Enhancing Donor Engagement Through Automation and Personalised Milestone Messaging

Published Date: 13 November 2024
Author: Mohammad Galib Shams, Nabil Mosharraf Hossain

At Greentech Apps Foundation (GTAF), our donors are at the heart of everything we do. Their generosity helps us build tools that benefit millions of Muslims worldwide. But as our donor base grows, we wanted to do more to acknowledge their contributions, reconnect with those who had paused their support, and open new lines of meaningful two-way communication.

📌 Problem Statement

We aimed to:

Celebrate donors who hit giving milestones, whether by total amount or number of donations.
Reconnect with donors who hadn’t donated in a year.
Track cancellations of recurring donations to better understand trends.
Encourage feedback by giving donors a chance to talk to us directly.

To do all this, we used Donorbox to track donor activities and built a system around four key metrics:

Amount Milestone: Total donation amounts (e.g., £100, £200…)
Frequency Milestone: Number of donations made (e.g., 10, 20, 30…)
Donation Gap: Donors who hadn’t donated in exactly one year.
Recurring Cancellations: Donors who had recently cancelled recurring support.

⚙️ Our Mechanism

We opted for weekly bulk email processing and used CSVs as our tracking base (with plans to move to PostgreSQL soon). Here’s a snapshot of the system:

Every day, we fetch new transactions via Donorbox API and update donor profiles.
Milestones and anniversaries are detected in real time as transactions are processed.
Donors meeting conditions are added to separate milestone tracking CSVs.
On Fridays, we send milestone and anniversary messages via Chatwoot, complete with a Tally form for feedback.
Recurrent cancellation alerts are posted to Slack for internal follow-up.

This daily update method helps us capture milestone thresholds at the exact moment they’re crossed—even if a donor quickly moves past them with another donation.

📬 Email Structure

Each email is warm and personalised. Here’s what we send:

Frequency Milestone Reached
Amount Milestone Reached
1-Year Donation Anniversary

Each message includes a Tally feedback form linked to Slack so our team sees every response.

✅ Results So Far

1700+ emails sent
30+ donor feedback responses
Direct correlation between emails and donations not yet analysed (on our roadmap!)

🧠 Challenges Faced

Null values for converted amounts in Donorbox: We handled this by using GBP directly or converting via a currency API.
Refund calculations: Adjusted totals accordingly.
Chatwoot limitations: Had to customise beyond their documentation to improve email formatting.

🔄 What’s Next

Here’s what we’re working on for version 2:

Replace CSVs with PostgreSQL for scalability.
Optimize milestone tracking for performance.
Refactor code to clean up legacy daily-run structures.
Track non-recurrent but frequent donors.
Define new donor metrics like retention and engagement ratios.
Connect Donorbox comments directly to Slack.
Investigate Stripe failed donations for better follow-up.
Build a dashboard that unifies Donorbox, Stripe, and PayPal data.
Introduce new recognition systems: e.g., Donor of the Month, etc.
Start tracking post-donation activity to understand longer-term engagement.

💬 Final Thoughts

This project has helped us strengthen our connection with donors and express gratitude more intentionally. It’s just the beginning of a more thoughtful, responsive, and data-informed way to build lasting donor relationships rooted in sincerity and impact.

Want to support our work or collaborate? Reach out at gtaf.org.