SmartActions

And it is now one o’clock, so welcome aboard everybody. Today, our topic is Smart Actions working to keep you informed and connected. This is one of my favorite parts of DonorPerfect, a great way to allow some automation to do something for you, as we say, sometimes have the database be Read More

And it is now one o’clock, so welcome aboard everybody. Today, our topic is Smart Actions working to keep you informed and connected. This is one of my favorite parts of DonorPerfect, a great way to allow some automation to do something for you, as we say, sometimes have the database be smart on your behalf when we set up some rules behind the scenes. So my name is Janet Carroll, and I’m one of the trainers here at DonorPerfect.

Glad to join you today to discuss this topic and to really show you how things work and demonstrate the process as well. So more specifically, we are going to define this special kind of automation. We’re going to give you three different scenarios of how we can create Smart Actions, and we’re going to literally create them together. Oh, you can’t hear me. Whoops. Okay. Thank you, Kristen. Thank you so much. We’re also going to look at the steps for building a smart action, and then we’re going to build those Smart Actions indeed, for those scenarios that we will have discussed. So feel free and send me questions. I have the chat and the Question and Answer panes open, so send me try to keep the questions if you can within the Q and A Chat, if there’s any comments, but I do have them open to be able to respond as best we can. If the questions, any questions or comments are out of context for this particular topic, we’ll save those until the end of the presentation, since we want to be respectful of the time that you set aside today to join us for learning about Smart Actions. So let’s start out by defining what Smart Actions are all about. And as it says right here, which I just love, it’s automation, but it’s defined by you. So you get to decide the rules. You get to decide what the smart action is all about. And in a nutshell, you decide what the rules are. You get to decide, as an example, if somebody’s a brand new donor, what kind of actions you want to set up to take for yourself if you have donations over a certain amount of money, is there some kind of an automation that you need to set up? That’s part of the, I’m going to say, repertoire of what is available. So they’re really automating the business rules based on this activity within DonorPerfect. So that activity could be a brand new gift, save it could be simply opening up a record where that can that record has volunteer time, or it has a total lifetime giving over a certain amount, whatever it might be, you get to set up some rules. There are two different parts you’re going to see later. There are two different parts, and they display as two different tabs in the setup of a smart action. The trigger says What does has to happen within DonorPerfect, and the action is, what are we going to do about it? What automation? The action is all about that automation. So the trigger is your role that you need to set up of what has to happen. The action is, what are we doing about it? Let’s, let, let’s set up that to be done on our behalf. It saves us time. So in so, instead of making a handwritten list or going back at the end of the day or at the end of the week and getting some data that has happened, okay, we could take some action in real time, as we open up records, as we save records, we get to decide if this is going to be based on whether we save a new record or a new transaction, or it could be any time that we save it, even if we edit it and then save our changes. So the bottom line is that it does help you in keep helps keep you informed and connected, because it’s doing some of those as actions, and we are saying that there are cons. There is consistency in what we’re doing, and if we put that consistency behind the scenes, it allows us to take care of business and take advantage of that automation, instead of taking the time to generate some of those email reminders or make some of those lists and inform maybe a colleague or a board member about something so let’s take a look now at about some of the typical or I’m going to say. Good examples of what we might want to automate. So when I’m thinking about the topic of major gifts, I’m thinking that when a major gift comes in, you might want to communicate some of the details about that to a particular person or people. So think about that. I want to notify my executive director, my development director, maybe a particular person on the board, maybe the solicitor, if you’ve got a region, maybe if you’re if you have a regional setup and you have people assigned based on regions, you can do that too. So you want to decide who you want to communicate to and what are the details about it? The delivered in a timely fashion means that when that gift comes in, and we might say, Do this only on a new gift, save when we have a major gift, so with that major gift being entered and saved for the very first time we will might want to have some automation take place, send out those emails to somebody to notify them. Maybe we need to create some tasks that say that a particular person is going to be responsible now for a, let’s say, a phone call or some kind of a personal outreach so the data becomes very accessible to everyone that needs it, right? And we are setting it up behind the scenes, in the background, so we don’t have, we could, we can set up all those emails to be delivered, and it doesn’t mean that, it means that somebody else doesn’t have to be involved with doing exactly those tasks. Of course, here you need to define what major gift means. Okay, are you coding it that way? Is it over a certain dollar amount? Again, your decisions, your your customization.
If we switch gears for a moment and say that another thought about automation might be a better donor’s first gift. We know that we say thank you to the donor, but let’s go one step beyond that, right? We know that we are going to be sending out that thank you. But what about beyond that? Do you have any standard operating procedures involved with who does what for a new donor? Does it matter the dollar amount it does it matter that region they might be located in? Does it matter anything dollar amount. What it was for? Was it for an event? Was it for an appeal? Like, what was it for? Think about all the different details. So what do we want to do? We want to start creating some touch points, and at this point, start stewarding this brand new donor. So yes, there’s a way to easily find out that that brand new gift that you saved is indeed a donor’s first gift. So we want to create these touch points. So the purpose of all of this, of course, is to make them feel part of that family of the supporters within your organization, and in the long term, we’re building this relationship with them. And we, of course, hope that they’re going to getting they’re going to become engaged and involved, volunteering, giving their second gift. The list goes on right. So we want to be stewarding them in a in a good way, in a standard way that we’re creating within your organization. So I want to make a comment that from the Fundraising Effectiveness product project by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, you may remember, or that within DonorPerfect, we have a report called The AFP report, the Association of Fundraising Professionals report, and it is a lovely report to 12 month periods. It shows certain metrics, and with that same organization, their Fundraising Effectiveness Project has found that only 19% of first time donors will give again, but 63% of donors who contribute a second gift will continue to donate in future years. That’s a lot to say about donors who we can convert from first time donors to second time donors, thinking about that long that the lifetime of the donor. So we really want to convert them over. So starting that stewardship right away for that first time donor is super important. Okay, so we want to increase. Um, that that retain percentage and also, according to non profit quarterly, it can cost up to 10 times as much to acquire a new donor than it does to retain a current giver. So we know that we want to retain who we have part of us, all we always talk about is reactivating lapsed donors. Let’s start with them as a brand new donor, and say, let’s try to avoid that lapsed let’s try to work on that retainment right from the very beginning. So we know that the touch points is so, so important. So with the touch points, we’re certainly able to make decisions on what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So we can easily create touch points within DonorPerfect. And if we go to that next step about touchpoints for brand new first time donors, part of me says, let’s again, notify certain people, if we whoever needs to know, and also who is going to be responsible for that outreach. That’s that first personal touch point outside of that thank you letter. Maybe you have board members that do that. Maybe you’ve got some money on staff. Okay, maybe you’re going to divide those first time donors based on dollar amounts, or maybe what it was for. So think about that. All of the rules that you set up, we would then want to set up actions. So the trigger in this point is being a first time donor. The action would be, let’s say, an email, a task created, etc. So all really good reasons, because we want to retain them and make that to be a very natural way to do things. And when we create a task for ourselves to follow up, we then encourage everybody, of course, with that task there to put it on your calendar. So you have two ways of getting reminded. Running a contact management report is also looking on your calendar and get reminded from what’s on your calendar. What about VIP donors? So the Philanthropy News Digest says an organization’s donor beta database is one of its most valuable resources. This is especially true when developing donor engagement strategies and techniques to boost retention. So my hope is that you agree with this. I know I certainly do. So define who your VIP donors are before we talk about a major gift. Okay, now we’re talking about the VIP donor. So now we’re at the donor level, not necessarily about that individual gift, because your VIP donor might have made a tribute gift, might have what purchased a sponsorship, might have just gave a donation, you know, just a general donation that they like to do and support you. So think about it. Would it be helpful to have donorperfect update or create if you had a VIP donor, would you want to have a flag in your system that says VIP donor? So do you have another name for it? Would you like to have different levels of VIP donors? You decide, but think about it. What defines a VIP donor? Either one VIP designation or a few levels of it decide what makes somebody a VIP donor. So if somebody just got to that level that you designated to become a VIP donor, let’s make some things happen in your database automatically so you get you get to decide the rules. So what if your VIP threshold was $20,000 lifetime, and what if somebody’s brand new gift just got them over that $20,000 threshold? You want to be able to know that so that you could then mark them as a VIP. Well, instead of always having to look to see who is a VIP and updating, why not have the database do that for you, if you set that threshold, and know that, before this gift, it was under that threshold, and now at with this last gift, it was at or above it reached that threshold. Wouldn’t that be really nice? So it’s really all about knowing your data and deciding all of these special targeted groups, the you know, the strategies that you have that help you work and do so well. With what you do, right? It’s going to help you with your donor, engagement, retention, stewardship is just going to help you all the way along. If you are creating segmented communications, this might be one of your groups, one of your segments for communicating. So I think that you would agree with me. My hope is that if we could automate some of this record keeping, okay, then we’re saving our time so we can spend it with that stewardship. We can spend it with our donors. We can spend it where it needs that personal touch, and let some of that automation take over and help us out, right? So it’s kind of connecting the dots, knowing your data. We see what’s going on, we get the database to do some of that connecting for us. Any thoughts? I mean, we just looked at three different examples of what we can set up in Smart Actions. Does anybody have any smart action set up? If so, are they like any of these three stories or scenarios that I just mentioned? Does anybody have that already set up in their database? Feel free use the chat, use the Q and A. Share your thoughts.

