Unveiling Journey Automation: Your 24/7 fundraising engine

Katie Gaston: Welcome, everyone. We’re so glad you’re here. We’re going to get started in just a few minutes, so go ahead and come into the room. Put in the chat where you’re joining from and what the weather is like where you are.

We’ve got a fantastic team of Bloomerang folks here. I, myself, am joining from Boise, Idaho, land of potatoes. I know Diana is joining us from Indianapolis, and we’ve got Atlanta on our side. Let’s see where everyone’s joining from. Denver, Colorado, Mountain. I like it. Chicago. We have North Carolina. Oh, and it’s hot in SoCal. Oh, wow. Tricia from the Philippines, welcome. Oh, Holland, Michigan. I have been to Holland. There’s a fantastic tulip festival in Holland, Michigan. Here we go. I love seeing where everyone’s joining from. Oh, Palestine. Welcome. Virginia, Indiana. Fantastic. Greenwood, South Carolina. Love seeing where everyone is joining from.

Okay, I think we are good. We’ve got a lot to get through, so I’m going to go ahead and kick things off. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of today’s webinar, again, we are so glad you’re here. Keep putting in the chat where you’re joining from. We love to see it. We’ll start with a few housekeeping items.

If you are interested, we have a live transcript with closed captioning. You can just click that CC button at the bottom of your screen. If you have any ideas that you want to share, go ahead and put those in the chat throughout today’s webinar. Finally, we’ve got a fantastic panel of folks from the Bloomerang team, as you can see here. We’re going to be answering questions throughout today’s presentation in the Q&A, so just put your questions there and we’ll get to them. We also have a live Q&A at the end of today’s session.

I am one of our presenters today. My name is Katie. I’m director of product marketing at Bloomerang. Dale, do you want to give yourself an introduction as well?

Dale Price: I would love to. Hello from Kennesaw, Georgia, just a couple of cities north of the greater Atlanta area. Bloomerang is good enough to bring me here to help direct our product road map, and I’m delighted to learn what you all need and bring it to life.

Katie Gaston: Fantastic. You’ll hear more from Dale in just a bit, and I’m going to jump in today with something we all know to be true: strong relationships fuel growth. If you build lasting relationships, we know that you’ll raise more. Ultimately, that’s not rocket science. But I want to start with a question today, which is, why is that so hard?

Because today’s donors expect more. Whether you’re working with younger donors or, let’s say, more mature and experienced donors, how you communicate and what you say matters. How they like to hear communication matters. And in addition to the differences in preference between generations, donors expect personalization. Think of the last time you bought something on Amazon, and Amazon surfaced a personalized recommendation for you. Donors care about that. Those consumer-based experiences are influencing donor experiences as well. Ultimately, building a relationship with donors takes effort above and beyond generic acknowledgments or one-off emails. Every touch point matters, and building a continuous conversation matters.

Research backs this up. In fact, an Accenture survey showed that seventy percent of donors believe personalization is an expectation, and they want to see that from nonprofits.

So why is it so hard to meet these expectations? Well, first, we know that you are overloaded. You’re wearing a ton of hats. How are you even writing personalized communication? How is that possible? It takes so much time. How do you change the approach per donor? That takes a ton of time. You try to make up for this with the systems that you have, bringing them all together into one. But ultimately, that can create something complex. It might break down at those integration points, and it adds to your cost. Again, research backs this up. A Chronicle of Philanthropy survey showed that most nonprofits have between ten and fifteen tools that they use every single day. Throw in the chat if that resonates with your experience.

But ultimately, going back to that first point, at the end of the day, no matter the donor expectations or how you get there with your tools, donors who feel connected to you keep on giving again and again. So let’s see what an example experience might look like for one of those donors.

We’re going to follow the path of Emily. Emily loves your organization. She’s very interested in getting involved, but you don’t know who Emily is. In fact, you don’t know her personally. She’s just a record out of the three hundred you have in your volunteer management system. You want to go through the process of finding a volunteer who could be a good donor. So you bring all those records into your CRM, and you look through them one by one. After time, you’re able to find, let’s say, ten donors. But remember, Emily, at this point, hasn’t had any communication from you.

