and the design and build of the websites that feed them.

Before this I was a wedding photographer, then a project manager, then a data analyst. Before that I worked a hotel, a woolen mill, and a fish cannery slime line, which remains my leading candidate for the worst job ever held by anyone. I have never minded unglamorous work. Most of what fixes an organization’s data is unglamorous work.

The name is Austin, my city and my school. The practice is Johns Creek, where I cook, keep a garden, and am comprehensively outnumbered by two cats called Finn and Callie, who came to me out of Ari’s feral colony at six weeks old and flea-ridden. A garden and a donor database want the same thing from you, which is attention on a schedule rather than heroics in a crisis. The longer version of that story is here.

If your organization is doing meaningful work with no IT department and no analyst, I built this for you.

Ari Holmes

Data Associate (they/them)

Ari is the data analyst: 100% data, all the time. Cleaning messy exports, reconciling constituent counts, quietly deduping files until the numbers can be trusted. Theirs is the kind of attention that finds the duplicate everyone else scrolled past.

They came to nonprofit data from marketing analysis, by way of a nanodegree in data science. It is a useful route in: segmentation is segmentation, whether the audience is a mailing list or a membership.

When they aren’t wrangling data they’re wrangling cats. Ari is caretaker for a local feral colony, supports TNR efforts and animal-rescue nonprofits, and fosters the hard cases: cats who don’t socialize easily, and cats whose medical needs are more than most homes can take on. They are training as a feline behaviorist.

A good deal of VCA’s instinct for the rescue sector comes from Ari having lived the paperwork.

Zach Mabe

Solutions Architect (he/him)

Zach shapes how the pieces fit: the systems thinking behind builds, registrations, and data flows. He came out of financial technology, where being wrong is expensive and traceable, and he brought the habits with him. He QAs everything VCA ships to that standard.

He is, by disposition, someone who wants to know how a thing actually works. He lifts, he boxes, and he watches physics and cosmology explainers for fun, which is a useful temperament in a person whose job is to find the problem before a client does.

He is also devoted to pit bull rescue, a corner of the sector that runs on foster homes, transport volunteers, and the patience to argue down a breed stereotype one dog at a time. Remy came out of that world and now supervises the home office from the floor, unmoved by physics.

He’s also the practice’s AI person, which here means close to the opposite of what it usually means. Zach’s job is working out where AI genuinely earns its place in a build and where it’s a buzzword somebody wants on a slide. Often enough the honest answer is a formula and a well-designed form, and we’ll tell you so.

Also here

Finn

Kara’s
Callie

Kara’s
Remy

Zach’s
In foster

Ari’s

Not staff. All four came out of rescue, and two of them came out of the colony Ari still feeds.

How we work

Direct and warm

No synergy talk, no hustle culture, no corporate veneer. We’ll tell you what’s true about the work, including the unglamorous parts.

Transparent on money

Published pricing, a stated nonprofit discount, and a straight answer when something isn’t worth paying us for.

Built to last

You own your website, your data stays clean by design, and everything we build meets WCAG accessibility standards.