The 4 automations every recurring donor program needs

Margie Worrell: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar today. We’re so glad you’re joining us here. My name is Margie Worrell, and I’m the curriculum manager for Bloomerang. I’m going to introduce our special guest in just a moment, but first I’d love to have you introduce yourselves. Drop into the chat and tell us where you’re joining us from, what organization you’re with, or anything else you want to share — maybe the weather, or a good snack. We want to hear from you.

Before we dive in, a little housekeeping. We’ll email you this recording and any resources later today so you can revisit the content at your own pace. If you have questions, drop those into the Q&A and we’ll do our best to get them answered today. The chat is also a great place to learn from one another — if you have thoughts or ideas, or you’ve tried different things yourself, feel free to chime in and share best practices with your fellow attendees. We love to see that.

Before I introduce Rachel, a little bit about us for anyone who isn’t already a customer: Bloomerang is a giving platform built for purpose, created to help you build stronger relationships and grow your impact. We have donor management, volunteer management, online fundraising, peer-to-peer campaigns, and custom donation forms — we do what we can to make your jobs easier and help your organization thrive. If that resonates with you, we’ll have a poll at the end where you can let us know you’re interested in hearing more. We’d love to talk about how we can help you achieve your mission.

Now, my favorite part of the session — introducing Rachel. Rachel Bearbower is an amazing person who also grows amazing gardens, which we were just talking about before we started. She’s the founder of the Nonprofit Automation Agency, and today she’s going to walk us through four amazing automations you can use. Rachel, thank you so much for being here — we’re really grateful you joined us.

Rachel Bearbower: Hi, it’s great to be here. Can everyone hear me okay? I’m thrilled to be here, so let’s get started — I’m going to share my screen.

Today’s presentation is going to be pretty demo-heavy, so I’m actually sharing it from a Google Doc rather than slides. I hope that’s okay with all of you. I’ll give you this Google Doc before the end of the presentation so you have access to everything I’m showing, because it’s detailed.

So today we’re talking about the four automations that every recurring donor program needs. I love the idea of automating pieces of our work so that, once it’s set up, every single donor can feel valued and cared for. The four automations we’re covering today: first, identifying your best prospects for recurring giving — we’ll jump into Bloomerang and look at reports there. Second, catching overdue and lapsed monthly donors before they disappear — you know how it goes, a credit card expires, one month goes by, two months go by, and you mean to reach out but you just don’t. We’ll talk about how to capture those and build a process around it. Third, creating personal, repeatable touchpoints for every donor — I’ll show you something specific you can do with Bloomerang Journeys that helps with that. And finally, something we don’t talk about a lot: how to end donor relationships with gratitude and care. When a recurring donor has been with us a long time, we want to say goodbye in the same spirit we said hello.

The tools I’ll be covering: Bloomerang, specifically for the reports and the automation journey; Zapier, for one workflow that’s three steps, so that does require a paid plan; Handwritten, a platform for creating automated handwritten cards; and Loom, for quick, personal video messages — though it doesn’t have to be Loom specifically, there are lots of video recording platforms out there. If you grab this resource, you’ll have the whole thing I’m teaching today, plus some quick links so you can check out everything I mention, and a table of contents.

A little about me — I teach automation. I love helping organizations solve their burnout crisis. There are so many things we do the hard way because we don’t know what we can automate, and I want to make sure we’re automating donor stewardship so we can really care for our donors, because retention rates keep going down. Certain pieces are really easy to automate and scale, which frees you up to do the things you can’t automate — building real relationships, having a conversation, going to coffee with someone. That’s what I’m trying to teach, and it’s what I do through the Nonprofit Automation Agency. In the document, you can find my bio, my LinkedIn, and our website if you want to learn more about our services.

So let’s jump in and start with building a report.

Automation number one: finding potential recurring donors in your donor file. Why does this matter? Oftentimes the people closest to us — our best givers, our volunteers, people already involved in our organization — are likely some of our best potential recurring donors. But how do we know who those people are? That’s what this report will show us.