So you prepare an email for those volunteers, and you invite them to engage with an event. You ask them to lead a peer-to-peer team. Emily is thrilled with the invite. She jumps in right away. She leads a 5K team. Not only does she love the event, but she raises twenty-five thousand dollars for your nonprofit. She’s fired up. She wants to get more involved.

Now, Emily is one of a lot of teams that you had. So you do your event wrap-up. You bring all that data from your event tool into your CRM. That takes you about a week, in order to send the thank-yous out, get everything set, and find a list of potential donors to cultivate from there. From that point, you say, okay, now that I’ve got all these event attendees, let’s see if I can get some of them to give again, including Emily. So you build a donation campaign: letters, emails, coffee dates, and you have to log all of that in your CRM. After the coffee date with Emily, she loves it. She’s thrilled. She donates another one-time fifty-dollar gift after that meeting.

Again, you’re asking, how can I continue to bring these people together and really cultivate some of these supporters? So you decide to do a volunteer recognition event. You make the invite list, but to figure out who to invite, some of the data is in your CRM, some of it is in your volunteer system, and you have to bring it all together. You fight with Excel in order to get it to work. Three hours later, you finally have your list. Emily loves the event. She sets up a hundred-dollar monthly donation. Then from there, you say, okay, let’s help cultivate a major donor. So you build a major donor donation campaign, and over the next year, you’re able to cultivate Emily to become a major donor.

That journey, we went through it really quickly. But all in, we believe it took about two years and an estimated fifty hours or, frankly, more of your time to go through each of those steps. The more important thing is that that’s an ideal journey. How many of your donors actually make it from the volunteer state to the major donor state? Not a lot. Emily, in this case, may not have become a major donor or a recurring donor or even a one-time donor, because the event follow-up took over a week. Or she may not have even led that peer-to-peer event because, let’s say, another nonprofit reached out first. Or, frankly, she may not have been a donor at all because you didn’t have the visibility to know she was engaged, excited, and interested. With your current tools, it takes too much time. It’s disconnected, and you don’t have the support or visibility you really need.

Frankly, we believe there is a better way. We know there’s a better way, and we know your organization deserves more.

Imagine if the journey looked like this, where everything was one line. It’s all connected. You never have to import or export. At key stages, data is just automatically added. So you know how much she’s given, how engaged Emily is, and what group of donors or supporters she belongs to. Not only that, but campaigns automatically trigger at key stages. You can send that peer-to-peer event invite within twenty-four hours, send that thank-you, and nurture Emily to become a recurring donor. Imagine how much faster in this scenario Emily would have given, how much more she could have given, and how much more that would allow you to do as a nonprofit.

That is the power of the giving platform. By combining volunteer management, fundraising, and CRM into a unified, powerful solution, the things that you can’t do today will now be possible, like personalizing your campaigns or uncovering new opportunities. Today, I am thrilled to explore one of our latest enhancements to the giving platform, which is all about personalizing and automating campaigns with Journey Automation. With that in mind, Dale, I’m going to pass things over to you, and you can kick it off.

Dale Price: Thank you so much, Katie. Hi again, everyone. We’re really excited to introduce Bloomerang Journey Automation.

Journey Automation automates every stage of the donor journey, from the initial touch point a constituent has to deepening relationships over time and full partnership. Constituents like Emily will get the right message at the right time, so they’ll be more in touch with your mission and their part in it.

Journey Automation is designed for you. We did this in two fundamental ways. First and foremost, we built in a tremendous amount of power and flexibility. But we also made it very, very easy for you to find what you’re after and actually get started using it, without technical jargon. We know from our beta customers it’s very easy to use but deceptively powerful. Katie is going to tell us a little more about that later. By keeping constituents more connected to your mission, Journey Automation will empower you to raise more.

I’m going to give you just five examples of the types of really important fundraising activity that Journey Automation can help with. For example: acquiring new donors from their first touch point to their very first gift. Acknowledging every new donor, or every donor of every gift, uniquely based on their characteristics and where they are in their journey. Nurturing all the way from welcome to their next level of giving. Acknowledging donations uniquely from mid-level and major donors with a blend of digital and in-person touch points, such as phone calls, meetings, and mailings. Engaging uniquely with a selected group of constituents to drive campaigns and cultivate deeper relationships. And recognizing personal milestones with something as simple but touching as a happy birthday email to each constituent.