Ah, okay, so Carly says the CEO receives an email that includes the donor information, which is great. So part of my comments earlier, just a little while ago, were about not only sending somebody an email, and remember, that email is in real time, so you’re not waiting till the end of the day to run a report or the end of the week or the month or whatever it might be, it’s real time when that transaction gets saved, which is really nice. There’s no delay factor there. But do you also create a task? You create a contact transaction for the CEO. I don’t know if your CEO is using DonorPerfect to be able to, you know, go in there and simply document their own conversation or whatever notes they may want to take. So just a food for thought, right? David says, when somebody requests legacy society info packet, Oh, that’s great. So that means you get to track the touch points for that. You get to even track how many legacy society info packets are we sending out in any month or year or whatever the timeframe is. So that’s really kind of neat as well. All right. Oh, very nice. So thank you. Jenna, very nice. And Elisa one second, going back to the quote here, and Lisa said she Oh, she wants to use more, and at least she now says, do those emails get saved somewhere? Well, they’re emails. They’re in somebody’s inbox, and the sent box we at DonorPerfect Send them out. Okay, so it’s all a matter of setting them up inside the smart action for how you want that documented in. There. Oh, and she says, would love for that conversation to become a contact in the donor record. So, so that is really what we’re talking about, right? We want to have more of that documentation. We want to have those touch points. Because I know that I’ve heard a lot of conversations over the years about organizations counting touch points, knowing that how important they are, and a certain average number of touch points for different level donors is what they want to strive for, to keep that level of giving, to keep that engagement, you know, to, I’m going to say, to keep that partnership, making everybody feel that they’re part of that, of the journey, of what your organization’s all about. So I love everybody’s comments. Oh, exactly. So, David, you’re tracking, you’re able, you’re tracking the touch points. So that’s fantastic. So you could run all those all different kinds of reports based on on that, and that also shows that we also all of that shows how much we care, because we’re following up and we’re making sure we’re doing what we are setting out to do. And I think a lot of these touch points also helps to keep us accountable. And I I know that I’m speaking for myself here, but when something’s on my calendar or something’s on my to do list in a certain way, I’m accountable because I have to finish it. So if something is is there for me to do, I have to go in there at a certain point and say that it’s completed. So I like that accountability, that the tasks force us to finish the loop right? It’s we started it off, we now want to finish it. And keeps it keeps us accountable. So thank you all this is really great because it’s also good to hear from each other on some of what you’re doing. So when we create a smart action, I’m going to just go through a this, the general shell of what we’re doing, and then we’re going to jump into creating each of those three Smart Actions. So we use the settings menu. The settings menu is the upper right hand corner of your screen, near where it has Where’s where it goes for you to log out. The settings menu is right there the menus, as all of our menus are alphabetical. So we go right to Smart Actions, and we add a brand new smart action. So remember, we have two tabs. One is the trigger, one is the actions. So the trigger is what is happening in the data to to then make the action take place. So we’ve got the trigger set up. We enter the name we might be calling it, you know, Legacy society info packets. Might be VIP donor. It might be about a major gift received, all different, you know, Carly was having a $1,000 plus donation. You know, notify CEO, whatever you want to call it. This is your name it. The idea is to remind yourselves of what you’ve set up, and later on, you might need to change the parameters that that trigger moment. Are we going to still say at that $1,000 level, or is it going to go up or down? Maybe we have that $1,000 plus going to the CEO, and maybe we see more gifts coming in that need this follow up. And maybe the CEO might then start to do 2500 and up, and you’ll let somebody else doing that 1000 up to but not including that 2500 so there’s a lot that you can do make sure the names, of course, is is descriptive of what it’s for. Rianne says, I don’t have smart actions as an option under Settings. Does that mean I need to change my DP account? If you don’t have it in your menu, it likely means that you don’t have permissions for it. I believe that if it was there, if if it, if it’s if you don’t have it in your package, it’s not going to be in your in your menu, but if you don’t have it in your menu, it also might mean that you don’t have their permissions for it. So do me a favor. Reach out to just to know what which way it is, whether it’s not in your package or you don’t have permissions. Reach out to somebody in support, reach out to your trainer, reach out to your account manager. Any of us could be looking that up for you, if you want to hang out at the end of the session, okay, the webinar. Could remind you about that, or just make a note to just reach out to support that would be the fastest, probably the fastest, way to get that answer. But I’m glad you’re here now, because. Uh, sometimes we don’t know what we what will be helpful to us. And I know that once you have smart actions, we always find a lot of uses for it. So we enter a name that is going to be resonating with you, very user friendly. The purpose of what this is all doing the Smart Actions purpose, right? You want to set up a selection filter, as long as you need to have it not work simply on every record in your database. So apply a selection filter, such as a certain solicitation code, or that the lifetime giving is over a certain threshold, and that before this last gift, it was below that threshold. So whatever might be appropriate, I’ve had Smart Actions that I worked with a university, and they had a smart action for every department, for the head of every department should receive an email when money was assigned to them, like money came in for the music department or the athletic department or whatever, and they used their coding scheme. So when that was a brand new gift with that coding scheme, the action taken was an email to that department head that money came in from a donor for their department, and here are some of the details about it. So that was an example of a selection filter. If everybody has a territory, and a donor in that assigned their territory gives you might want to have a an email that goes to that person in charge of that territory. It’s an email, maybe a task as well, to follow up. Decide what all of your parameters are. When you’re done setting all of this up, of course, we save that trigger tab. We then go to the Action tab, and there’s several different options that are potential actions. So one of the there’s only five total possible actions, no more than that, you may see all five. When you get to that actions tab, you may not see all five, and that is based on the trigger. Everything that you’re setting up will have its own appropriate actions possible. So you may see all five of these. You may see only a few of them. We talked about sending an automated email when we create a task related to what’s going on, like we want to create a task that somebody should be reaching out personally, let’s say that major gift, okay? Or that VIB toner, we’re always doing that stewardship. Create a task for it that creates a contact transaction. We can update fields that VIP, example, before, if somebody now hits that threshold, that P to become a VIP donor, you want to update, if you have a flag or some other field there, you can update that field with that value. That’s what this is all about.