We’re going to start by creating a new report from scratch, and select Constituents. This is my demo account, so you’re not looking at anything official — just a lot of fun made-up names. We created a constituent report, and under filters we’re going to select Household, because we want to find everyone in the whole household.

This gets detailed, so bear with me. First filter: Transactions, then calculated — the sum of the revenue amount of specific transactions. Add the date: during the previous 365 days. Revenue amount greater than $0.01. Then, where it says “between,” switch that to “greater than” — greater than the sum of the revenue amount of specific transactions, with a date during the previous 730 days, revenue amount $0.01.

Then, in the filter to exclude, we add date during the previous 365 days. This rule is basically checking whether a donor’s giving in the last twelve months is greater than what they gave in the last two years.

Next we add two more filters. Go to Transactions, specific transactions, add a filter for date — previous number of days, 730 — and revenue amount $0.01. Then exclude previous 365 days again.

Now we need to exclude anyone who already has a recurring donation schedule. Under Transactions you have your basic transactions, and then under Recurring Donation Schedules you have a whole other layer of filters specific to recurring donors. So: type, recurring donation schedule; then, status — schedule status, active. Basically, we’re now excluding everyone who already has an active recurring donor schedule, because they’re not potential recurring donors — they already are one.

In my demo account, almost nobody shows up here, because it’s just a demo account with made-up data. So I want to show you a real client’s account instead — kudos to Megan Walsh from Roots Ethiopia for letting me show her report. She has a few additional filters, but the basics are the same: remove anyone who’s already a recurring donor. I’ve removed names to protect privacy, but you’d want to add first name, last name, and email address so you know who these people are.

The columns I’ve included here: latest transaction date, latest transaction amount, giving in the last two years, giving in the past 365 days, number of transactions, average transaction amount, and number of interactions. So you can look at this and think, this person has had nine transactions, or eight transactions — maybe it makes sense to go have a conversation with them about becoming a recurring donor. In this account, there are seventy-three people you could go have that specific conversation with.

You can add and change columns easily by clicking in and selecting what you want — latest transaction amount, latest transaction date, and so on. You can also add a filter for the sum of the revenue amount of specific transactions over the past 730 days, and another over the past 365 days, to get those two-year and one-year giving totals as columns.

Margie Worrell: There are a couple of questions coming in. Melinda’s asking: does this automation work for check donations? She says they have many recurring gifts via check, but Bloomerang doesn’t recognize them as such on the dashboard.

Rachel Bearbower: It should, because what we’re pulling is the specific donation revenue — we’re not filtering by whether it’s flagged as recurring. So it should pull it. That said, I’d double-check it: create this report, then look and see whether the donors you know are giving via check by, say, a monthly pledge are showing up as expected. You might need to make some tweaks if you have a lot of those check donations, but it should pull those in.

Margie Worrell: Ruth is asking: she’d like to add a column for the latest fund, to know what the donor is interested in as part of the conversation. Do you think Bloomerang would make fund available as a column to add?

Rachel Bearbower: Absolutely, you can add that — I’m blanking on exactly where in the moment, classic demo brain, but I know it’s available. We’ll look that up and get back to you, Ruth, since we have the question documented. That’s a great idea.

Margie Worrell: One more, more of a best-practice question. Carolyn asked earlier: should we acknowledge a donor’s new recurring schedule, or each recurring gift? Which do you think is the better process for acknowledging recurring donors?

Rachel Bearbower: I’d say acknowledge their first gift and their first schedule — those usually happen around the same time — but if I had to pick one, I’d lean toward gift over schedule. In the next automation I’ll show you what that looks like in practice.

Okay, moving on. For the sake of time I’m going to skip the build for the next report, but it’s included in the resource so you can create it yourself.

Automation number two: overdue recurring schedules. This covers what happens when a credit card payment fails, or someone’s plan has lapsed — usually it’s a failed payment. We want to make sure we’re reaching out to those people, and if it’s lapsed several times, we want an automation that catches it.

