Creating a Workflow for Recurring Donors HELP!

Kathy Arocho

Hi I am fairly new to Workflows. I want to create a workflow for recurring donors.

1st email for new recurring donors - Welcome or Thank you

2nd email for anyone who pauses or cancels recurring gifts

3rd email for failed payments

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Crystal Bruce

Tagging in All-Star @Alex Wong to see if he can assist with this workflow question and I'm checking with my team to see what resources are available. Thanks!

Alex Wong

RE NXT Workflow "can" do some of what you want, but limited. It all depends on if you can get a constituent list filter to the 3 groups of donor, which I am not certain as I do not use RE NXT "Recurring Gift".

However, even if you are able to set it up, there is a limitation as RE NXT Workflow can only trigger for a constituent once. So if same constituent have multiple recurring gift and "activities" multiple times, the email can only be sent once.

If you want better control and more options to do this, you will need to consider using Power Automate.

Kathy Arocho

@Alex Wong I'm not familiar with Power Automate. Is it a completed tool or easy to learn? What apps do you need to use it with RE NXT?

I was also thinking that since we only have a hand full of recurring donors that I could just set up an action to check on new, terminated and failed recurring donors then email them accordingly based on a query that matches the status or something like that.

Any tips and guidance would be greatly appreciated.

You can email me directly at karocho@lbbc.org. Thank you!

Elizabeth Johnson

@Kathy Arocho - lots of opportunities to learn it and there are consultants who can do the heavy lifting. Here is a link to one option: PSG's AutomateGenius.

Alex Wong

Power Automate is a powerful, web-based automation tool that is relatively easy to learn. Elizabeth shared a great resource to help you get started. Beyond basic automation, it can support a wide range of use cases, from strengthening data governance to automatically delivering tailored daily, weekly, or monthly reports to the appropriate audiences, whether fundraisers or executive leadership.

For your specific situation, if you’re managing a small number of recurring donors and are comfortable with some manual effort, your approach can certainly work. However, if your goal is to reduce repetitive tasks and invest in a skill set that will provide increasing value both personally and organizationally, Power Automate, especially when paired with the Blackbaud SKY API, is a strong option.

Feel free to reach out to me at alex.wong@ffxconsulting.co. I’d be happy to provide a brief, more personalized overview of what this could look like for your organization to help inform your decision.