If you open up a record, and let’s say you want the person that doing data entry know that this is a VIP donor. Let’s say you open up a record where that lifetime giving is already over that threshold you’ll have, you can have a pop up message says, this is a VIP donor of ours because of that level of giving. And you get to customize that pop up message. So lots of options. Another one of my favorite pop up messages is that when somebody checks off the box of do not send mail, and they do not fill in the reason for it, or they have a reason, but they forget to check the box that says, Do not send mail. So you have a special filter that says, if one is one is filled in, but not the other and going in both directions, then have a pop up message. So in this case, when you save the main screen, when you save that constituent data, and you those the no mail and the no mail reason fields are off a little bit because they’re not. One is done and what the other one is not. Then you can have a pop up message displayed something to the effect of review the no mail and the no mail. Reason fields so they work together. Okay? One is filled in, one is not. Make up your own message. You can also have some kind of an action that says, let’s open up a particular URL. Maybe it’s going to be containing a website that was entered on the main screen, and maybe you want to now open up that website using the data that’s in that website field that was entered. So lots of really cool. Things. So we set up the trigger tab, we click save, we set up the action. We can have up to five actions. As I said, when we’re finished, we now do a Save and Close. So I want to go into the database, and I want to create all three of those smart actions. So does anybody have a preference for what I do first? Because my my goal is to do all three, and I am going to jump into the database here. So if you have a preference, just let me know. I’m going to start right now by coming into settings, as I mentioned before. Email. Dana, yes, we’re going to do email, likely on all of them, so that will be incorporated update fields, please. Oh, no, no, absolutely men, because when I think about that VIP designation, I absolutely want to do that so. So thank you for your feedback. I appreciate it. I’m going to come into settings and Smart Actions. So here it is on the screen, I see that I have a few active Smart Actions. When you come in on your screen, you see that active. And you have, also, I have, right now, one that is not active, it’s okay. And you can see that the active, you see, we have an active column so, but the default, of course, is to see active. I’m going to click add new smart action, and let’s get going. I mentioned we have two tabs right select trigger and configure actions. So let’s, since somebody entered a preference in which particular order, I will just go in that order that we just created, that we just went through. So it’s going to be a major gift. So we’ll decide what we want a major gift to be but let’s first start out by saying, When is this going to happen? And I want to do something about a major gift. I only want to do something about it one time only. So I want to go into this new set of options. So I’m now thinking about a new gift save, which a new gift save everything is new only one time. So I’m going to click new gift save, and I’m going to call this one major gift, so we could decide what that major gift means, or define it, you know, what kind of what we want to set up so that we’re going to be notifying somebody about this major gift. So let’s do major gift notification to the director of development, Brianna says, Would that include gifts in batch gift entries? And I’m going to say that is able to be done. I’m going to take a slight pause for Brianna right now, because we’re on we’re on the right screen to answer that question right now. So we saw before that when we come in here to designate this trigger, we can do it at any time that we save only when we save when it’s brand new, only when we save when it’s existing. So it’s not the brand new, right? So we’ve got the any, we’ve got the existing and we’ve got the new well, and we’ve got these page loads, which means that when we open up whatever’s there on the main screen, the get screen, look at that, when we open up the screen when we delete we can have some kind of automation as well. But look at the very bottom, which is what Brianna was asking. So if we want anything to happen when we post gifts from over up here, where it’s tasks, that’s gift entry. That’s what Brianna is asking about. So when we use that method of data entry, yes, we can use this bottom option down here that says when it posts. And you still need to, of course, decide, do we want to have an email? Do we want to do something based on all of those transactions in that group, in that batch, or do we want to have it only on some of them? And that’s if it’s only on some of them, we then go into here and do set a selection filter. So absolutely. Brianna, that’s a great question, and thank you for asking. Right now we’re going to do a major gift notification to the Director of Development. Ah, isn’t this the best part? Nadine says, Thank you for asking, because I was hoping for the same thing. This is the best part about classes and webinars, because we when somebody asks a question that we were thinking about but just had. Done. Hadn’t asked yet. So this is great. So I’m going to set a selection filter here, and let’s click Apply, and I’m going to add a new filter, and I’m going to come into main bio, because we’re talking, oh, I’m sorry, what we’re talking about, major gift. My mind went different way. For a moment, we’re talking about a major gift. So we’re talking about a major gift, it’s about a transaction. So when it’s about a transaction, now we’re talking about the dollar amount of that gift. So I’m on the gift screen, I’m coming into my Gift Amount field, and I’m going to say that is greater than, or equal to whatever I define as a major gift. Let’s call it $10,000 no dollar signs, no commas. Just put in the 10,000 and I’m not going to put any other requirements in about who’s giving it, an individual organization. I’m just going to consider this a major gift, plain and simple. I’m going to click continue. I see it here. I’m going to now save it, because I’m building it into a Smart action, I have to save it for it to work behind the scenes. So I’m going to call this, well, let’s call it gift amount greater than or equal to. Now I get to make it look very user friendly. So I put in my dollar signs and my comma there. I also want a reminder to everybody in my organization that this is part of the smart action. So I’m choosing my filter folder for Smart Actions. If you don’t have a folder for that, go ahead and add it. This is simply here as a reminder of what this is about. Why? Because if you ever look to change this filter, you’re going to get a reminder that it’s about related to a smart action. So you don’t want to change it, unless your intention is to change the smart action. So I’m going to share this with my colleagues. I am excluding pledges and link gifts as well. I only want money in the door, just the gifts I’m going to click done.