This report pulls recurring donor schedules where the status is overdue — it’s a pretty simple build. Again, you’d add first name, last name, and contact information, plus amount paid, average schedule amount, and projected revenue over the next one, two, three, and four years. Then schedule the report to run on whatever frequency makes sense — weekly if you have a lot of recurring donors — so you’re staying on top of both your potential donors and the ones whose card just failed.

Each of these automations, by the way, lists the tools required and walks through the steps, with some pro tips at the end.

Automation number three: Bloomerang Journeys. This feature was introduced recently and it’s a great addition to what Bloomerang offers. I’m going to show you how to map out the milestones for a new recurring donor’s first twelve months.

Before you even open the journey builder, map out your milestones: what’s the theme of each touchpoint, what’s the format — personal email, a card, a video message — and what tools and notes go with each one. Here’s how I’ve mapped it out: month one, a warm welcome via a personal email — a draft email that lands in your inbox so you can quickly send or edit it before it goes to your new recurring donor. I’ve taught that build before, so I won’t cover it today, but the tutorial is included. Month two is a high-touch connection — a card sent automatically through Handwritten. Month four is a human touch: a video message sent via text or email, using Loom and a Bloomerang task. Month eight, we reaffirm that value with another video message and another Bloomerang task. And around month twelve, a celebration — a final card sent through Handwritten.

So over the course of twelve months, a recurring donor gets four or five automated touchpoints. This could look different for your organization, but automating it means every donor gets that personal touch in the same order, without it feeling like a process.

I’ve also included video tutorials in the resource — how to build the draft email, how to set up the Handwritten thank-you notes — plus some videos from Jo at Make Do, a client who’s excellent at recording direct-to-camera messages for her monthly donors, for inspiration on how to make those feel natural rather than staged.

Now let’s go build the journey in Bloomerang. You’ll find donor journeys, or journey automation, under Communication. There are lots of ways to use donor journeys — a simple one is a happy birthday journey, where the entry source is a donor’s birthday and it creates a task for you or sends you a reminder. Very handy for making things feel personal.

For the recurring milestones journey, we click New Automation. The entry source is an initial recurring donation — you can filter this by amount, fund, or appeal if you want to get more granular. Save that, and then the first step is creating a task to confirm the donor’s name and address are accurate. Sometimes when people fill out a form, formatting gets weird — capitalization, spacing, that kind of thing — and since we’re relying on automation, our data needs to be clean. So we create a task with a note like: “In prep for month two’s card via Handwritten, confirm the accuracy of the name and address — capitalization, spelling, all of that.” Give it a seven-day deadline, and check the box so this task must be completed before the constituent can move forward in the automation. So when a new donor comes in, you get a task to check their information before anything else fires.

Months one and two, in my blueprint, are actually handled via Zapier, which I won’t walk through today but do include tutorials for. So in the Bloomerang journey itself, the next step is a time delay of 113 days, then a task reminding you to send the month-four video message. I chose 113 days specifically to give myself extra time to confirm the name and address first. For that task: purpose, impact cultivation; assign it to yourself; note, “record a quick thank-you with an update video”; give it seven days. I wouldn’t check “must be completed” here, since you don’t want a donor stalled in the automation just because you haven’t recorded the video yet.

From there, add another time delay of 120 days, then the month-eight video message task. I don’t actually have the twelve-month step built into this particular demo, but the next one after that is a two-year delay — you can build these out to ten years, so every year after the first twelve months, you get a task reminding you to reach out again.

That’s automation number three — map your blueprint first, and the rest follows from there.

Automation number four: ending the relationship with gratitude. This one’s my favorite. When a donor cancels a recurring gift, I think there’s real value in being able to bless and release them — to say, thank you so much for your gift, go on and bless someone else as much as you’ve blessed us. You can set this up so you don’t have to remember to check who’s canceled; it just lands in your inbox automatically.

