Workflows for donor acknowledgements

Question

We are trying to create a acknowledgement workflow for both first time donor and returning donors based on payment method however i am confused whether or not to build out a workflow for this or just use AI acknowledgements and send them out individually whenever a donor makes a gift..! Need help and guidance

Faith Murray · Answer

Power Automate is becoming more and more adopted, as people try to simplify custom workflows. However, my understanding is that while it's cheap to implement, there is a major learning curve to implement it yourself. You can pay for a consultant to set it up for you, but then you would need to keep going back to your consultant anytime the process needs updating. So with PA, you have to choose your price: learning curve or dollars.

It may be that PA is something your org wants to invest in. I'm planning to dig into it myself later next spring. However, my philosophy is why use an outside source for something that RE already does just as well natively? Blackbaud has continued to state that it plans to keep some version of Global Add or Import in its future webview releases, so as long as it continues to function at the same level of proficiency, I would continue to use the native function. A query+Global Add is simplicity itself to run, once it is set up.

As far as the query, you're completely on track. But, I assume you also want to isolate people who were lapsed for a time (usually a year). So, you might benefit from something like:

* First Gift less than Last Calendar Year
* AND Gift Summary: Total Number of Gifts = 0 (Gift Date = Last calendar year, or This calendar year if later in the current year)
* AND Last gift date in the past 7 days
* AND Gift is not acknowledged

Make the query Dynamic, so you don't have to re-run every week. Then use Global Add to add Actions.

If the Actions include the acknowledgement itself, I would include the "not acknowledged" criteria, then use Global Change to mark the gifts acknowledged after your Global Add.

If the Actions do not include the acknowledgement, but is instead a follow-up process - if, say, you allow regular gift acknowledgement to send a thank-you, but you're wanting to send a secondary gesture of thanks - you would not need to include that criteria.

Using the Gift Summary: total number of Gifts last year = 0 is an imprecise range that will shift as the current year progresses: for example, someone who last gave in 2024 and gives in June 2026 has been lapsed 18 months instead of 12. You can set the gift summary to a specific date (eg, gift date < 06/01/2025), but then you lose the ease of a dynamic query that auto-runs when you open the Global Add.

On the other hand, if you simply use Total number of gifts > 1 and last gift date is last week, then unfortunately, you will also catch everyone who is not lapsed: your monthly donors who have given every month since 2010, your annual society members, etc. So if you want to target lapsed donors, you need the summary filter for inactivity.

Priya Rajendran · Answer

Thank you Faith, this is really helpful context!

For returning donors specifically — I want to make sure I'm building the query logic correctly. Should I be filtering based on total number of gifts > 1, or is there a better way to identify that a specific gift was their second (or later) gift?

My concern with using total gifts > 1 is that it would catch everyone who has ever given more than once, rather than isolating constituents whose most recent gift is what triggered the acknowledgement need. For example, if someone has given 5 times and just made their 6th gift, I want to make sure I'm only acknowledging that latest gift and not re-acknowledging them for older ones.

Would the right approach be:

* Total number of gifts > 1 AND acknowledgement status = Do Not Acknowledge on the latest gift?
* Or filtering on latest gift date falling within a specific window (e.g. last 7 days)?

Also — when you mention using Global Add for returning donors, is that the standard approach most organizations use, or are you seeing shops move toward Power Automate for this?

Appreciate your guidance!

Faith Murray · Answer

Chiming in here that AI acknowledgements only work with online gifts. So it cannot accommodate snail mail workflows at all. I believe that is why the feature is underused, because it often makes unnecessary work to have to create two different acknowledgement workflows for snail mail and online. That, combined with the fact that many orgs struggle with a low email address rate for donor universes, makes it difficult to implement as a universal process.

As far as webview workflows, they are really only designed to filter by gift amount, type, or fund - not gift date, channel, or subtype. You can link it to a list, but a constituent list can only handle one gift criteria at a time - so you can filter by First Gift, or Latest gift, but not both, which is what you would need to address recaptured donors.

Workflows could work well for first-time donors, however: simply create a constituent list based off first gift date, and then link it to your workflow.

Otherwise, you may need to utilize the query function to pull reactivated donors and then apply actions through Global Add. You could also segment an external Word merge by letter code.