So I have my new gift saved. Everything’s going to happen once only for these gifts of $10,000 or more. And yes, it also runs. I after data imports. And the data imports not only is about importing, but it’s also about downloading transactions from the two DonorPerfect online form products. I’m going to click Save. I’m done with this trigger, so I clicked, I did my save. I’m going to come now over to my configure actions. So we just had a major donor, major gift. So I want to send Look at this. I have all five options here. I do want to send an automated email notice that the from address is already filled in, and that’s because we get DonorPerfect, or sending it out for you. And as you can see here with that question mark it is is filled in for you to avoid being flagged as spam. Okay, so we need to send this out, and that’s why we’re putting it in here. We send it out anyway. Okay, it’s always been that way, but it now is going to say that, and we now need to say who is going to receive it. And again, all of the the question marks are to help you here. If you want more than one recipient, as it says here, separate using a comma between email addresses. Do not use semicolons, all right, so I’m just going to put in one person’s name in here. All right, and what’s happening is that if I am sending this out or it needs to come back to me, like I’m setting it up, but if it really is supposed to be coming from me, I’m going to put myself in that reply to field. All right. So that means that when Arlene gets this, she clicks, reply is going to come back to me. It’s not going to come up. It’s not going to go into that do not reply email address. So that’s a really nice thing. And the wording, I think, on this screen is very helpful, especially with these with the question marks to help you out. And now I’m going to say, major gift. Whoops, let’s fix my spelling here. Sorry about that major gift receive. Who? Okay, check inside for all of the details. Now I come into my message body, and you know, I have all of my styling elements right here. So I’m going to so I’m selling this to our lane. If it was more than one person, of course, I would have done a comma and I would have more email addresses, but I know it’s only going to one person, so I’m just going to personalize it that way and say a major gift came in for. From the following donor Oh, not doing well with my spelling here from the following donor details follow. All right, so now I can say donor name and look at this. I can click Insert Merge Field. I get this box to come up, and I’m now I’m going to find the first name of the donor, and let’s find first name. And here we have first name of the donor, and I’m going to Click, Submit. It came right in here. I’m going to click a space, and I’m going to say, Insert another field, and now I’m looking for the last name of the donor and let’s do that. Last name is here. Click Submit, and you know, maybe I want the donor ID as well. So I’m going to move that down a little bit and say, here’s the donor ID, because that might be super important, just for that quick look, if somebody wants, or, in this case, Arlene wants, to open up a record and simply see more information. So I’m just going to do donor ID and click Submit, and there we go. I could be adding all of the details. Okay, so then, of course, I might have the gift date open this up a bit more, right? So create whatever you want, right? And I might even have the general ledger I can put in whatever I need, solicitation, think about anything that is relevant if you have a solicitor, and maybe you have a gift solicitor as well, just in case you have both, maybe they’re the same, maybe they’re different, right? So whatever it might be, if you’ve got a region, whatever details you need, but remember, I just added the name and the donor ID that was from the main screen when I when I’m here, I am at the gift date. I’m going to click Insert Merge Field. And now, when I’m looking at it, I’m going to look here now for the date of the gift and I have to look in the D for date. Oh, here we go. So wasn’t sure if it’s going to be d for date or gift date. And the geez, here’s my gift date. Click Submit. There it is. You can highlight. You can change colors. You can do whatever you need to do, right? Okay, here, I could change the colors. Here, I’ll make that red. You can do anything you want down here, pretty cool. Let me see what’s going on here. Nadine says I created a pop up notification for donors record. This donor has a unique request that we don’t want to forget about. Oh, isn’t that smart? Very smart. So I think we can all learn from that, right? So you had a, I’m going to say your filter was probably the donor ID, is my guess. So then the action here is using the display pop up message. I think that is so smart, fantastic, right? Whenever you’re done here on this particular part, I’m going to click Save. I’m going to stay here for a moment and say I had just had a major gift. I think I might want somebody to be, oh, I’m looking at the time. I have to speed up a little bit. I have I want to create a task for somebody. So I’m going to click create transaction. I want to task. I’m going to click contact record. And now I’m going to add a new value, and I’m going to say, first of all, assign it to our Lean. I sent this to Arlene, so I want to have it assigned to her. So I’m going to come in here, and here I just assigned it. I’m going to click Apply, and I’m going to add a new value. Imagine that you’re filling out manually, a contact transaction. Set it up for all of the details. Okay? And I’m going to say the activity is going to be some kind of a personal contact, follow up with a personal note. I’m going to do that right? I’m going to click apply. So I’m building up everything that I need, as if I was doing this manually. So create a mailing code, create everything that you need. The one I want to demonstrate here is the due date. So the due date, I don’t want to have a specific due date, because I’d have to be editing this all the time. I want to do an offset date. And I’m going to say that the offset date is going to be in two days, because this is a major gift. So I want to say the date is going to be two days after today. So I’m going to click apply, look at that today’s date, plus two days I’m done. I’m going to do a Save and Close. My major gift notification to development director is here. It’s all set up. If I were to now enter a gift of $10,000 or more, Arlene’s going to get a an email and. She’s going to be assigned that new task. Let’s go on to the next one. Add an another new smart action, and this is going to be for a brand new donor, their first gift. So I only want to do something with that one time. So again, I’m going to do a new gift save, and we’re going to say this is the first time donor. Oh goodness, my spelling today is not good. There we go. And we’re going to say, notify somebody who is responsible for following up on that, on all of the new donors. And I’m going to just say, notify Joe. Pretend that Joe is the person I need to notify, I’m going to come in here for my selection filter, and I’m going to click apply, I’m going to add a new filter. And what I want to say here is that every gift behind the scenes has a lot there’s a lot of details that could be documented. We have a special field behind the scenes on every gift record. I’m going to click on gift pledge, and I’m looking for particular field called first gift. It’s not one of my favorites. I’m going to click all fields, and I’m going to come down here, and here it is, first gift. First gift is a checkbox. If it’s checked, it’s the first gift. If it’s not checked, it’s not the first gift. This is done automatically by the database. You don’t do anything. It’s going to be marked or not marked. So imagine you’re saving a gift, and it is behind the scenes marking that is the first gift for that donor. I’m going to click Continue. That’s it. This is the very first gift. So I’m going to say first gift of donor. And again, this should be laid to a smart action so I’m going to come down here and say it’s a smart action filter, and I’m going to do all the same things here, and click Done.
