It’s not a surprise that nonprofits are experiencing burnout. Staff members have to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, and cultivating donor relationships takes significant effort. In the end, you have so much to do in such little time.

Fortunately, you can fight fundraiser burnout with smart automations. Here are four ways you can integrate smart automations into your nonprofit workflow.

1. Setting up a welcome journey for new donors

Getting a new donor to contribute a major gift to your fundraising is great, but if they never hear from you again, they’ll disappear. To ensure they’ll stick around, set up an automated welcome journey for them:

1. Start with a simple thank-you and a brief introduction to your nonprofit and its mission.
2. Share a specific impact story that shows how your organization has helped the local community or impacted someone's life.
3. Invite them to follow you on social media. If you have recurring giving options or special offerings, such as tours (for visitor-based nonprofits like zoos and museums), mention them as well.

By creating an automated journey for new donors, you don’t have to worry about what to send. Then, you can simply focus your energy on the donors who will actually respond.

2. Building a recurring donor appreciation journey

Just as you would create a special welcome experience for new donors, you should also build an appreciation journey for your recurring donors. Their recurring donations provide some stability for your organization, but if they don’t often hear from you, they may feel you’ve forgotten them, which can erode their motivation to continue giving.

When automating a journey for your recurring donors, focus on expressing appreciation and demonstrating impact in the following ways:

1. Start with a quarterly update. What has your nonprofit been up to? How have the donor’s contributions impacted your most recent projects? Reminding supporters that their donations have fed many people or helped build a new mobile school for underserved youth, for example, will strengthen their resolve and inspire them to continue their support.
2. Once or twice a year, send a video of a board member expressing their appreciation for the donor’s continued support—even better if they mention the donor by name. Bloomerang’s guide to donor stewardship recommends sending personalized messages to donors to deepen their relationship with your organization.
3. Every year, drop a check-in message. It can be a roundup of all your nonprofit’s projects this year and any upcoming ones. You can also use this check-in message to ask for feedback, making donors feel like they’re part of the team.

This automated journey ensures that you keep in touch with your recurring donors, thus maintaining or even boosting your donor retention rate.

3. Automate matching donations

If you’re planning to start a matching gift program, automating it is a must since it streamlines the process. Here’s how you can integrate automation into your matching gift program:

• Identify match-eligible gifts. When someone fills out an online donation form, the matching gift software can automatically detect where they work and who their employer is, making it easy to determine whether the company is in the database and whether the gift is eligible for matching.
• Trigger follow-ups after the donation. Once someone has made a gift, automation tools can send timely, personalized emails that confirm the employer match eligibility, provide instructions for completing the match, and send reminders over days or weeks if the match hasn’t been completed yet.
• Enable auto-submission. Some matching gift programs offer "auto-submission," a feature that lets donors complete the matching gift process directly from the nonprofit’s donation page. They don’t have to fill out any additional forms later, making the process easier.

By leveraging automation tools in your nonprofit’s matching gift program, you can increase the impact of each donation with minimal effort.

4. Automate renewal notices

Since monthly donors give consistently over time, they are often one of the donor groups with the highest lifetime value. That means simplifying the monthly donor renewal process is essential.

Shift from a manual, paper-based renewal process to an automated system. Automating the renewal process lets you send the notice on a set date (or another date the donor prefers), easing your mental load. It also ensures that no donor slips through the cracks due to forgotten deadlines.

The best part about automated renewal notices is that they’re easy to set up, so long as your nonprofit has a dedicated membership management system. In just a few clicks, you can retain your recurring donors and even convert one-time donors into lifelong supporters, boosting your donor retention rate and overall revenue.

About the Author

As Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bloomerang, Diana Otero leverages her expertise in nonprofit CRM to help organizations strengthen donor relationships. She is passionate about showcasing solutions that empower For Purpose organizations to move beyond data tracking and foster genuine connections.

With more than a decade at Bloomerang, Diana excels at translating product capabilities into strategies that save time, fuel growth, and allow nonprofits to focus on what matters most: their mission. Her work is informed by her experience as a former nonprofit board member and ongoing volunteer work with various organizations, giving her unique insight into the challenges nonprofits face. Connect with her on LinkedIn.