NGO / Fundraising
4,800 donors. Every thank-you, personal.
The problem
A fundraising organisation wanted to thank major donors with personalised video messages — acknowledging the donor by name, their specific gift, and the tangible impact it would fund. With 4,800 donors receiving campaign communications each cycle, doing this manually was not a production challenge. It was an architectural one.
The approach
A personalised video pipeline connected to their donor CRM. Each donor receives a video addressed specifically to them — their name spoken on screen, their contribution acknowledged, a concrete impact statement matched to their giving tier. Delivered by email within 48 hours of their gift.
The result
4,800 personalised thank-you videos delivered in the first campaign cycle. Donor response rate increased significantly. Several donors cited the video specifically in follow-up communications.
Pipeline
The brief
The organisation had been sending printed thank-you letters for years. They were well-written, personalised, and largely unread. A digital fundraising consultant had suggested personalised video as a retention tool — the data was compelling — but no one knew how to produce it at the scale their donor base required.
The instinctive answer was to pilot with their top 50 donors and manually produce each video. We suggested a different approach: design the system to handle all 4,800, then the top 50 becomes a default rather than a ceiling.
What we designed
The tier layer: Three video templates mapped to giving tiers — entry, mid, and major. Calibrated, not just copied: the major donor template includes a bespoke impact statement from the Executive Director; mid-tier features programme footage and a beneficiary thank-you; entry-tier is warm, brief, and brand-consistent.
The data layer: Dynamic fields pulled from Salesforce — donor’s first name, giving tier, specific campaign supported, and the impact metric for their contribution level. Each video assembled with data specific to that donor.
The automation layer: Make.com monitors the CRM for new gift records. When a qualifying gift is logged, it fires automatically — matching the donor to the correct template, assembling the render job, and dispatching the finished video via personalised Mailchimp. The entire flow runs unattended.
The pipeline
Salesforce (gift record) → Airtable (tier + campaign state) → Make.com → Shotstack → Mailchimp (personalised delivery)The fundraising team sees a live Airtable dashboard: gifts received today, videos dispatched, delivery confirmations. Exceptions are flagged automatically — incomplete donor records, missing assets, failed renders — so the team’s attention goes only where it’s needed.
What this means in practice
In the first campaign cycle, 4,800 donors received a video addressed to them within 48 hours of their gift. The organisation sent more personalised video in that single cycle than in its entire prior history.
The response was immediate. Email open rates on the thank-you sequence were well above benchmark. Several donors replied directly to the email, commenting on the video. Two major donors referenced it explicitly in follow-up calls with the fundraising team.
More importantly, the infrastructure now exists for every future campaign. The system doesn’t need to be rebuilt. New campaigns get a new template and a new Airtable column. The pipeline does the rest.
Start here
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