Journey Automation leverages grouping of donors by common characteristics. Bloomerang automatically maintains a number of groups for you, such as prospective donors who have yet to give, lapsed donors who haven’t given in a long time, or volunteers when you have the Bloomerang giving platform. You can also create and maintain your own groups, like those with the same types of interests in your organization. Groups let you tailor your messaging to resonate with each constituent, in terms that matter to them, so you can help deepen those connections.

Now I’d like to show you how Journey Automation works. Journey Automation orchestrates communications, so that’s where we see it on the menu. Let me know if you can see my screen.

Journey Automation appears under Communications, and the first thing we see is a list of prioritized automations. I can filter just on those that are running, those that are no longer running or paused, those that are currently in draft, or perhaps some that used to be running but are now archived. I’m going to filter just on those that are running. The next thing I notice in the list is that they’re categorized for convenience by type. Here, for example, I have three automations for first-ever donations.

The first one I see welcomes major donors. This is accomplished simply by setting up a filter on donation amount. If the amount is equal to or more than five thousand dollars, which is what Dale’s Dog Haven, my fake organization, considers to be a major donation, constituents will be taken on this journey. We start with a very special email acknowledgment, and then right away, we see a couple of tasks. Journey Automation will automatically assign a task to my teammate, Leslie, when a new major donor is to receive a phone call. I’m asking Leslie, please make that call within a couple of days. Next, there’s another task for a mailing, asking Leslie to also put our new donor welcome package in the mail, our letter and our coffee mug. Next, there’s a time delay of exactly a week, and then a major impact email to share ways that we’re making a difference to the community and that they’re making a difference for our organization. A couple more weeks go by, and I’ve configured an email invitation to be sent, and then other ways to be involved, and on down the journey. I’ve configured this based on best practices for welcoming new donors and, in particular, engaging with major donors, but it’s fully tailorable.

Next, I configured a similar automation, but this time it filters on an amount of five hundred to five thousand, which is what Dale’s Dog Haven considers to be a mid-level donation. Here again, I see slight differences. I decided to send a tailored, personalized email to the constituent acknowledging this special donation, a phone call, a wait, and on down the journey.

Finally, for all other constituents who make their first-ever donation that’s not of a major or mid-level amount, there are no filters. We built in all of the logic to bring in everyone else, and I’ve configured this journey to include an acknowledgment email, a wait, an impact email, and on down the list.

I also see some numbers displayed. If I click on one of these categories to see how constituents have been taking this journey, I see the list of constituents that are currently within it. If I want, I can choose one of those constituents and drill right in. I’m going to choose Mercy Blue. I’m very curious, because that happens to be our family dog. Right away, two things really get my attention. First, I see that there was a donation, and Journey Automation appropriately picked it up, sent an acknowledgment email, and then followed up a while later with a newsletter invitation. The second thing I notice is that it’s a bit alarming to see that our dog actually made a donation. I mean, we knew she was smart. She made a fine choice with her spending, but a little suspect. And this might explain all those dog toys we’ve been getting from Chewy lately.

Next, I see a category for donors who support with their initial gift on a recurring schedule. Here again, I set up a filter for major donors who have set up this extra time commitment to be a repeat donor. We’re going to treat them very specially, with not only a personalized email for that use case, but we’re also going to reach out. This time, I’m going to try to schedule a meeting myself with this donor, and on down the list. And then for all other donors, there’s no filtering. Again, Bloomerang is doing all the work for you. We take any constituent who makes their first donation on a recurring schedule and take them on a tailored journey.

Next, we see three acknowledgment journeys for constituents who make a next donation. This shows off how easy it is to filter based on the type of automation or the type of donation. For instance, if a constituent makes a next one-time donation or soft credit, they’ll be taken on a journey for an email acknowledgment, a wait, and a next appeal. On the other hand, if a constituent makes a next donation on an established pledge or recurring schedule, they can be taken on a slightly different journey. Here, I’m going to alter, for example, the nature of the acknowledgment email to recognize that fact and build out the remaining steps. Finally, we can also tailor journeys for constituents who make a next payment on a membership plan.

