nonprofit
marketing
stripe, hubspot, gmail, notion
Donation thank-yous go out within the hour
Thank-you letters went out in a weekly batch on Fridays, which meant a Saturday donor waited six days to hear anything. The donor list also lived in a spreadsheet nobody had permission to fix, so the same person often appeared three times.
The problem
Thank-you letters went out in a weekly batch on Fridays, which meant a Saturday donor waited six days to hear anything. The donor list also lived in a spreadsheet nobody had permission to fix, so the same person often appeared three times.
What they built
Each donation now writes a contact record matched on email, sends a personal thank-you from the director address within the hour, and logs the gift against the right campaign. Recurring donors are recognised as returning rather than greeted as new.
The flow, step by step
What changed
<p>Riverbend Food Trust runs three food banks and raises most of its money through small online donations, typically between fifteen and eighty dollars, plus a few larger gifts each year. Two staff members handle communications between everything else they do, so any process that depends on a person sitting down on a Friday is a process that skips whenever that Friday is busy.</p><p>The old routine was a weekly export, a mail merge and a batch of letters. It worked in the sense that everyone eventually got thanked, and failed in the sense that a Saturday donor waited six days. Anyone who has fundraised knows the moment a gift is given is the moment the giver feels most connected to the cause, and a week later that feeling is a memory.</p><p>Underneath it sat a worse problem. The donor list was a spreadsheet with about four hundred duplicate people in it, because every export appended and nobody had the standing to merge rows. That made total given per person meaningless and made the board report an exercise in caveats.</p><p>Moving the list into HubSpot and matching on email fixed the duplication as a side effect of the flow rather than as a project. Syncline looks for an existing contact before it writes, so a donor who gives four times a year updates one record four times. Nine duplicates remain and all nine are people who genuinely used two different addresses, which the team is happy to leave alone.</p><p>The two template split is what the director points to. A first gift gets a short introduction to what the money does; a returning gift names the previous campaign and thanks them for coming back. Both send from her own address, both are plain text, and both look like something a person wrote, because a person did write them once and only the fields change. The second gift rate inside ninety days went from 18 to 27 percent over two quarters, which the trust attributes mostly to speed and partly to the returning donor wording.</p><p>The Notion campaign log replaced the caveats. Every gift is recorded against the appeal that produced it, so the quarterly board report is a filter rather than a reconstruction, and the question of which appeal actually worked now has an answer that fits on one page.</p>