MissionWired Retires Dropbox and Moves External File Exchange to Files.com

MissionWired is a direct-response fundraising agency for nonprofit, political, and advocacy organizations. Since 2007 it has raised more than $3.1 billion in small-dollar donations for its clients across email, SMS, digital advertising, and a direct mail practice named Direct Mail Firm of the Year at the 2024 Reed Awards. Behind the fundraising sits a serious data operation: an internal data lake, machine-learning models that predict donor behavior, and the industry's first digital list-growth co-op.

The raw material of all of it is donor data. Contact lists and personal information move constantly between clients, the agency's creative and data teams, and outside vendors. A direct mail campaign means graphic assets and copy proofs circulating between the client, the agency, and the print supplier. The data practice means list exports flowing out to clients on their own schedules. For MissionWired, exchanging files with outside parties is not a side function of the business. It is the business.

Donor Data Was Leaving Through Consumer Sharing Tools

Before Files.com, that exchange ran on consumer tools. Dropbox was the standard for external sharing. Google Drive carried external exchange as well. Every external client and supplier transfer was managed by hand.

The cost landed on the most sensitive asset the agency holds. Donor PII left the organization through platforms built for internal collaboration, with no way to monitor which user accessed which file. Sharing through Google required the recipient to hold a Google account, which a print vendor or a campaign's ad shop often does not. And the contractual bar was rising: a growing number of MissionWired's clients require BAAs, a formal data-handling commitment that an ad hoc mix of consumer sharing tools was never set up to carry.

MissionWired had outgrown consumer file sharing for the data its business runs on.

Keeping Google Meant Splitting the Estate

The obvious fix, replacing the collaboration suite wholesale, was never on the table. Google Workspace worked. Internal storage and collaboration lived there, and nobody wanted to disrupt how the agency's own teams do their jobs. The problem was not inside the building. It was the edge, where files cross into hundreds of outside organizations.

So the requirement took a specific shape: a split. Google would keep everything internal. One purpose-built platform would take everything external. That platform had to handle the complex workflows the agency uses to send and receive files with both internal and external parties, log user activity so the agency could see who touched what, distribute password-protected share links, carry a BAA, and offer machine paths like SFTP for clients who collect files on a schedule instead of clicking a link. Turning off Dropbox was the end state.

MissionWired selected Files.com to be the external half of that split.

One Governed Route Out of the Agency

Files.com became the single mandatory route for anything containing PII leaving MissionWired: donor data, contact lists, and personal information headed to clients, direct-mail vendors, and digital suppliers. Everything else about the build serves that one rule.

Each counterparty gets its own walled slice. Hundreds of external client and supplier users hold Files.com accounts, each scoped to their own folders through groups and granular per-folder permissions. A print vendor sees its jobs. A client sees its own data. Neither sees anyone else's. Internal staff, administrators included, sign in through Google or Okta SSO with two-factor authentication.

Onboarding was scripted rather than clicked. Using the Files.com REST API, the infrastructure team wrote Python that creates folder structures and provisions users in bulk, including applying the standard supplier folder layout across every client folder. Adding the next client or supplier is running a script.

“The API access is really good because then we can script things that we need.”

The platform carries both human and machine traffic. For ad hoc sends, staff use password-protected share links under the agency's own domain. For the data practice, automated exports from the internal data lake are written into Files.com for clients to collect, and some clients pull those files over SFTP on their own schedules with no one at the agency touching them.

The Dropbox displacement ran as a phased migration. It began in Q1 2025 with the delivery workflow for the agency's digital co-op and continued through an audit and consolidation of Dropbox data while both platforms ran in parallel. By May 2026, MissionWired was fully off Dropbox. Internal sharing landed on Google. All external sharing landed on Files.com.

Off Dropbox, With Room for a 56-Terabyte Month

With the split complete, MissionWired replaced an ad hoc mix of consumer sharing tools with one governed route for every file leaving the agency.

Campaign peaks fit without rearchitecting anything. In September 2025, the platform moved 56 terabytes in a single month, roughly fifty times the typical run rate of about a terabyte a month.

• Donor PII now leaves the organization one way, through Files.com, with user activity logged and every share carried under MissionWired's own domain. A client contract that requires a BAA is no longer an exception to plan around.
• Dropbox is retired entirely, and Google Drive no longer carries external exchange. Google does what it is good at inside the company, and Files.com handles everything that crosses the boundary.
• Onboarding the next client or vendor is repeatable: folder structures and accounts are applied through the API, not assembled by hand for each new relationship.

The external network keeps growing. The platform's user base nearly doubled in the year of the consolidation, and external clients and suppliers now outnumber MissionWired's own staff on it. The agency's file exchange platform belongs more to its counterparties than to itself, which is exactly what an external exchange layer is for.

A Key Part of the Infrastructure

“Files.com is a key part of our infrastructure.”

And MissionWired got there without taking anything away from its own teams. Google stayed exactly where it worked. Governing external data exchange did not require replacing the collaboration suite. It required splitting the estate and giving the outside edge a platform built for it.