Creating a Workflow for New Gifts

Jenni Lien

Hi! We'd like to implement a workflow for a handful of processes. One workflow we're interested in setting up is a “qualification workflow” for donors who gave their “greatest” gift of $1k+. The intention is to create a process for our gift officers to reach out through a variety of actions for any donor $1k+ to determine if they should be added to a portfolio.

Is there a way to exclude any donors who make their “greatest gift” of $1k+ that are already assigned to solicitors from this workflow? Ex: Jane Doe is in my portfolio, and her greatest gift has been $1,000. She makes a $1,500 donation (her greatest gift), so she would get pulled into the qualification workflow, even though she doesn't need to be included since she is already in a portfolio.

Appreciate any insight!!

Alex Wong

@Jenni Lien
the RE NXT workflow designer is meant to be very basic, selecting from a constituent list, or use the basic criteria selection, then send emails and/or add actions to the constituent. A constituent can only be triggered by this workflow once.

While you can filter on constituent list by greatest gift, there is no way to filter “no fundraiser/solicitor assigned”.

For complex workflow that involve complex filter, it will need something outside of RE NXT. i.e. Power Automate. Something you can explore on your own, or use a Blackbaud partner that can do automation for you.

Jenni Lien

@Alex Wong Gotcha. I appreciate the clarification! If we kept the workflow, would we be able to manually delete/remove the workflow actions once a gift from a portfolio donor came in? So manually remove folks?

Since a consistent can only be triggered by this workflow once, if they made a second gift, they wouldn't get pulled in, correct? Would we need to duplicate the workflow every certain length of time (quarterly, annually) to re-set the trigger?

Alex Wong

@Jenni Lien
any actions can be manually deleted or marked as completed, so nothing to do with workflow. So i'm not what you are asking.

As for your 2nd question, not sure about your “use case”, since if your workflow “exists”, when someone gave a greatest gift over $1K the workflow will email/action as you define it, but will not happen again on the same work flow. So meaning, if someone gave $1K, triggered the workflow, if the same person give $2K, the workflow isn't going to trigger again

Jenni Lien

@Alex Wong Gotch okay!

Can you point me in the direction of some examples of how others are using Workflows? I'd love to see how others using the Workflows for donor touch points. Thank you!!

Alex Wong

@Jenni Lien
i don't have any info about how other use RE NXT workflow as I do not use it myself. I go the power automate more custom route.

I guess you can try another post where the subject line is more along that line “Poll on how other uses RE NXT work flow”.. maybe you get some that uses it to respond.

Austen Brown

@Jenni Lien - Echoing Alex, I highly recommend you take a look at Power Automate, your use case is simply to complex for what Workflow can handle. I started in Workflow and quickly found out that most use cases will be ‘too complex’ and moved onto Power Automate and haven't looked back.

Here's a blog that talks through the differences between Workflow and Power Automate, what else you can use Power Automate for, and resources for getting start learning this skill:

If you're not interested in learning Power Automate yourself and/or would like to partner with someone to build this for you, my company is happy to help. We have a team of experts in RE NXT and Power Automate that customize automations to your organization's needs. Check out AutomateGenius for more information.