Recurring Donation Drip

Keeping track of when to talk to donors again about donating can eat away at a lot of your time, that you could be using to work directly with your program. So why not automate it?

People may not donate again or set up recurring donations for a number of reasons, not the least of which is simply becoming busy and forgetting. A reminder drip series allows you to automate reaching out to contacts at a certain time after their last donation, share any exciting updates about your company, and encourage them to donate again.

This automation sends off a drip series 6 months after a contact's last donation. A goal at the bottom of the automation checks for donations and moves contacts out of the automation once they have donated so you're not accidentally asking people who just gave to give again. If contact's finish the drip without donating, a tag is applied so your team can track donor activity.

Here's how this automation works:
1. The date based trigger is set to activate 6 months after the contact's last donation date.
2. The contact receives the first email in the drip.
3. The contact waits for four days.
4. The contact receives the second email in the drip.
5. The contact waits for four days.
6. The contact receives the final email in the drip.
7. The contact waits for four days.
8. If the contact didn't donate during the drip series, they will reach the next action and receive a tag "Didn't Donate During Drip". The contact then moves to the goal step, but if they didn't meet the condition, they will exit the automation.
9. A goal is at the bottom of the automation, tracking if a contact donates. If they do before reaching the end of the automation, the goal will have the contact jump to the bottom of the automation and exit, so they don't keep getting emails asking for a donation.

Note: In our example, we use a date based custom field for Last Donation Date in both the trigger and the goal. The trigger is set to trigger six months after the date in the custom field. The goal is for when the last donation date is the current date, meaning the contact gave that day.

We populate that field using the automation "Last Donation Date", feel free to import that automation first. If you track donation inactivity differently, feel free to adjust the conditions in the trigger and goal.