Speaking of members, we’ve created a very special journey for constituents who first sign up and then make their first payment to become a member. Here again, all I did was choose the entry source of initial membership payment, and Bloomerang and Journey Automation are doing all the work for me to run this automatically. I can now offer a special acknowledgment email. We’re going to welcome this new member with a phone call, and we’re also going to mail out our new member package.

The next category is campaigns and cultivation. The first example here shows off the ability to prebuild an automation that will start later. I’ve gotten myself in a bind in the past preparing for GivingTuesday. What I’ve done now is prebuild a number of steps for engagement with constituents I’ve identified as having high potential on Bloomerang’s generosity score. In this example, I want to engage with them to save the date, start giving, tell others, and move on to monthly giving. I’ve set this to automatically start on October seventh, in my example. So when October seventh arrives, this Journey Automation will automatically start up. It will reference the members of this group and start to engage them. I did all my work in advance, so I won’t get myself in a bind again this year.

We can also choose a group such as volunteers, to deepen relationships and engagement, do relationship building, and cultivate them to tell others and find other ways to get involved. Please provide financial support. We can choose any group that’s available that we’re maintaining.

In this example, I’m showing how to drive a campaign for constituents I’ve identified who have provided support, or who I believe may be happy to support, updates severely needed to our building and facilities. In this example, the automation is configured to automatically exit any constituent who makes a donation that’s designated for our building campaign. I could also similarly express an association to a particular fund or set of appeals. So Journey Automation will not continue to ask a constituent to give for the building fund or campaign once they’ve done so, after they meet the ask.

Finally, we’ve got an elegant, simple example, again where Journey Automation is doing the work for us. Each constituent on their birthday will receive a beautiful email just to deepen that personal touch.

Let’s see how easy it is to set up a new automation. I’ll give it a name. Journey Automation is going to make sure I haven’t used that name before. Now I simply choose from the available entry sources. These are all prepackaged for us, built into Journey Automation to do the work. This is where, for example, I could select an available group to drive engagement, to drive a campaign, or cultivation. That’s how easy it is to do these different things. I’m going to choose next donation. In this case, I’m going to add a filter to show you just how easy it was when I built the other ones that were set aside for a specific journey for major donors.

Now I want to do a few things right off the bat if someone makes a major donation that is next, one-time, or on a schedule. First, I’m going to add an email. I could choose one of the beautiful prebuilt templates that Bloomerang provides, but I can also choose one that I already tailored to Dale’s Dog Haven’s styling, positioning, messaging, and branding. I’ll name the email from the template, and then all I need to do is return to Journey Automation. It’s that easy.

As my next step in this automation, I’m going to create a task to call the major donor. The channel for this one will be phone call. The purpose is another form of acknowledgment. I will assign this to my teammate, and I’m going to ask that she get that done within three days. At any point in the future, Leslie will see tasks that are assigned to her on her home dashboard anytime she comes into Bloomerang CRM, or under her notification bell.

Next, I can add a time delay. This is where I can specify either the number of days to wait, or I could put in a specific date, which can come in handy, again, for driving events or campaigns, things that are time-sensitive. I’ll save that, and then I would go on my way, creating more emails and delays.

Finally, I will publish. This is where we see prioritization take effect. Journey Automation automatically recognizes that I already have three automations defined and active for next donations, and it gives me the opportunity to place this one in priority order, which tells Journey Automation the order in which I would like these to be evaluated. I want the next major automation to be evaluated first. This is most important, so I’m going to leave it at the top. I could drop it somewhere different, but I’ll leave it first. Then I’ll simply save and publish. And I’m now done. I’ve added another automation, simply.

So you can see the power and the flexibility that’s built into the platform, but, hopefully, you also see how easy it is to use Journey Automation. Now we’re going to return to the presentation.

As we’ve seen, Journey Automation is reactive to donors where they are, based on their profile, their characteristics, and, more importantly, their behaviors. It leverages groups for deep personalization. It automates a blend of digital and personal touch points. It surfaces participant journey activities right in the CRM, so everyone sees how Journey Automation and constituents are engaging with each other. And it’s incredibly easy to use.

