GivFlow is super powerful! I’ll be honest, though. Planning Center might be more powerful as a whole – it has more data than we do! We recognize this, and that’s why we sync our data back into PCO.
Active Households
GivFlow works similar to Planning Center in that we track individual donors. While a husband may have lapsed recently, maybe the wife started giving. The first thing you should do, is put together a list for active giving households. The list is simple:
- Give me all people where GivFlow donor status is Active
- Include all household adults
Awesome. Set that baby to automatically refresh every night, and you’re good to go! Know you have a list of actively giving households. We’re going to use this list to run our other list against.
Lapsed Donors
This is easily the biggest thing you can be doing in your church TODAY. Identifying the people that could possibly be leaving. GivFlow uses individual donor data to determine when that giver misses their regular giving frequency. We push that data back into Planning Center for you to automate anything you want! Let’s take a look at the list:
- Give me all the donors that have a GivFlow status of Lapsed
- Give me all the donors that had their status updated to lapsed in the last 30 days
- Exclude the donors in the “Active Giving Household Adult Members” list (created above)
Now, I set this to the last 30 days, but you can adjust your list however you’d like. Set that baby to refresh automatically every night and now you have a trailing list of donors that have lapsed in the last 30 days.
Establish Automations
Well that’s cool, but what do I do with the list. Here some ideas:
- Automatically push these people into a custom workflow for someone on staff to reach out to them. What you say is up to you, BUT I would advise against starting the conversation with “We noticed you stopped giving”….lol. Seriously, just ask them how they’re doing. If they don’t answer, leave an open ended voicemail.
- Connect this list to MailChimp and set up a custom drip campaign. I’m a huge fan of automation. This is a great non-confrontational way to try and re-engage with them. Send them a few emails over the course of a couple months just checking in on them, inviting them to talk to someone, or trying to get them involved in something else going on at your church.
Do those things, and hopefully you’ll see their status move to Recovered so you’ll know what you’re doing is working. Remember, you’re a church. That means you’re great at relationships and pastoring people. Hopefully the things above lead to more of that!
Want help setting up some automations?
Email me at evan@givflow.com as we’re setting up some custom automation packages for our churches for:
- Developing new donors into Active donors
- Giving active donors stories on where their donations are going and keeping them engaged
- Recovering lapsed donors
- Developing recovered donors back into active donors