The Organization
Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation operates the Thunder Bay 50/50 — Canada’s largest hospital 50/50 lottery. Since launching in January 2021, the program has generated over $180 million in total revenue, supporting patient care at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
The Problem
Running a lottery of this scale with a small team meant relentless pressure on every front. During each draw cycle, thousands of customer inquiries poured in — questions about ticket purchases, draw schedules, winner announcements, technical issues, and more. Every single one required a thoughtful, accurate, and compliant response. There was no room for shortcuts.
But customer service was only one piece of the puzzle. The same small team was also responsible for writing marketing emails, social media copy, media releases, and ad content for every campaign. To understand where tickets were selling, who was buying, and how to optimize future draws, raw customer data had to be manually normalized, analyzed, and broken down into geographic and demographic insights. Contact lists required constant cleaning, deduplication, and formatting before they could be uploaded to email platforms for outreach.
Every one of these tasks was being done manually — and for a team of this size, the workload had become unsustainable.
The Search for a Solution
Off-the-shelf AI tools weren’t the answer. Generic chatbots and writing assistants didn’t understand the nuances of lottery operations — the regulatory language, the compliance requirements, the specific types of customer questions that come with a live 50/50 draw.
Consumer AI platforms can “technically” be trained on a knowledge base, but they come with a critical limitation: they lose context over time. The longer you use them, the more they forget. Conversations drift, knowledge bases need to be re-uploaded, and teams find themselves constantly retraining the same tool on the same information. It’s like hiring someone new every few weeks and starting from scratch. Solving complex individual customer support issues related to tickets, subscriptions, questions about draw regulations etc; required senior team members to handle directly.
The team needed something fundamentally different — a platform that never forgets, only gets smarter, and has essentially unlimited memory bandwidth. Something that retains every interaction, every correction, every piece of organizational knowledge permanently, and compounds that intelligence over time rather than losing it.
It also needed to be simple. Not everyone on a nonprofit team is technical. The solution had to be packaged into an interface that anyone could pick up and use immediately — no training manuals, no prompt engineering, no learning curve. Just open it and go.
The Solution: Lightspeed
Torin Gunnell, Director of Lotteries, began building what would eventually become Lightspeed — an AI platform designed specifically for nonprofits and raffle operations.
Rather than starting from a blank slate, Lightspeed was trained on tens of thousands of real-world interactions, customer inquiries, marketing campaigns, and operational scenarios accumulated over years of running live draws. This gave the platform an immediate depth of understanding that generic AI tools simply don’t have.
Lightspeed was also built with machine learning at its core. The more the team used it, the smarter it got — continuously refining its responses, learning the organization’s voice, and improving its accuracy over time.
The platform includes five purpose-built tools:
The Results
The impact was immediate and measurable:
Response Assistant reduced the time spent on customer inquiries by nearly 90% compared to fully manual responses. Lightspeed found patterns in support cases and knew how to answer/assist customers before the team had even read their inquiry.
Marketing content that previously took hours to draft was produced in minutes, always on-brand, on-tone and ready for refinement.
Raw sales exports that required hours of spreadsheet manipulation became visual, actionable dashboards in seconds. “Cleaning up data” for Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Raisers Edge NXT was completed with only a few clicks.
Contact list preparation went from a tedious manual process to an automated workflow with built-in validation.
What the Team Says
“I built Lightspeed because the tools we needed simply didn’t exist. When you’re running a draw and hundreds of inquiries hit at once, you can’t afford to be slow. Lightspeed doesn’t just speed things up — it gives our team autonomous tools that handle the heavy lifting so we can focus on strategy, growth, and the work that actually moves the needle. What used to take us an entire afternoon now takes minutes. That time back is everything for a small team.”
“Lightspeed has completely changed how I work. I’ve never been able to get back to customers this fast — and the responses are accurate, professional, and sound exactly like us. It’s genuinely learned our workflow, the way we communicate, the tone we use with our supporters. I don’t have to second-guess what it gives me, if I need to correct a response it generates; I can do it with a few clicks or write another prompt to refine it. It’s become an essential part of how we operate, and I honestly can’t imagine going back to the way we did things before.”
“The impact Lightspeed has had on our lotteries team has been remarkable. We operate with a very small team, and in this environment, time is our most valuable resource. Lightspeed has given the team exactly what they needed — tools that make them faster, more productive, and more agile. The efficiency gains have been significant, and it’s allowed us to do more with the resources we have. This is the kind of innovation that transforms how a small team can compete at a very high level.”
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