Donors are more likely to give when they are acknowledged for their behaviors, when they understand how your mission is benefiting the community, how they are benefiting your mission in the community with impact, and the specific ways they can get more involved. Donors, for example, who get a personal thank-you within just forty-eight hours are four times more likely to give again. Automation ensures that these opportunities aren’t missed.

As you saw me walk through all those different journeys I’ve defined, it’s just too much. I can’t do it on my own. Leslie and I can’t cover it, and certainly not with an even bigger team. There’s a tremendous amount of coverage here that automation can do for us. A way that I like to think of Journey Automation is as another member of our team. I can set up rules, and then Journey Automation will follow those rules and drive that deeper engagement for us, so those opportunities aren’t missed. Automated journeys have been shown to increase engagement by two hundred fifty percent and generate three hundred twenty percent more results, because the system is always listening and working for you. Because Journey Automation is so easy to use and powerful under the hood, you’re actually going to have the time to use it and get all these benefits. And now Katie is going to tell us a real example of that right now.

Katie Gaston: Thanks so much, Dale. It was so good to see it in action, so I appreciate you taking us through that.

The Delores Project, just one of our Bloomerang customers, started using Journey Automation and saw game-changing results. In fact, within just six months, they acquired five hundred new donors and saved one to three hours per week. I think it’s pretty obvious how that can happen, with exactly what you just went through, Dale, in the automation and saving the time of manually writing emails and cultivation strategies. Lucas, their director of development, commented, “It was immensely helpful in scaling our operations and cultivation.” So I would ask each of you, what could you do with three more hours per week? And how much of a difference do you think five hundred donors would make for your mission?

Journey Automation is part of the overall giving platform, like I talked about at the start. Ultimately, it’s purpose-built for nonprofits, and it’s intentionally crafted to be powerful enough to solve your exact needs. We started with journeys. I think one of the questions I saw in the chat was, are there templates? The thing that’s important to highlight with Journey Automation, just like Dale went through, is that the way we built this is specifically for nonprofits. So whether it’s various types of cultivation strategies, whether that’s acquiring new donors, or moving a donor from a welcome series to the next level of giving, or even targeting a group of major donors or a specific type of donor, or recognizing milestones like birthdays, that is all about donor cultivation, which is why we created the system in a way that makes it incredibly easy for you to do.

My challenge to you, whether you’re new here and just learning about Bloomerang and Journey Automation, or you’re a customer and already starting to play with it, is to start with one of these journeys and then expand from there. Because achieving next-level fundraising and really building the strong relationships you need to hit your goals is well within reach.

With that in mind, we’re going to go ahead and go to the Q&A portion of our session today. But before we do that, I know you’re all busy. Diana, would you mind triggering our poll right now? If you’d like to learn a little bit more about Bloomerang or Journey Automation, just go ahead and answer that for us, and we will be in touch very soon. I know we had quite a few really great questions come in. We’ll send out this presentation and the recording following the session, so you can take a look at all of these resources. Diana, are there any questions that you think would be great for us to go through live?

Diana Otero: Absolutely. There was a great question earlier. If a donor might fall into more than one automation, how does Bloomerang ensure that they don’t get multiple messages, so they have that streamlined journey?

Dale Price: Thank you. That’s terrific. One of the things I showed in the demonstration is what we call priorities. The example I showed was next donation, based on type. I wanted to configure, also, to get more granular and pick up major next donations, so I prioritized that first because I consider that to be most important. If a donor is already established, but they make a major donation, which, again, based on my configured gift sizes, is five thousand or greater, I place that at the top of the list, telling Journey Automation, each time a constituent makes a next donation, evaluate them in this order. If they have that amount of donation, they’ll take that journey and not any of the others.

Katie Gaston: Fantastic. Thanks, Dale. What other questions, Diana?

Diana Otero: There’s also another great question. Oftentimes, donors use different names, or you might have them in your CRM under their work email, and then they donate using their personal email. Now you might have duplicates in your system, and you don’t want that donor to be caught as a new donor again. Dale, is there a way that we can clean this up so that the donor goes into the right journey?

