Some of the most important moments in a supporter's relationship with your organisation happen when you are in a meeting, working on something else entirely, or not at your desk at all.
A new regular giver signs up. Someone creates a peer-to-peer fundraising page. A major donor prospect downloads your impact report. Without automated journeys in place, these moments often pass without the timely follow-up they deserve.
Ortto's journey builder exists to close that gap. This article explains how automated journeys work, what makes them effective, and where to start.
What a journey actually is
A journey in Ortto is a sequence of actions triggered by supporter behaviour. When something happens, a defined response follows automatically: an email, an SMS, a wait period, a branch based on what the supporter does next, another message, and so on.
The key distinction from a standard email campaign is that a journey responds to the individual, not to a send date. A campaign goes out to a list at a time you choose. A journey activates for a specific person the moment they meet the entry condition, whether that is midnight on a weekday or the middle of your organisation's end-of-year appeal crunch.
The result is communication that feels timely and personal because it is timed to what each supporter actually did, not to when you had capacity to press send.
Why timing matters more than most teams realise
Research across digital marketing consistently shows that the first 24 to 48 hours after a meaningful action are the window of highest engagement. A donor who just gave is thinking about your cause right now. A fundraiser who just created their page is motivated right now. A volunteer who just signed up is enthusiastic right now.
A welcome email that arrives three days later because your team was busy misses that window entirely. An automated journey that responds within minutes does not.
Beyond the initial moment, journeys also hold supporters through the quieter stretches of a campaign or program. A regular giver does not just need a thank-you when they sign up. They need to feel connected to your mission across the months and years that follow. A well-built nurture journey does that work consistently, without requiring your team to manually reach out to hundreds of people on an ongoing basis.
Journeys go beyond communication
One of the most powerful aspects of Ortto's journey builder is that it does not stop at sending messages. At any point in a journey, you can trigger actions across your connected platforms. Update a record in your CRM. Create a new profile on your fundraising platform. Send your team a Microsoft Teams notification. Tag a supporter for follow-up by your major gifts officer.
This means a journey can do operational work alongside communication work. When a new regular giver signs up, the journey can send the welcome email, update their CRM record with the new giving status, and notify your stewardship team, all without anyone needing to lift a finger.
It also means your journeys do not have to exist in isolation. They can interconnect, moving supporters between them as their behaviour and relationship with your organisation evolves. A fundraiser who starts in a welcome journey can move automatically into a re-engagement journey if they go quiet, or into a recognition journey if they hit their goal. Simple journeys, working together, responding to real behaviour without any manual intervention.
Four journeys worth building
New regular giver welcome series
This is often the highest-value journey a fundraising team can build, because regular giving programs live or die on early retention. A supporter who feels welcomed and connected after their first gift is far more likely to still be giving 12 months later.
A simple version looks like this:
Day 0 (immediately after sign-up): A warm welcome email that confirms their gift, explains the impact it will have, and introduces them to your organisation's work in a way that feels personal rather than administrative.
Day 3: A follow-up that shares a specific story connected to the program their gift supports. Not a receipt. Not a newsletter. A story.
Day 14: A check-in that invites them to explore other ways to get involved, whether that is following your social channels, signing up for an event, or reading more about your impact.
Day 30: A one-month acknowledgement that thanks them for their ongoing commitment and reinforces the difference their gift is making.
Each of these touchpoints does compounding work. By the time a regular giver reaches their three-month payment, they already feel like a genuine part of your community rather than a transaction on a list.
Peer-to-peer fundraiser support journey
Fundraisers who feel supported raise more money. They also come back for your next event. The challenge is that most organisations do not have the capacity to personally support every fundraiser throughout a campaign.
A journey solves this at scale. A starting framework:
Immediately after page creation: Welcome email with practical setup tips, a prompt to add their profile photo, and encouragement to make a self-donation as their first step.
Day 3 (if no self-donation yet): A gentle nudge explaining why self-donations matter, with a simple call to action.
Day 7: Fundraising ideas and social media templates, timed to when initial motivation often starts to fade.
