Nonprofit teams are busier than ever these days. From dealing with budget cuts, year-end frenzy, and managing the day-to-day, your teams are strapped for time and can often find it hard to focus on scaling strategic marketing efforts.   

Here come marketing automations, your key to scalable, personalized, timely communications that not only free up your staff to focus on mission-critical work, but work largely behind the scenes, doing the work of nurturing and engaging your donors without the added stress.  

Here are 13 marketing automations to set up in 2026 that can help you work smarter, not harder!  

1. Welcome Series for New Subscribers 

A welcome series is one of the most valuable automations that your nonprofit can set up to begin developing a relationship with new contacts.  

Every time a new subscriber enters your database, they should be entered into a short sequence that sends multiple warm emails introducing your mission, sharing impact stories, and inviting them to take their first small step in engaging with your organization, such as following you on social media or signing up for your newsletter.  

These emails are meant to establish trust from the start and nurture these subscribers to eventually begin donating.  

2. First-Time Donor Thank You and Appreciation 

The first time a donor makes a gift, instead of a single generic thank you email, consider automating a thoughtful and personalized multi-step sequence that offers immediate gratitude, and then shares the impact of their gift in action.  

Multiple touches after a gift creates a positive giving experience for the donor and encourages them to continue contributing. 

3. Event Promotion and Reminder Sequences 

Promotion and reminders of upcoming events often require manual communications that can eat up the time of your staff members, unless they automate them. Creating an event promotion and reminder sequence can take the stress out of follow up with each individual supporter, and ensure that they receive timely reminders.  

These communications should include registration confirmations, reminders to add the event to calendars, and day-before and day-of alerts. 

4. Post Event Follow-up Sequence  

After a supporter attends an event, whether it’s a gala, a 5k, a virtual webinar, or a volunteer day, they should be entered into a personalized sequence that expresses gratitude and shares helpful next steps.  

These emails should thank them for attending the event, explain the impact the event had on your organization’s mission and fundraising goals, share highlights from the event, provide next steps of similar upcoming events they should register for, and invite them to stay involved through donating, volunteering, or joining your newsletter.  

5. Behavior-Based Email Nurtures 

Monitoring your supporters’ behaviors can clearly tell you what they care about and how they are most likely to engage with your organization and mission. Behavior-based email automations can send different messages based on different actions.  

Here are some examples of automations you can create based on donor actions:   

• If a donor clicks on a monthly giving link → Trigger a follow up email that shares an impact story about the power of recurring gifts and invite them to join your monthly giving program. 
• If a donor watches a video → Send an email that expands on the topic of the video, whether it’s a related story, or ways to take action. 
• If a donor reads a certain blog post → Automatically send a piece of related content or downloadable resource on the topic, and invite them to join your newsletter, if they haven’t already.  

6. Lapsed Donor Reengagement Series 

Every organization has supporters that drift away, but hope is not lost! The right reengagement campaign can remind them of why they donated in the first place, and how much your organization valued them as a supporter.  

Create an automation that triggers when a donor hasn’t given in a specific time frame and send a warm, personal reengagement message, including updates, recent successes they helped make possible, and a soft invitation to reconnect.  

7. Volunteer Onboarding and Training Sequence 

When a supporter signs up to volunteer, send an automatic sequence that gives them next steps, including a welcome email, training materials or orientation videos, a reminder of their shifts, and the contact information for who they can reach out to with questions. This will help volunteers feel immediately recognized and reduce volunteer drop-off.  

8. Abandoned Donation Form Follow-Up 

If a donor leaves the online donation form before completing it, create an automated sequence that emails those who entered their email address but didn’t finish the form, gently encouraging them to complete their gift. An immediate outreach that gently asks if they had any technical issues or shares the impact that their gift can have can recover a surprising number of otherwise missed gifts.  

9. Anniversary and Milestone Appreciation 

Donor and volunteer anniversaries matter, but can be hard to remember manually. Automated sequences that trigger on certain anniversaries, such as one-year donor anniversaries or reaching a milestone number of hours served for volunteers can help supporters feel appreciated and remembered for their contributions.  

10. Recurring Donor Nurture  

One of the most valuable automations that you can implement to create a base of loyal supporters is one that identifies one-time donors and places them into a short nurture series designed to convert them to recurring givers. This sequence should include a heartfelt thank you for their gift, a message that explains the value of predictable recurring donations, and an invitation to join your organization’s monthly giving program.  

11. Recurring Donor Engagement  

Send regular updates, success stories, impact metrics, and other important information to your recurring donors to keep them informed of your organization’s mission and the impact of their recurring donations. These messages can also include invitations to upgrade to a new tier of monthly gifts, and automated notices when cards expire or payments fail.  

12. Advocacy Action Follow-Up  

When someone signs a petition or takes an advocacy action, trigger a thank-you email to be sent to them and include next-step actions that they can take to continue advocating for the cause.  

Examples include:  

• A “thank you for raising your voice” message
•  Other ways to stay involved 
• Related events or educational resources to keep them informed of the cause  

13. Lead Scoring for Major Gift Prospects 

Create an automated system for scoring donors based on their engagement with your organization over time so that your development team has an easier time identifying who to call first to secure a major gift.  

Donors can be scored based on factors such as event attendance, webinar attendance, donation frequency and amount, the number of emails they have opened, pages they have visited on your website and more. Once a donor crosses a certain score threshold, they can be automatically flagged for personal outreach by your team.  

Importance of the Right CRM 

Marketing automations only work as well as the system that runs them. Without the right segmentation capabilities, clean donor data, and the capabilities of the automations themselves, your workflows can become murky and send the wrong message to the wrong donors.  

A strong nonprofit CRM acts as another powerful member of your team, ensuring that donor data, engagement activity, and donation history live in one place, so that automations can correctly trigger based on behavior, without messy imports, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools.  

With the right automations in place, your organization will have the ability to communicate more consistently, steward donors thoughtfully, and save your staff time better spent on critical tasks. A few smart, simple automations can go a long way in making a huge difference to your goals!