Journey Automation helps you create automated, personalized, and timely communication flows for essential donor outreach. Use Journey Automation to automate continuous engagement for constituents in all donor lifecycle stages. For example, automate cultivation, acknowledgements, drip campaigns, and milestone celebrations.
When you create an automation, you design a journey for constituents based on their donor lifecycle stage, donation activity, group membership, or milestone. Each journey has one or more steps, such as a welcome series for new donors that also assigns staff tasks and a relationship manager.
After you publish an automation, constituents automatically enter the automation when they qualify to do so, such as after a donation or on their birthday.
Journey Automation walks you through a simple setup. You can automate your engagement and acknowledge every donation without needing advanced knowledge or additional staff.
Why Should I Use Journey Automation?
Use Journey Automation to automate your donor outreach:
Cultivate prospective donors
Welcome new donors
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 — How the journey begins. Entry sources define who qualifies to enter the automation, and 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)