Dale Price: By the way, we have a couple of other panelists here, and they’re welcome to jump into the fray as well. Yes, actually. We are currently in the process of enhancing Journey Automation, and very soon it’s going to have a built-in delay. I saw this in some of the chat, so it’s relevant. There’s going to be a built-in delay of twenty-four hours that allows some additional time for changes. It’s often the case that there are potential duplicates that can be reconciled. It’s also sometimes the case that transactions are imported in bulk, and the CRM is working hard to make sure the right transaction is connected to the right constituent. So we’re allowing a twenty-four-hour period for the system to do its thing, while users continue to update their data and keep it clean, before dropping each constituent into a new journey that’s triggered by any donation activity.

Diana Otero: Love that. Now I have a two-part question for Dale and our friends in product. I know we’re constantly making improvements on our features, and Journey Automation is super exciting. I know a lot of people want to dive into it. Number one, what can you share with us about what else is on the horizon? What else can we look forward to? And number two, if folks have suggestions, where might they go to submit those suggestions?

Dale Price: Those of us in product management take these types of questions as our very favoritest of all. Only to be surpassed by how soon can we get on your calendar to talk and tell you more about our priorities. In response to the first, I’m going to give a few highlights of things that are coming over the course of this year, and some you’re actually going to see in Q3.

One is fully automated, built-in capabilities for the prospective group that Bloomerang automatically maintains for you, and also for the lapsed donor group. Bloomerang has a lot of work already in the system that maintains donor groups and other groups for you. Journey Automation is going to be connected in a way that you can build a specific automation, or set of automations, filtered if you like, that stay continuously in sync with new prospective donors as they come in, and then automatically exit prospects once they do give. The same goes for recapturing lapsed donors. Those are just two examples. Another one is the ability to highlight and celebrate donors as they achieve lifetime giving thresholds, for example, or when they reach the annual anniversary of the first time they ever gave to your mission.

In terms of the second question, any customer of Bloomerang can visit, in the upper right corner of the CRM, something we call the feature portal. This is where people go and see all the different wonderful ideas that other customers have offered up to Bloomerang that we’re still considering. They can place a vote. You can vote on your favorites, and we look very, very heavily at that information and bias our road map prioritization toward things that get the most votes, obviously. We also see the list ourselves to get interesting conversations started. And if you’re out there seeing ideas that you like, but you have an additional one in mind that you don’t find, enter it yourself and see if other people vote for yours as well.

Diana Otero: I love that. Thanks, Dale. I occasionally will also browse those suggestions from customers. We love seeing all of your suggestions, and I can vouch for it. All the product managers take a look at each of your suggestions, so make sure to check that out.

Now, Dale, something that came up in the chat too is that some customers may have seen that Journey Automation was out as a beta, but now it is not in beta anymore. It is available to everyone, and we’ve talked to some customers already. What have been some of your favorite use cases that you’ve seen customers do with Journey Automation?

Dale Price: The Delores Project that Katie highlighted is a wonderful example. They had activities that they were doing to really try to get the word out and increase their giving, in light of the different climate they’re finding themselves in with their mission. They were able to offload to Journey Automation a lot of manual work they were doing for an ongoing campaign, get the word out, and drive toward business results in ways that they found so helpful that they’re able to devote more time to doing more.

We’ve also seen, in order of popularity, the things customers were eager to jump in and try. They love welcoming new donors. That’s overwhelmingly the top, most popular use case. A second one is, interestingly, a close race between second and third. People really enjoy how easy it is to get that high touch and deeper personalization and engagement of just setting up a lovely happy birthday email to each constituent, because it’s so fast and easy. You set up one beautiful email template, set it up in Journey Automation. Does that work for you? And then the third one is next donation. Let’s make sure to be continuously acknowledging. If I were going to stress one thing over anything else from a best practice standpoint, start by acknowledging every single donation. This is where we really strongly encourage you to consider using those filters. Take advantage of all that power that’s already built into Journey Automation to understand different donor and donation types, and take each donor on their own journey that really resonates deeply with them, and you’ll be rewarded.

Diana Otero: I love that. Now, you touched on something very important, and Katie mentioned it earlier as well: donors are looking for that more personalized experience. There was a great question in the chat as well. With everything being automated, how can you ensure that it still feels personalized? Anyone can jump in on this question.

Dale Price: Such a good question. I’ll talk about that a little bit from an automation perspective and then welcome others. Thanks, Diana.

