Donor cultivation

What donor cultivation is

Donor cultivation is the quiet engine behind the Cultivation suggestions queue. Fay keeps a steady eye on attendance, giving, and membership across your whole audience, and turns hundreds of records into a short weekly list of the right people to reach out to, so cultivation stops depending on memory.

With something like six hundred people on file, no one can hold in their head who just attended for the first time, which loyal regular has never been asked to give, or whose membership is about to lapse. The engine does that watching for you and hands you a handful of names, each with a reason attached. This article explains the idea; for the screen itself, its layout, buttons, and grouping, see the Cultivation suggestions article.

The four moves it surfaces

The engine surfaces exactly four kinds of suggestion. Each is a specific, timely move, and each arrives with the reason it appeared:

• Send a welcome: a newcomer who just attended for the first time (their first event three to sixty days ago) and hasn’t been contacted yet, so the welcome is still timely.
• Invite to give: a loyal regular, three or more events in, who has never once been asked to donate.
• Reach out, attendance lapsed: a past donor who has drifted away, with no attendance in over twelve months.
• Membership ending soon: a member whose role lapses within thirty days: time to renew.

The reasons lean on ideas covered elsewhere in the handbook, what counts as a first-timer, a regular, or lapsed comes straight from Audience & attendance, and the giving and membership history behind each move lives on the People record.

Who the engine considers

The engine only suggests people you can actually reach. To appear, a person must be a kept record, not archived, with an email on file and no Do not email flag. There is no point surfacing a name you cannot contact.

The one exception is win-back. Because re-reaching a lapsed donor matters most, the Reach out, attendance lapsed move is a little more forgiving about the record it will surface, the value of not losing that relationship outweighs a stricter rule.

How the list stays honest

The list regenerates every night, at roughly 3:30am, and again immediately after every ticket import, so it always reflects today’s reality, Saturday’s first-timers are ready to welcome by Monday morning.

Two rules keep it from nagging. Each person can hold only one suggestion of a given kind at a time, so the same name never crowds the list twice for the same reason. And once you act on or dismiss a suggestion, it never comes back. The queue asks each thing of you exactly once.

Acting on a suggestion

From the queue you do one of two things with a suggestion. You Log contact, which records the interaction and clears the suggestion in a single step, or you Dismiss it.

Logging contact is the link between cultivation and the rest of your outreach: it writes to your contact log and lets you schedule a follow-up, so a welcome or an ask flows straight into the record instead of living in your head. The step-by-step mechanics of the screen, how suggestions are grouped and where the buttons sit, belong to the Cultivation suggestions article.

The philosophy

Three principles hold the whole feature together. It suggests, you decide, every name is a prompt, never an instruction. It is one short list, not a firehose; the point is that five good names beat six hundred rows you will never work through. And it never sends anything itself, every note, call, and letter is still yours to write. The engine’s only job is to make sure the people who most deserve attention are the ones in front of you.