- Fact: First-time donors are much less likely to give again if they don't feel appreciated.
- Fact: The #1 thing a donor wants to know - across every age bracket - is the impact of their gift.
Express sincere thanks and connect donors to your ministry by using a Workflow to automate communication to first-time givers.
Creating this engaging Workflow is simple, and the steps are laid out below. Modify this to fit your church setup as needed.
Find the left navigation menu and select Workflows.
Give the newly-added Workflow a name that makes it easily recognizable. (Ex: Giver - First Time Donor Thank You)
Add a brief description that reviews your goal or what the workflow will do. For example, send an automated email to all first-time donors. Assign an Interaction to send a thank-you note. This helps bring clarity when reviewing later and focus on the workflow's goal while building it.
Now, add triggers to start building the actions of your Workflow. Since we are working with donations, we want to use the Giving-focused triggers. Specifically, the Giving -- Amount trigger.
Select the trigger, then the Group(s) the workflow should look for. In the example, we will look for anyone who is in the Guest group. Then we want to look for anyone who has given over $.01.
Note: The workflow will fill in the trigger parameters' details. You can see here the details along the top are A member of -Status - Guest gives $.01 to any fund in one gift.
Next, add actions to take when the trigger is activated. For example, you may want a pastor or volunteer to send a brief handwritten thank-you note. Use an Interaction to assign this to the correct person with details of what needs to be followed up.
For an immediate response to the donor, send an email expressing appreciation for the gift!
This will let us engage the donor right away, and you can add a personal touch by automatically filling in their name using the '@' placeholders. Options are found at the bottom of the message field.
NOTE: Make sure the placeholder is CAPITALIZED or it will not work.
The last important item to add for this simple workflow is the Update Progress action. This action ensures that after the other actions have completed, the database will not run this workflow for this person again. It declares, "I have already run this and don't need to again."
All our triggers, actions, and customizations have been added, so we need to save the work. Use the DONE button to save your Workflow!
Your new Workflow is now set up and ready to run. Click the SAVE button to add the Workflow to the list.
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