We talk about personalization in two contexts here. The first is personalizing the actual journeys themselves, so they can resonate with each constituent based on where they are in their journey, so to speak, at a higher level with your mission. We encourage leveraging those different types of entry sources, as we call them. We’ve already done a lot of the work for you. Just set up one or more automations for each of those different entry sources, and this now takes a constituent on a unique path of communication, based on the steps that will make sense to them. It will resonate. It won’t necessarily occur to them to wonder whether someone manually sent that or whether a system did it on their behalf based on rules you already set up. Again, coming back to the Delores Project, they were doing a lot of the work manually. They struggled to keep up. They’re now able to do even more because they’re simply setting up Journey Automation to do it for them. It’s no different for the constituent, except they’re going to get a richer experience.

The second area of personalization is the content of the messages themselves. In the emails, which I didn’t dive into at all, I could have shown off the Bloomerang email builder itself, the email designer. There’s a very rich set of capabilities to do personalization in the actual messages themselves. An email is very easy to set up as “Dear [name].” That’s the most obvious example of email personalization on the planet, but it can go much deeper than that. It’s easy to tailor those emails to recognize the type of donation, the size of the donation, the date, and characteristics of things that are personal about the constituent as related to what’s on record. The email template can actually reference personalized, specific information based on their data, which is what you would do if you were sending them an email anyway. You would look up the constituent. You would look up that transaction, in this example, and you would construct a heartfelt email tied specifically to them, or in your phone call, or in what you would mail them or send them in a letter. Journey Automation is doing exactly the same thing for you. You’ve just prebuilt it using a template and expressed that personalization message yourself. You’re still writing it yourself. It’s doing all the sending and delivery in reaction to donors, at scale. That’s what you don’t have time to do.

Katie Gaston: I’ll add on to that, Dale. I thought everything you said was spot on, and it was such a good question around this concern of how you balance automation and scale with, to the point of the start of the presentation, still building an authentic, genuine, and real relationship with donors. The two things I would add are, first, that getting someone’s attention today is really hard. There is a lot of information. Think of how many emails you got. Research shows there’s a number of touch points someone needs even to listen and pay attention. So Journey Automation helps you hit that scale, where they do start to see, “Oh, I remember this nonprofit organization.” That way, a message can even register on their attention scale, much less resonate with them. I think that’s one: the scale is really valuable.

The other is remembering that Journey Automation is different from just email, in the sense that you can also layer on things like tasks. So instead of just sending an email and then sending another email, you say, “I want to send an email, then I’m going to personally call this donor, and then maybe I’ll do the newsletter, and then I’m going to add another task, which is to invite them to coffee.” It inherently, by how it’s been designed, takes it to a personalized level that’s above and beyond what you would get from something like an email marketing automation system.

Dale Price: You’re muted, Diana. Wanna hear you.

Diana Otero: Thank you. No, I was going to say, I really resonate with that, because how many pieces of mail or email do I get in a day? Just figuring out which one to read, sometimes, honestly, I don’t read everything. But if someone is consistently communicating with me and they know me well enough to communicate with me about the things I care about, that’s really going to make them stand out. And I love that thought of automate when you can. You can send those emails, but you can also create those tasks for yourself or others on your team for those more personalized touch points. You know which of your donors are going to need that, and you can create those tasks automatically. Love that.

Now I always love asking our panelists as well, especially since we have a wonderful team of people here from our product team: what’s been your favorite feature of Journey Automation that you would like to shine a spotlight on?

Dale Price: I’m going to let one of the other team members jump in. I know they’re eager.

Tammy Hammond: All right, I’ll jump in. It’s hard to pick my favorite. I don’t think I can pick a favorite. I think the thing I would say is my favorite is the breadth of, and I know it’s not really a feature, how much you can customize. We’ve really made an effort to make it super easy to use and approachable, so it can be a little deceiving how powerful it is when you think about how many different ways you can segment and how many different things you can do now with static groups and dynamic groups. I just encourage you to get in there and play around, and we’ll talk a little bit at the end about all the resources we have and all the team members who can help you.