and I click save now and now, the question is, what do I need to do? Do I need to set an automated email? Do I need to create a transaction? What do I need to do? If I’m only trying to notify Joe, I’m going to do an automated email. So don’t forget, we need to check the boxes here. If you set up an email and don’t check the box, it’s not going to happen. Okay, if you check the box and don’t fill it in again, nothing’s going to happen. So we need to make sure that we do both sides of it. I have heard people complain something is not working. What did I do or not do? Sometimes it’s as simple as some checking off the box because the email might be perfect. Every so often they set up an email and didn’t have an email address, so it didn’t go anywhere. But just thinking, I’m just trying to think out loud a little bit about why something may not work, and it’s just because we may have forgotten one of those details. So in here, I would be putting in if there was an I said, like to notify Joe about a first gift. So let’s just say Joe at any npo.org and let’s I’m going to say reply to me. And so it’s going to Joe from me, and we’re going to say we just got a brand new donor Ooh. Check inside for all the details. What am I going to do? I’m going to do the same thing right. Here are all the details about our new donor, and I’m going to go through the same thing I like. If we need a prompt, put a prompt in. If you don’t need a prompt, just come in here and start clicking Insert, merge field. Set it up so it’s pretty obvious to you, highlight, change color, do all of those cool things. All right, here’s a lot of styling that you get to do anything that you want. You want to have bullet points with the details. Set it up with some bullet points. This is yours to set up when you’re finished. Do any one of these? Do a save at the very bottom when you’re done with all of those actions to perform. Then, of course, we’ll do a Save and Close. So in this case, I would likely do I would do a transaction to create a task for Joe. If I had more time, I would go down that, repeat that path, like I just showed you, a due date. Was it part of my mailing code for a new, brand new donor? I would want to have a brand new mailing code if I didn’t already have one, to be basically welcoming new donors. You know, I could have an activity of a phone call or an email or something like that, but my mailing code for my new donors is going to be just that. So I want to keep track of what it’s all related to, which is really nice. We want to track touch points along the way. Are we following up? You know, I want to make sure that we’re doing all of that. So I’m going to click Save and Close. So that’s the example of we’ve done a first time donor. We’ve done the major gift notification. We need to do that VIP, because we were talking about the VIP, and somebody asked before about, like, updating a field. And we’re going to do that. Now. That’s what’s next. Let’s click add new smart action. And again, I want to have this run based on a new gift save, because now in the back of my mind we have that VIP, that donor who just be crossed over the threshold to become a VIP donor. So I’m just going to call this here new VIP donor. And so now and a quick comment here. The comments doesn’t go anywhere. It’s right here. So if you need notes about it, what you’re doing, why? Who’s you know something in general, or some specific in here. It’s only internal. You won’t see it any other place, but here. So if you want to document what you’re doing and why or whose rules or whatever it might be, put it here and save it absolutely fine. Let’s do a selection filter. I’m going to click Apply, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a new filter, and I’m going to pretend that our threshold is $20,000 so first of all, I’m going to go into main area and ask for lifetime giving. Here we have lifetime gift total, and I’m going to say is greater than, or equal to $20,000 here we go. But that’s not enough, because we could have a lot of donors that are $20,000 or more. What I want to know now is who just went over that threshold of $20,000 so I’m going to click add more criteria, and now I’m going to add a part of this restriction setup, and it’s going to be dealing with that last gift. Because the last gift is really what this is all about. The new gift, save is the last is, is current. So the new gift is also the last gift. Think about that for a second, right as we add more and more gifts, the the new, the newest is the last. It’s the most recent. So I’m going to stay in main bio, and now I’m going to ask about the last gift amount. And I’m now I’m going to say I want this to be less than $20,000 I’m not done with this yet. Continue. So now I have here they in order to get to become a VIP, they have to have $20,000 or more. But what I also need to do is say, Hey, donorperfect, before this gift was given, we had to have been below that $20,000 level. So what am I going to do right now? I am going to copy, whoops, get to my mouse back. I’m going to copy this field name right here. I’m just doing a control C on my keyboard, and I’m going to put that at the very beginning of the statement, a space and a minus sign. So now I’m saying lifetime giving, yes, it’s at or above my threshold of $20,000 but now I’m saying my lifetime giving minus this last gift that I just saved. So with lifetime giving without this was under $20,000 so that’s how we ah, oh, man, thank you. Isn’t that so smart? Somebody was very creative and shared that a while ago, and that it was the easiest way to get here, right? So, but we need both of these components together, because one of them is not enough. We need both of them because one says where they are now, which could be a lot of donors in your database, but we have to say, but who just crossed that threshold? So we are saying, well, be take your dollar amount and remove this last gift. And was it below? And now it’s at or above. We are golden, right? So we’re going to say new VIP donor over I’m going to say greater than or equal to the $20,000 threshold, and then we’re going to again, put it into my Smart Actions filter folder. I’m not going to share it and the and is the combined. I need both of these statements to be true at the same time, I’m going to click done and I’m going to click Save. I always click Save at the end of using either of the tabs. So I did my. Save there. I’m going to come to configure actions, and I, of course, I want to notify somebody about my brand new VIP. So let’s do somebody else here. Okay, and let’s say, if somebody replies to I’ll put myself in there. So I’m sending something to Kelly. Kelly wants to reply. It’ll come to me. And now I’m going to say we have a brand new VIP donor. Check here for all the details. And now I come down here and I do the same thing I’ve been doing before. Okay, I’m going to skip this particular set of details here. I’m going to just going to click Save. What I want to do is do my update field, because I know that that was, this is the what’s a little bit different than the other two. Yes, I would, of course click a create transaction, because I want to make sure that Kelly reaches out does a personal outreach. Hey, you just reached this level, special level, of hours, all that kind of neat stuff. But I want to do update fields. I’m going to click add new field to update. When I click over here in that pull down, look at this. I could update any of these bio fields. These are now main fields. Look at this. I have a ton of fields. I can update something in the gift if I needed to right tons of fields. I think flag is at the bottom. It’s at the bottom, and it is.

