Save the Children uses Xapien to accelerate corporate donor due diligence, cutting review times by over 60%. In a funding landscape transformed by the 2025 dismantling of U.S. international aid, this speed and accuracy enables the organisation to assess more potential corporate donors while maintaining rigorous, values-aligned vetting. The result? More time and resources directed toward Save the Children’s core mission of protecting vulnerable children worldwide.
Background: Save the Children’s story
Save the Children was founded over a century ago by British humanitarian Eglantyne Jebb to address crisis-level famine and disease affecting children in the aftermath of the First World War. Their work started here: rooted in the belief that all children deserve education, health care, and protection in emergencies. Save the Children is now a global leader in supporting the world’s most vulnerable children in times of crisis. Their mission to champion the rights of the world’s 2.3 billion children is supported by donations from governments, individuals, foundations, corporations, and multilateral institutions.
These donations are crucial to the mission, so Save the Children conducts rigorous due diligence on funding to ensure alignment with its values. Corporate donors are the most common focus of this process. The team assesses whether a donation should be accepted and briefs the wider team on lower-risk partners in case negative information arises in the future.
The challenge: Speed and accuracy
Amid a rapidly shifting funding landscape, Save the Children faces a dual challenge: maintaining rigorous, values-aligned due diligence while responding quickly enough to secure critical funding. Accuracy is essential to protect the organisation’s reputation and uphold its mission, but speed is equally critical. Every hour spent investigating a donor limits the number of funding opportunities that can be reviewed and advanced to support children’s safety, education, and wellbeing.
Prior to Xapien, thoroughly reviewing a single corporate donor could take multiple hours, creating bottlenecks during periods of high demand. The team needed a way to streamline due diligence without compromising the depth of analysis required to identify potential risks and make confident donor decisions.
The solution: A game-changing approach to donor risk
Xapien delivers both accuracy and speed to the due diligence process, enabling reports to be completed in as little as 15 minutes rather than over the course of an afternoon. “Ask xapien,” a feature on-hand to answer users’ specific questions, has been particularly useful for the Save the Children team. While the platform remains one component of a wider, human-led approach, increased familiarity has steadily reduced the time required to complete due diligence reviews.
Connor Thorpe, Managing Director of Research at Save the Children, has found Xapien an “abject success,” noting that the tool has “instantly become key” to their donor due diligence process. Xapien now underpins donor decision-making, helping the team document and share lower-risk issues internally for transparency and future monitoring, while clearly flagging higher-risk cases that can result in a donation being declined. Recent platform updates have further streamlined this work by surfacing areas of concern early in the report. As Thorpe puts it: “We couldn’t be happier. So, I just wanted to say, thank you. It’s really been a game changer for us.”
Ultimately, Xapien supports organisations in transforming their due diligence capabilities so they can meet their goals with greater confidence and efficiency. In the case of Save the Children, an AI-supported due diligence process plays a vital role in helping the organisation navigate current funding gaps. The result? More time and capability to focus resources on protecting children’s health and safety, both in the U.S. and globally, at a moment of escalating need.
