Welcome to our new blog series “Making the Most of DonorView” where we will bring you tips and suggestions about using the tools in DonorView to enhance your fundraising programs. Our goal is to help you understand how to apply the features in the software to your existing workflow as well as show you some new ideas to consider adding to your process. In this post we invite you to delve a little deeper into the Automated Actions feature in the CRM Module.

Automated Actions let you send internal and external notifications when a constituent reaches a certain milestone called a “trigger” in the database. Triggers can include things like a first time gift, a cumulative giving amount, a single gift amount, or even a total number of gifts. For example, you can be alerted automatically when someone makes a donation of $1,000 or more, or they make their 10^th donation, or their lifetime (cumulative) giving has reached at least $5,000. While all of this information is also easily gathered on the Constituents Grid by adding a filter, the Automated Actions feature can go a few steps further.

Along with the internal notification to you and your fundraising team, you can also automatically assign follow-ups, assign the constituent to a constituent category, and even send the constituent an email message.  If we use our lifetime giving total of >/= $5,000 again, we could add a follow-up for the development director to call the donor and thank them, assign that donor to a “Major Donor Prospect” constituent category, and send a warm thank you email to the donor letting them know how much their giving has impacted your community. And you only need to set up the Automated Action once and enable it to allow these activities to happen automatically each time a constituent reaches the milestone.

For organizations with a donor engagement or move management program, these automated actions allow you to recognize potential prospects in real time. Not only are timely acknowledgements of individual gifts important to donors, recognizing commitment to your cause is also appreciated. Tracking things like repeat donors and longevity also reveal excellent prospects for legacy and planned gifts. You can learn more about the Automated Actions feature in this knowledgebase article or reach out to the support team at [email protected] with questions. Stay tuned for next blog post when we take a look at managing sponsorships for events and fundraising campaigns with the Sponsorships feature in the Fundraising Module.