I’m super excited about where the project is today, and we’re going to continue to add all the exciting features that Dale said. I’m just really excited about the impact. We do a lot of research across our customer base, across anonymized data, to see how these interactions correlate to you raising more. So we know, and we can prove to you, that it does help you raise more. I’m super excited about the whole offering. I put it in the chat, my team runs all the product, and we welcome the feedback. As you get in there, we have lots of healthy debates internally about which features to prioritize, so we really need your input on where you want to see this go, because we’re just getting started. Thank you for your time today. We’re super excited about this and lots of other things we have on the road map.

Dale Price: Yeah. I agree with Tammy. Cody, come off mute. Yeah. Go ahead, Cody.

Cody Lawson: Yeah, I was going to say I agree with Tammy on all that, but I would pick my favorite as the first-ever donation automation. There are so many nonprofits who, for one reason or another, maybe don’t thank those first-time donors. And donor retention, donor attrition, is a real problem in our industry. Being able to, without having to monitor minute to minute the donations coming into your organization, kick off a welcome series of emails or a set of tasks that draws attention to this new donor coming in is a really great way to get that relationship started and try to connect with people who, for whatever reason, say, “I want to be a part of what you are doing, the good work that you are doing.” That welcome series is the most vital point in the relationship and in developing and cultivating that relationship. That’s why I always go back to the first-ever one.

But I would agree with Tammy that all the other ones have value too. That initial recurring donation, you know, there is this sort of shift generationally. Younger generations look at recurring gifts almost like engaging with a nonprofit is like Spotify or your Netflix account. They engage as a subscription service. Nonprofits’ recurring gifts are something that they really will take to in the future. You see this trending this way. So that initial recurring gift is also a way for you to say, “This long-term commitment that you’re making to us helps us be financially stable for the long term. It gives us a predictable source of income that we can look to in the future.” I could go on and on. I’ve been neck-deep in this for years now, so we’re really excited that you all have access to it.

Dale Price: My favorite, if I can very quickly, I think blends both Tammy’s and Cody’s. I tend to love any time that a product can help take things that are extremely complicated and make them so simple that you’ll actually use [inaudible]. And that’s donation acknowledgments. It’s not one specific one. It’s that category. I hope it looked incredibly easy to get that set up, because that’s what we need you to do. Our encouragement is, please just get started. Do what it takes to just build that first one, and I really think you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to then move on to the second one. Again, if you’re already doing the work, put the work into just setting up Journey Automation to do it repeatedly for you. It’s really that simple, because we spent a long time doing terribly hard work, and big teams here at Bloomerang worked really hard to make it that easy for you. So take advantage, set up those donation acknowledgments, and from there, relationships blossom.

Diana Otero: I love that so much. Sunitha, anything to add? Any favorites on your end?

Sunitha Ramachandran: Yes. I think that the happy birthday is a very good, useful automation. It may seem simple, but it delivers meaningful impact. It provides a very easy, low-effort opportunity for donors to show that they remember the donors and appreciate them as individuals. It’s like a personal, emotional connection that directly supports retention and donor loyalty. Even if we don’t ask them for donations, a simple birthday message helps keep the nonprofit top of mind. It’s warm. It’s celebratory, and it serves as a very subtle reminder of all the past giving, so I love that one.

Diana Otero: I love that so much. A lot of great things that we’re hearing here. There are many different types of first donations, and it’s important to personalize those journeys. Those touch points that are just thanking donors and saying happy birthday are so important. They’re not about asks. It’s really about building those relationships with donors. Katie, if you let us, we’ll just keep talking, so we’ll hand it back to you to wrap it up.

Katie Gaston: It’s an exciting topic, and I so appreciate everyone, thanks for coming on, Cody, and joining in on the panel, Sunitha, Cody, Tammy, and Diana, helping to facilitate our questions portion.

I hope you found today valuable and learned a few things. There was one final thing I want to highlight in the chat because I know it came up: just so everyone is aware, we do include a starter pack of Journey Automation with every CRM license. So if you’re interested, I hope you filled out that poll. We’ll be in touch to set up a conversation so we can do a deeper dive into how this can impact your organization. With that in mind, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your Tuesday. Thank you for spending an hour with us, either this morning or afternoon, depending on where you are. Take care, everyone. Thanks.