So now I still have to decide what what in this case, I have my flag field, but I have to put in what my value is of the flag field. This is a little bit different. Of course, you know, just because when we’re thinking about all of those check boxes on the flag field, it might feel a little bit different. Okay, I want to come in here and click Find code and look at that. I’ve got a VIP contact. I want to, I want to designate this. So this is what I’m doing. I’m saying that the go into flag, update my flag field. I’m going to assign it to VIP, and I’m going to click Apply, and that’s it. I’m going to click save, right? I could continue to add I finished that one, if I wanted to update more fields, of course I can. And every so often, I’d be working with somebody, and they would say they need to a certain scenario. They need certain field values on the gift screen to be a certain way because of certain kinds of gifts you might want to have. It to be a receipt delivery by email, or make sure it’s by letter or a certain kind of a thank you letter code to be assigned. So there’s different kinds of field updates that you can do which are really nice. So Min is asking, if I manually unclick VIP, will it be re ticked? The next time a gift comes in the the answer is, if it qualifies, if you manually uncheck VIP and on your flag screen, it is it’s not checked, it will, if this satisfies the requirements, yes, it will check it off. If it is already checked, it’s not going to show is anything right? Because maybe somebody said that they were a VIP for special reasons, and we put them in that VIP category even though they didn’t reach that $20,000 threshold I set up. Okay, so if something’s already checked off, this is only going to make sure it’s checked and nothing’s going to change. So yes, if you manually uncheck it, this, of course, will check it off if you’re worried that you don’t want somebody to be checked. VIP, I already did a save here. Let me make a quick comment. Then if I come back to trigger edit your filter. And instead of just all of what I set up here, I could add more criteria here, and I could say a donor ID is not equal to such and such, and that will make sure that if it’s not, if that record, that donor is not ever supposed to be VIP, I can make an exclusion here that donor ID is not equal to that value. And that’s one way of getting around that, if that is something you’re trying to avoid. So we now have our new VIP donor. I hope that that part makes sense. Ah, good. Thank you. Appreciate it. So I know it’s at the two o’clock mark. I am just going to do a little bit of comments here a quick recap, because I’m need to be respectful of your time, and I’m happy to hang around a little bit if anybody has any questions how tos, whatever it might be. So I mentioned some of these common uses, actually, before I got to the demonstration part. I think that’s why I got there a little bit late. So tons of different options. We talked about major donors, right? Well, we talked about VIP donors, but again, you have your own categories. We did a major gift. This is now saying we’ve got a major donor maybe you’ve got, like, a major donor category, a mid level donor category. Think about all of what you’re doing and how you structure everything. You can set up your smart action to fill in and say that this is now a major donor. And if you have a major donor in a mid level, if you have so few tears, I would say it might not be a flag. It may or may not be a flag. Maybe it’s its own other field about donor level, and maybe you have a few choices in there, and a pull down, you will update that that field with the value, just like I did with flag today. We did first time donors already. You could ask. You could ask the database about who the second time donors are who just gave their second gift. And again, the purpose would be to create that touch point, to make people aware of those who need to know, of course, and then create a touch point for somebody. Maybe your board members are going to be doing certain kinds of follow ups here, right? Do you want to document and have some touch points or record keeping of some kind when records are deleted? I mentioned this actually earlier. What about in the Email Setup? Sometimes we need to notify a solicitor or somebody in their list just gave so that’s another way of of selection filter, right? You’ve got a new gift saved, and the solicitor equals so and so. And you’ll if that’s a case, you’ll create an email, an automated email, to that person you know, and decide you know how you want to go about what else any other tasks that’s going on? I’m happy to hear everybody’s thoughts about how they’re going to use it. I want to just do a quick recap now to make sure that everybody can get on to other tasks for the day and hang around if they do have any other questions. So we learned a few things about Smart Actions today, right? Automated business rules based on your data and your needs. We saw that it could be very big time savers, because we’re going to eliminate some of these manual processes that we might not have minded doing, but they are. They they take time. So we don’t have to do that. We don’t take the time the automation is in place, right? And we get to share all this important information timely and efficiently because of right? We save it. The Smart Actions all get checked based on their selection filters. When it’s appropriate, those emails go out, or the fields get updated tasks, all of those different possible actions. I’m happy to answer any questions. I also want to thank everybody for joining me today. I hope you have a lot of takeaways. And I think this is the kind of a setup where setting where we have a lot of very practical takeaways. So I hope that if you are using them, that you can go a little bit deeper. I know a few of you are just learning all about it, so happy to answer any questions, and I’m going a couple of questions came in. So I’m going to go in order here. Nadine says, I entered my batches from the receipt. I enter my batches from the receipt screen. So that is not the rece so what was mentioned earlier was the batch gift entry, not the receipt batch number. So those are two different things. So you say I enter my batches from the receipt screen, will the batch gift entry action have the same effect as when I update a batch from the receipt screen? I’m going to ask one second, I’m going to ask you to unmute. Oh, David, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Nadine, would you like to unmute and maybe clarify your question.

