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The Eight Individual Donor Alerts

Individual donor alerts tell you when one of your donors has done something worth a personal response.

Individual donor alerts are the single-donor cards in Act on Insights. Each one fires because something specific just happened to one of your donors, and each one is a stewardship moment worth acting on quickly. Eight event types produce them.

The short version

Where a model insight predicts what a group of donors will do next, an alert reports what one donor just did, such as a record gift, a lifetime giving milestone, or a lapsed donor returning. The card names the donor, says what happened, and suggests a next step scaled to the size of the gift. The response is usually a call, a note, or a personal thank you, made in the same week rather than the following months.

The eight alerts
Alert Fires when What it is for
Largest-ever gift A donor gives the largest single gift on their record Acknowledge the step up specifically, not with a standard receipt
Lifetime giving milestone A donor's cumulative giving crosses a threshold Recognize the whole relationship, not just the latest gift
Gift-count milestone A donor reaches a memorable number of gifts Reward loyalty in donors whose gift sizes never trigger anything else
Anniversary The anniversary of a donor's first gift A reason to make contact that is not an ask
Welcome back (reactivation) A lapsed donor gives again Close the loop fast so the return does not feel unnoticed
Drifting away (pre-lapse) A donor shows signals they may lapse soon Intervene while they are still a donor
First big gift A donor gives notably above their usual amount for the first time The earliest reliable signal of mid-level or major potential
Retention win A new donor makes their second-ever gift First-to-second gift is the hardest conversion in fundraising, and they just made it
How are donor names handled?

Alerts are named cards, so the donor's name matters. Two cases are handled explicitly:

  • No last name on file. The alert shows the donor's first name plus their donor ID in brackets, so you can still identify the right record.
  • No name at all. The alert is suppressed, because a stewardship card with no name to act on is not usable.

If you see more donor IDs than you expect on your cards, we recommend checking the quality of your name data in your CRM.

How long is an alert worth acting on?

Alerts are surfaced daily across a five-day work week, and each donor can appear only once in a day, so the same donor does not show up twice on the same day's cards.

We recommend working through alerts promptly, because the value comes from the timing of the event. A thank-you call for a record gift has more effect in the same week than two months later. Drifting away alerts are more time-sensitive still, because they are there to help you reach the donor while they are still giving.

Working an alert

To work an alert:

  1. Read the card. It gives you the donor, the event, and a suggested next step sized to the gift.
  2. Click through to the donor profile for the giving history, so you are not making the call cold.
  3. Make contact, or assign it to whoever owns that relationship.
  4. Log the interaction in your CRM as you normally would, so the next person to open that record can see it happened.
Frequently asked questions

Are these different from the cohort insights?

Yes. An alert is one donor and something that already happened, and a model insight is a group of donors and something predicted. Act on Insights: two types of cards compares them directly.

Can I set my own thresholds for what counts as a milestone or a big gift?

Not yet. Threshold customization is the deeper phase of configurable alerts, and a simpler version that lets an organization turn insight types on and off is planned first. See Working an insight.

Will everyone on my team see the same alerts?

Yes, for now. Alerts are generated for your whole organization, so your team sees the same cards on the same day. Alerts aimed at one person need per-person permissions, which Dataro is working on.

One of my donors triggered two events on the same day. Which alert do I get?

Each donor gets at most one alert a day, so you get one card for that donor rather than two competing ones. Working an insight covers overlap in more detail.

Why did an alert show a donor ID instead of a surname?

Because there is no last name on that record. The ID is there so you can find the right person in your CRM. Records with no name at all are suppressed rather than shown anonymously.

I was on leave for a week. Did I miss alerts permanently?

The donors and the events are still in your data, so nothing is lost at the record level, but the daily cards move on. If a specific stewardship moment matters to you, the donor profile still shows the giving history that triggered it.