Journey Automation helps you create automated, personalized, and timely communication flows for essential donor outreach. You can use Journey Automation to automate acknowledgements, drip campaigns, and milestone celebrations.
When you create an automation, you design a journey for constituents based on donation activity, group membership, or milestone. Each journey has one or more steps, such as a welcome series for new donors that also assigns tasks to your staff.
After you publish an automation, constituents automatically enter the automation when they qualify to do so, such as after a donation or on their birthdate.
Journey Automation walks you through a simple setup. You can acknowledge all donations and inspire deeper engagement without needing advanced knowledge or additional staff.
Why Should I Use Journey Automation?
Use Journey Automation to automate your donor outreach:
Acknowledge every donation from individual donors
Create drip campaigns
Celebrate donor birthdays
Celebrate donor anniversaries
When you automate these workflows, you:
Enhance your fundraising efforts. When you acknowledge donations, donors are more likely to donate again, donate more, and become sustaining repeat donors. Automated acknowledgements help you reach every donor so donations are less likely to go unacknowledged.
Get better results for campaigns and cultivation. Automated email campaigns generate more revenue and have higher click-through and conversion rates compared to mass emails.
Strengthen donor relationships. Automate thoughtful, personal touchpoints like birthday greetings to create meaningful experiences and attract new donors.
Save time. Free up your time on repetitive tasks for more valuable fundraising activities.
How Does It Work?
When you create an automation, you set up these elements:
Entry source — Defines how the journey begins. Entry sources have built-in rules for how constituents qualify to enter the automation, and for which entry sources have priority over others. Learn about entry sources and priority.
Entry source settings — Some entry sources have required or optional settings. For example, for group-based Campaigns & Cultivation automations, you can select to exit constituents who donate so you stop sending appeals.
Entry source filters (optional) — Refine who qualifies to enter the automation. Filter by amount, campaign, fund, and appeal to create highly personalized journeys.
Steps — What happens during the journey. A step can send an email, assign a task, assign a relationship manager, or add a time delay. You can create single- and multi-step automations.
After you publish an automation, constituents enter it if they qualify to do so. For donation automations, constituents enter 24 hours after the donation was created, which gives you time to correct transactions and merge duplicate accounts.
After entering an automation, constituents automatically move through each step and complete the journey, unless something causes them to exit early. You can monitor analytics that show you who participates in each automation. Automations run continuously unless you pause or archive them.
How Many Automations Can I Publish?
To start, your license includes three running (published) automations. You can upgrade to unlimited running automations. To upgrade, click Learn More when the "Automation Limit Reached" message appears. You must have admin permissions to request an upgrade.
How Do I Get Started?
If your license includes three running automations, we recommend that you automate your donation acknowledgements. To get started, read Quickstart: Automate Donation Acknowledgements.
If your license includes unlimited automations, consider doing more:
Related
Journey Automation recorded training (56 minutes)