Hi there. Sorry. No, no.

No, it’s good. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. We have a lot of people that still stay so Eddie, please explain, and I’m happy to answer.

So when I process a gift. The very last step is to go through the receipt screen, right, and then I update the batch, giving it a new Yes, exactly, giving it a new batch number. That is when I would like to have that notification go out. 

When to who and what and why. What are we trying to accomplish?

So for a major gift alert, so we’ve got it set up for a for the board of directors to receive an email when we receive a major, major gift. So

If you want it to happen there, and so you have two choices really, well, a couple of choices. Okay, the first choice is do a smart action, in which case it will be the notification will be transaction by transaction that might it keeps everybody informed on a timely basis. Yeah, but if you don’t want it that many emails, I’m going to say that many emails. Okay, not sure what that point means, depending on how many major you know about the the major gifts that need to be note for note of notification. But if you’d rather send it all at once, like in a report, my first question is, do you have any scheduled reports? I’m going to come in reports and Report Center, and you see under here where it says scheduled. If you click on there, I’m in a test system right now. The most you can have is 100 you can have zero in your package. You can have five or 10 or 20 100 depending on what your donorperfect package has Sure. Okay, so if you wanted it, let’s say once a day or once a week. Scheduling allows daily, weekly and monthly reports. So if somebody really wants to get it together, you know, a report instead of the one by one. Okay, one by one keeps you in real time, but when sometimes we just want to look at one piece of paper or one screen to see the report, and that’s when a report is really nice. So scheduling a report, or alternatively, going to your dashboard and making a dashboard report, and then basically set it up for yourself in a certain date range, whatever that might be, and run it whenever you need it. So there’s different you know, you can create reports and run it whenever needed, depending on what the specific circumstances are to have a generic filter, let’s say for the last week, or Yes, like the last week, and there’s a few different definitions of last week. So you can have last week, last month, all these things, and decide, because you know what, you might not have scheduled reports. Okay, everybody in this session today, some of you may have scheduled reports, some of you may not so if you had scheduled reports, I would certainly go down that path, but only if you can make it on that regular basis. And I still sometimes find myself making a scheduled report and also putting it on my dashboard to make it on demand, because sometimes we run a report on Monday and we’re only running it once a week and Wednesday or Thursday. Another major gift comes in and saying, I don’t want to wait until next Monday to run this report again. I’m going to run it now. So I want to run at the end of the day today. So I like having bookmarked or are those on demand reports on the personal dashboard. So when you come, I’m just going to come in here, and while I’m doing that, Jenny, everybody gets the recording of the session, I think somewhere about an hour from now, or whenever that automated email goes out. Yes, it does. All the attendees get the recording. So I just mentioned those bookmarked reports that are on your personal dashboard. So I clicked on reports and dashboard. You need to be on your personal dashboard here. So it needs to be my dashboard. And look over here. You want to be in the reports area. And here you can add and delete your own reports. So I’m going to say like 98% of the reports can be added here. You cannot add export to file. You cannot add the counter report. You cannot add the illustration ones like the pie chart and the bar chart. I think I’ve run into those four that I cannot add here. I think it’s I think everything else I’ve ever tried is possible to add here, and you get to have your selection filter in the back, you know, set it here so it can say last week, say yesterday. And I’m talking generically, by the way, I can say yesterday. There is a statement that you can put in there, and you can check with support or with a train or anybody, it’s in the knowledge base. So you could, you know you can have it generically say yesterday or the last three days or last week? There’s a lot of ways you can ask generically so you don’t have to edit this and set it up and just run it whenever you need it. So that itself, I find, is really nice. So does that answer your question? Um. It.

