Automate donor follow-ups

Who can do this Owner, Admin

Automations send the right message — to a donor or to your own team — when something happens, without anyone having to remember to do it by hand.

Before you start

• Automations is a Pro plan feature (Enterprise also includes it). On the Free plan, the page shows a lock and an Upgrade link instead of the recipe gallery.
• Finance can open Automations and see what’s running, but can’t create, edit or activate one. Member doesn’t see Automations at all.
• Find it under Email → Automations in the sidebar.

Steps

1. Open Email, then Automations, and select New Automation. You’ll see a gallery: Start from scratch, plus four ready-made recipes — Thank first-time donors, Large gift alert, Win back lapsed donors, and Welcome a donor to a new tier. Each recipe is a complete, working automation you can activate as-is or customise.
2. Choose a trigger. In When this happens, pick what starts the automation for a donor: a completed donation, a recognition tier change, a form submission, or a donor lapsing (no gift in a set number of days — default 365, adjustable between 30 and 1,095). Also choose How often can a donor enter? — every time the trigger fires, or once per donor ever.
3. Add conditions, if you want to narrow it down. Under Only if, add up to 10 conditions (gift amount, campaign, first gift, recurring, recognition tier, donor segment, or form — depending on the trigger). Conditions are all ANDed together; leave the list empty to include every donor the trigger applies to.
4. Add steps. Build an ordered list of up to 20 steps:
   • Wait — pause for 1–365 hours or days before continuing.
   • Email Donor — sent to the donor who triggered the automation.
   • Notify Staff — sent to your organisation’s admins, and/or up to 10 additional email addresses that belong to a member of your organisation (an address that doesn’t match a member is rejected).
5. Write the message, using merge tags. Click a merge tag chip to insert it at the cursor: donor first name, donor name, donor email, organisation name, donation amount, campaign name, donation date, tier name, form name, days since last gift, and an unsubscribe link (required by law on every donor-facing email).
6. Send yourself a test. From an Email Donor or Notify Staff step, select Send Test — it sends to your own account’s email address, not to a real donor, so you can check formatting before going live.
7. Save, then switch it on. Save your changes, then flip the Active switch. If it isn’t ready, DonorCARE lists exactly what to fix — for example, an automation needs at least one email or notify step (a wait-only automation does nothing), the last step can’t be a wait (it would never fire), and an email step needs a trigger that identifies a donor.

The terms

Draft — created but never activated. Only a draft can be deleted.

Active — live; new donors who match the trigger and conditions are enrolled.

Paused — switched off. Donors already partway through stay exactly where they were and pick up again once you reactivate.

Archived — permanently stopped. Archiving cancels every donor still waiting partway through, and an archived automation can’t be reactivated.

Snapshot at enrolment — the moment a donor enters, DonorCARE copies the automation’s steps as they exist right then. Editing the automation afterwards — even activating it — never changes what a donor already in progress receives; only donors who enter from that point on see the new version.

What this means in practice

Do

• Check the Runs tab after editing a live automation if you need to know who’s still running the old version — the editor’s own banner reminds you that in-progress donors keep the steps they started with.

Don’t

• Archive an automation to “pause and think about it” — archiving cancels every donor currently waiting and can’t be undone. Use Pause instead if you might switch it back on.

The Runs tab

Every donor who enters an automation gets a run, shown here with Enrolled, In Progress, Completed and Failed counts, plus a filterable table (Waiting, Running, Completed, Failed, Cancelled). Expand a row to see each step’s own status, when it fired, and the current “Step X of N” position — including when a run is waiting until a specific date and time.

What it doesn’t do yet

• No branching — an automation is a single ordered list of steps, not a decision tree.
• No WhatsApp step — only email and staff notification, for now.

If something goes wrong

What you see	What it means	What to do
“Add at least one action step (email or staff notification)”	Every step in the automation is a Wait — there’s nothing for it to actually do.	Add an Email Donor or Notify Staff step.
“The last step cannot be a wait — it would never fire”	An automation can’t end on a pause.	Remove the trailing wait, or add a step after it.
“A donor email step requires a trigger that identifies a donor”	The trigger (for example, a form submission) doesn’t carry a specific donor to email.	Switch to a donor-bearing trigger, or replace the email step with Notify Staff.
The Automations page is locked with an “Available on Pro” badge	Your organisation is on the Free plan.	Upgrade to Pro or Enterprise from Settings → Plan.
A notify-staff email address is rejected	Only current members of your organisation can receive automation notifications.	Use an email address that matches an existing team member, or remove it.

Related

• Send an email campaign
• Roles and permissions