Cultivation suggestions

What Cultivation suggestions are for

Cultivation suggestions is a short, daily to-do list of the people who most deserve a note from you next, a first-timer to welcome, a faithful attendee to finally ask, a lapsed donor to win back, a member whose term is running out. It turns the quiet signals already sitting in your data into a handful of concrete nudges, so outreach never depends on you remembering.

The list lives at /cultivation_suggestions, as the last tab of the Donations row, Donations, Campaigns, Receipts, Cultivation, because deciding who to ask is fundraising. The tab carries a count pill when anything is waiting. Today surfaces the same queue when it is urgent; the thinking behind it lives in the Donor cultivation article.

The four suggestion kinds

Every suggestion is one of four kinds. The kind shows as a badge in the queue, and each carries a one-line “Why” that spells out the signal behind it:

• Send a welcome: a first-timer whose first event was between 3 and 60 days ago and who has never been contacted. Its “Why” reads First attended {date}.
• Invite to give: a regular attendee (three or more events) who has never donated. Its “Why” reads Attended {n} events, never given.
• Reach out, attendance lapsed: a past donor whose attendance lapsed more than twelve months ago. Its “Why” reads Last seen {date}.
• Membership ending soon: a member whose role end date falls within the next 30 days. Its “Why” reads Membership ends {date}.

Who’s eligible

A suggestion is only ever raised for a kept person, one who has not been archived, who is also contactable: they have an email and are not flagged Do not email. The one exception is the win-back case. Reach out, attendance lapsed is a little more lenient about contact details, because reconnecting with a former donor is worth a phone call or a letter even when the email has gone quiet.

Statuses & the one-per-kind rule

A suggestion is in one of three states: pending (waiting in the queue), done (you logged the contact), or dismissed (you set it aside). The queue you work from lists only the pending ones.

Two rules keep the list honest. First, a person can hold only one suggestion of a given kind at a time, so you will never be told twice to welcome the same newcomer. Second, once a suggestion is resolved, whether done or dismissed, it is never recreated. That makes a dismissal permanent: if you decide a particular regular should not be asked to give, dismissing their Invite to give settles it for good.

The queue & its actions

The queue is a plain table with four columns: the Person (linked to their People record), the Suggestion (its badge), the Why (the signal line above), and the actions.

Two actions sit on each row. Log contact opens the contact form in a modal, so you never lose your place; when you save the note the suggestion is marked done and drops off the list. Dismiss sets a suggestion aside. It asks “Dismiss this suggestion? It won’t come back.” first, because, as above, a dismissal is permanent.

When nothing is waiting you meet a calm empty state, “Nothing to nudge right now”, with the reassurance that “As people attend events and give, we’ll suggest who to reach out to next.”

You never build this list by hand. Fay regenerates the whole queue automatically every night, at around 3:30 a.m., and again immediately after every ticket import commits, so the morning after a concert the new first-timers are already lined up. Fresh signals appear on their own; resolved ones stay gone.