Here's how to use Churchteams and especially workflows to automatically discover lapsed givers and then send an email and notify a pastor to be aware there might be a need.
- Create "Lapsed Donor Active" and "Lapsed Donor Passive" groups. The active group will launch the workflow. The passive group will allow you to keep from re-enrolling lapsed givers into the workflow. Make both groups accessible at the Financial Admin level only. Whoever is managing this process will be able to access the "Active" group (with financial admin level access) to manage pastoral care, and also access the "Passive" group to make those people available again for the workflow.
- Create your Lapsed Donor workflow by clicking Communication > Workflows.
- Click "+Create Workflow" and fill out the needed information. Below is an example of what this could look like. You will want a clear goal stated in the description, and the "Reply To Email" will direct where replies to emails come back to - i.e. the pastor in charge of lapsed donor pastoral care.
- Use the Lapsed Donor Active Group as your enrollment group. Then, for your first step, you will select "Schedule follow-up," and assign that note to the pastor who will be responsible for follow-up. They will immediately get an email and a text with a link back to the person's note page to contact them and report on them.
- If you want to add an email to the workflow, it might look something like this. Be sure to save it as an email template. Remember the template name is used as the subject line of the email. You could also send a text if preferred, but remember to check your Chat for any open-ended replies from your people.
- You can decide whether to use these action steps or any others in the workflow itself.
- At the end of the Workflow, be sure to include the steps "Add to group" and add the person into the Lapsed Donor Passive Group and "Remove from group" to remove them from the Lapsed Donor Active group.
- Create your Lapsed Donor report to add people to that group. Click Reports > New > Add People to Group (under the People section).
- In the Options Column, select a join date of the current date, select your "Lapsed Donor Active" group, and select the group role of Member (this is just asking what is their role in that particular group).
- Then, exclude people who are in the Lapsed Donor Passive group. These people have already been through the workflow. Do this under the Filters section, Groups/Registrations > Group Involvement > People not in a group, and select the Lapsed Donors Passive from the Group(s) dropdown menu.
- Next, still under Filters, select Contributions, then scroll to First/Most Recent and put in a date range of 12 to 3 months ago for the most recent contribution. These are people whose last donation was at least 3 months and up to 12 months ago.
- To remove people who may have given just once or twice during those 9 months, you can scroll further down to Number of contributions and select a number of contributions during the same time frame.
- Once you click "Go!", it will give you the ability to display the list of people that fall into this category before adding them to the group, so you can check that it is capturing the type of person you want to follow up with. If you want to adjust anything, like the number of contributions, click the "Back" button displayed on the Churchteams page, as this will hold all of your filters and allow you to adjust things easily. Adjust things until you get a report that you feel best fits your culture and ability to follow up.
- When you do, click the green "Add to Saved Reports" button and use this image to help set a dynamic date range from 52 to 13 weeks for every time you run the report. That way, each time it runs, it is looking back at the correct time frame automatically.
- Finally, you will want to schedule this report to run automatically, perhaps weekly or monthly, depending on your preferred rhythm. To schedule this report, go to Reports > Scheduled > + Schedule a report. Select your "Lapsed Donors" report from the dropdown, add email(s) you'd like to be notified about this report, and set the frequency and start date/time. This will automatically run this report at the designated frequency/time so that your lapsed givers will be automatically added to your "Lapsed Donor Active" group, which in turn will add them to that Lapsed Donor Workflow, starting the follow-up process.