Transform prospects into donors by making them feel welcomed, valued, and part of your mission from day one, leading to a first gift. Acquiring first-time donors is essential for your organization’s long-term sustainability because first-time donors replace donors lost to natural attrition.
Automate & Save Time
To cultivate prospective donors, create an automated, multi-touch journey and let Bloomerang CRM do the work for you.
How It Works
A prospective donor is a constituent who hasn’t donated, has no soft credits, and whose household members haven’t donated. Bloomerang CRM automatically identifies these constituents and adds them to the Prospective group. You can use this dynamic group to automatically enter prospective donors into a cultivation journey.
To do this, use Journey Automation to create a Prospective Donors automation. Constituents automatically enter this automation if they:
Are active individual constituents.
Are added to the Prospective group on or after the date you select.
Example: If today’s date is January 1, 2026, and you select January 1, 2025 in the automation, constituents added to the Prospective group on or after January 1, 2025 enter this automation.
The automation uses real-time data to determine whether constituents qualify to be in the automation. If a prospective donor or a household member donates or receives a soft credit, Bloomerang CRM automatically removes them from the Prospective Donors group and this automation.
Before You Begin
Decide which email interests and email purposes to use for emails sent from your automation.
(Recommended, but optional) To save time, create email templates at Communications > Emails before you create the automation and emails.
Create a Prospective Donor Automation
To create a Prospective Donor automation, you can:
Start quickly: Edit the example automation, which is named Cultivate Prospective Donor Journey. This draft appears if your organization has never created a draft automation from the Prospective Donors entry source.
Start from scratch: Create a Prospective Donors automation from scratch.
To begin:
Click Communications.
Click Journey Automation.
Do one of the following:
To start quickly:
In the Donor Lifecycle > Prospective Donor Automation section, click the Cultivate Prospective Donor Journey draft automation. If you don’t see this draft automation, start from scratch.
In the entry source, click the three vertical dots and then click Edit.
To start from scratch:
Click New Automation.
Name your automation and click Save.
In the settings for that automation, click Choose an Entry Source.
In the Donor Lifecycle > Current Donors section, select Prospective Donors.
Select a date. Constituents automatically enter this automation if Bloomerang CRM adds them to the Prospective group on or after this date.
Click Save. The automation saves as a draft.
To edit the entry source before you publish the automation, click the three vertical dots and then click Edit.
Important: You can have only one running or paused Prospective Donors automation. You can pause and edit a running Prospective Donors automation. If you publish a new Prospective Donors automation while an existing one is running or paused, the new automation replaces the existing automation, which will be archived.
Add Steps: Email Actions, Time Delays, and Task Actions
Next, add one or more steps to your automation. At least one step must be an action.
Add an email action for each email in a series.
Add a time delay before each email action to control when Bloomerang CRM sends each email.
Assign task actions to remind a staff member to contact the constituent.
Assign a relationship manager to the constituent.
Test the Automation
You can send test emails from an automation before you publish it. This is an optional step, but we recommend it.
Publish the Automation
When you’re ready for constituents to enter the automation, click Publish.
Next Steps: Manage Automations
After you create and publish an automation, you can monitor participation, manage automations, view emails sent by automations, and view tasks assigned by automations. Read Manage Automations.
Example
For an example automation, read Top 10 Journey Automation Templates.