Jo from Make Do sent a great example of this to a donor who canceled — you can watch that video for inspiration. The donor’s response was lovely: appreciative, warm, not awkward at all. That’s the kind of note you want to get from a donor as you’re parting ways.

I’ve included the steps, a Zapier template you can use if you already have a Zapier account, and swipe copy for the email itself. I built this one with FundraiseUp — I haven’t figured out how to do it directly in Bloomerang yet, so I’ll have to get back to you on that, but it’s straightforward with FundraiseUp or similar tools.

In Zapier, you create a new Zap, choose your trigger platform — in this case, “updated recurring donation” — select your account, and test the trigger. Then you add a filter: plan status exactly matches “canceled.” That way the Zap only continues when a plan has actually been canceled, not just updated. Then the action is Gmail — create a draft. You fill in the to and from fields, and use the swipe copy for the body, personalizing it with the donor’s first name, and your own name, title, and organization. Every time a recurring donation is updated and the status is canceled, it creates a draft email that lands right in your drafts folder, ready for you to review and send — or you could set it up as a reminder to yourself instead, like “heads up, so-and-so just canceled her recurring gift, make sure to send her a video.”

So, to recap: automation one finds potential recurring donors, automation two catches overdue recurring schedules, automation three uses Bloomerang Journeys for touchpoints across the donor’s first twelve months and beyond, and automation four sets up a way to bless and release donors with gratitude once they move on. All the resources I mentioned are linked in the document.

Margie Worrell: Thank you so much, Rachel — a great session today. I’ll launch a poll while we take questions; if you’d like more information or want to connect with Rachel, feel free to drop into the poll. First question from the chat: any ideas on how to incorporate this process for current recurring donors, some of whom have been giving for years? Maybe as a separate automation journey?

Rachel Bearbower: Yes, I’d build a separate one. Build it first for your new donors, then duplicate it and adjust the language slightly for your current donors — instead of “welcome,” something like “thank you for being with us.” The automations themselves stay the same.

Margie Worrell: Another one: how would you handle recurring United Way donors after they reach a hundred percent of their pledge, or whenever you’re notified of a gift allocated to your nonprofit?

Rachel Bearbower: I’d treat it the same as any other recurring donor. If you want to get more specific, you could filter by United Way and build a dedicated workflow just for them, but generally I’d lean toward setting this up once for all recurring donors — and if you’re using a draft email automation, you can still personalize it with the specifics of what they did.

Margie Worrell: Rebecca’s asking, related to an earlier question: if you create an email task in an automation, does it automatically send the email, or just assign the task?

Rachel Bearbower: It just assigns the task — you’d still need to create and send the email yourself. There is an option to send an email automatically within the journey if you want that.

Margie Worrell: Right — so if you build it as an email step, it sends automatically; if you build it as a task, it’s just a task.

Rachel Bearbower: Right, and I’ll admit I have a bit of a control issue — I like to send myself a reminder and double-check things before they go out, just to be sure.

Margie Worrell: Last one: would you request a monthly increase during that twelve-month wrap-up, or is there a better time to do that?

Rachel Bearbower: That’s a best-practice question, and it really depends on a lot of factors. But that twelve-month final touchpoint is a great place to have that conversation. If you use FundraiseUp, they have a link you can include that helps donors upgrade automatically — but yes, I do think that’s a great moment for it.

Margie Worrell: Thank you, Rachel — it’s always a pleasure, and we really appreciate the insights you shared today.

Rachel Bearbower: Thank you. I know this went fast — hopefully you grabbed the resource, and we’ll get it out to everyone in a PDF as well so you can access it. I hope it was helpful and gave you some ideas to try.

Margie Worrell: Thank you to each and every one of you for joining us today, and thank you for all the work you do in your local communities. You make your communities better places to live because of the work you do every day. We don’t say it often enough, but we’re here to say thank you. We hope to see you at the next webinar. Take care.