When they receive their first donation: A congratulatory message that celebrates the milestone and encourages them to keep the momentum going.
One week before the event: A final push with tips for last-minute fundraising, sharing ideas, and a reminder of what they are raising for.
The journey branches based on what each fundraiser does. Someone who reaches their goal early gets a different message to someone who has had no donations yet. Ortto handles that branching automatically once you have set the conditions. From there, based on their activity, they can move automatically into a different journey. One that re-engages fundraisers who have gone quiet, or one that builds on the momentum of those who are performing well.
Appeal donor stewardship journey
Most appeal journeys end at the thank-you email. A stewardship journey extends that relationship through the weeks that follow.
After the initial receipt and thank-you, consider a short series that shares the impact of the appeal once results are known, introduces the donor to related programs or upcoming events, and gently begins building toward the next campaign. This transforms a transactional gift into the beginning of an ongoing relationship.
A well-designed appeal journey also differentiates the experience by giving level. A supporter who gave a smaller gift might receive a general impact update, while a larger donor might receive a more detailed story or even a personal note from your team. You can use conditions and splits in the journey to tailor the experience without building entirely separate sequences.
Lapsed donor re-engagement journey
For supporters who have not donated in 13 to 24 months, a re-engagement journey can do the work of a dedicated win-back campaign without requiring one to be manually planned and executed each cycle.
A simple three-step sequence that acknowledges the gap, shares what has changed or what has been achieved since their last gift, and offers a clear and easy path back is often enough to reactivate a meaningful proportion of a lapsed audience. The key is making the first message feel like a genuine reconnection rather than a generic appeal.
What good journey design looks like
A few principles that separate effective journeys from ones that feel automated in the worst sense:
Start with the supporter's experience, not the organisation's agenda. Each touchpoint should ask: what does this person need right now? A fundraiser three days after creating their page needs encouragement and practical help, not a reminder about your charity's history.
Use branches to respond to behaviour. The most powerful journeys do not treat every supporter the same. A supporter who opened and clicked your first email gets a different second message to one who did not open it at all. Ortto's journey builder makes this branching straightforward to set up.
Do not over-communicate. More touchpoints is not always better. A tightly structured journey with three or four well-timed messages will outperform a sprawling sequence of ten that exhausts the supporter before they reach the end.
Let the score inform the journey. If you have built engagement scores from Win 2, you can use them as branching conditions within journeys. A fundraiser whose score drops below a threshold can automatically enter a rescue sequence. A donor whose score climbs above a threshold can be flagged for a personal outreach from your team.
Think about what happens between journeys. Your journeys do not need to operate in isolation. A supporter who completes your appeal stewardship journey and shows high engagement could automatically enter a regular giving conversion journey. Connecting journeys together creates a continuous experience rather than a series of disconnected campaigns.
Try it in your 14-day trial
In the 6 Step Guide to Ortto at the end of the playbook, Win 4 has two parts. First, you create a branded email template you can reuse across journeys and campaigns. Before you start designing, it is worth setting up your brand settings in Settings > Brand Book. Defining your colours, fonts, logo, and button styles there means every email, landing page, and capture widget you create will automatically inherit your brand look.
Then, you build a Tax Appeal Thank-You Journey that walks you through the key shapes available in the journey builder: entry criteria, conditions, delays, emails, splits, filters, and precise timing. The goal is to get hands-on with as many journey shapes as possible and feel how intuitive and customisable the builder is. The journey uses a condition to separate donors by gift size, a split to A/B test impact stories with higher-value donors, and a filter to ensure your final regular giving ask only reaches the most engaged supporters.
Your audiences from Win 3 and your scores from Win 2 feed directly into your journey conditions, which means by Win 4 the platform is already working as a connected system rather than a collection of separate features.
Next in the series: Win 5: Support the people who support you. Learn how to use capture tools, Talk, and multi-channel communication to keep volunteers, fundraisers, and event participants feeling confident, encouraged, and connected throughout their journey with your organisation.