It does it actually, and it gave me a little more information, because I don’t have any of these reports set up, and have kind of thought that it would be helpful, and just haven’t done that.

Gotcha, because when you’re running receipts, you’re finishing a process that is not about that entry of the receipt. It’s about the review and processing of them to, of course, we need to make sure we thank the donor. So to then take a step back and say, oh, you know, I still need to get those major gifts, you know, to so and so, whatever it might be, I need to run that report on major gifts. It has to be wherever. Okay, so you have to decide, do I want it as those major gifts come in, or say, I’m going to do it after every time I update the batch, so you know you have to, or maybe I’m going to run it once a week, or once, whatever it is, you get to decide. When do you want to run this? There’s no right and wrong, but I think there is that decision to be made, because, number one, I don’t know how often you’re running the receipts. You know, how often are you processing, you know, the receipts and coming into update batch, right? Is it going to be a certain time frame always is like, is it going to what is it going to be? Yeah, are you only oops.

Sorry. No, no, no. Go ahead. Oh, it varies by the gifts. Sometimes it’s three or four times a day. Sometimes today is a very slow day. So none today.

You mean no major gifts today or No, no, no processing of receipts today, no.

Processing. Gotcha, any gifts? Yeah. So I would.

Say take a step back decide if you want to run this based on the timing of updating your batch. Okay, do you only want to pull out the major gifts from that batch? So imagine this for me, if I did update batch right now, I would be assigning a group of transactions this number 107 Yeah. So if, if that was me, if I updated my batch first, but I only wanted to look in that batch 107 I would go to run a report, and I would need to say, Hey, DonorPerfect, get that receipt batch number 107 and the amount of the gift is greater than, or equal to some dollar amount. So that 107, is going to be changing all the time, right, right? So I have to make, I actually need to do that every single time. So I’m not sure it’s great to do. And you can do that, but I don’t, won’t be able to automate that, right? Yeah, right. That makes it becomes a different picture. So think about what do you need, when do you need it, and is there something, some kind of a standardization that you could think of that’s going to work for you? And whatever the answer is, if you’ve got scheduled reports, maybe you can schedule it again. The scheduling is available for daily, weekly and monthly. If it doesn’t, if you can’t make it fit into one of those three molds, then I would go to the reports and dashboard and add it to that reports area so you can set it up and say, You know what, I’m going to run it today, and you’re going to run it using your restrictions. But then again, behind the scenes, there are we looking at the last week, the last month. Is it okay if I run it for the last month, and you know what, I ran it last week, so some of the gifts are going to overlap because they’re still in the last month, and I’ve already told so and somebody about it. Is that okay, right? Does that make sense? Like, sometimes, sometimes somebody wants a list of donor donations, 5000 and up for the month of August, and then they want an update. Well, you know what? I already gave it to you last week, and you already have some, but I’m still in the month of August, so some of it’s repeated, and now you have a few more added to that list of those 5000 and up donations. So think about what’s okay. What do you want? What is the model that you’re trying to create for you or somebody else? I might be opening up more questions and answers. However, there’s a lot of options.

No, that’s great. You gave me, given me some other things to think about. I think I’m going to keep the smart action just as we have it, okay, but you’ve given me some other things to kind of.

to think about. I’m glad there’s so much that the database can do. Smart Actions is just one of those really cool things. When I went from supporting and training on the DonorPerfect installed to the online This, to me, was one of the most exciting parts at the time there’s but it’s morphed in all these years since that, since that transition. For me, now there’s all these other things that are also pretty exciting. This is the first one of that exciting. Uh. The Pyramid there for me. And that’s so that’s, that’s why I just probably love it so much. And look, Chantelle says, you know, it’s exciting. It is, you know. And I thank you, man as well. It is exciting because there’s opportunities. And I think the saying goes, we like to work smarter, not harder, but we need to learn how to use the tools and make it work for us. Because if it’s not doing what you want, because it’s not the automation that you need, then we need to make sure you’re doing just what you need, right? And I think sometimes we all get enticed by some automation, and we need to just make sure we rein ourselves in to make sure. Is this what we need? Is this? Who needs to be notified? Is this the information that they need to get? Let’s make sure that we do what is requested. And sometimes we add an extra value added information in some of those scenarios, but we need to make sure it’s doing what we what somebody asked, so that it’s going to help them and do it with what their job is. So I wish you all good luck. This is It’s exciting. So thank you for clarifying. Aging. Appreciate it. I don’t want to leave anybody else out, because if anybody else has any questions that needs some clarifications, you’re also welcome to unmute as well.

So thank you all for all this great participation makes it informative for every single one of us, myself included. So I wish you all a great rest of the day and look forward to when joining you joining us at another webinar in the future. So take care, everybody. Bye, bye.