Not every supporter is at the same stage of their journey with you. Some are highly engaged and ready for the next step. Others are quietly drifting away and need attention. Some signed up to fundraise a month ago and have not done a thing since.

The problem is knowing which is which.

Without a quick, easily accessible, and intelligent view of where each supporter stands, most teams default to treating everyone the same: the same appeal, the same event invitation, the same re-engagement email. It is not because they do not care about personalisation. It is because they do not have a reliable way to see who is actually engaged and who is not.

Ortto's scoring feature changes that. This article explains how it works and what you can do with it.

What a score actually is

A score in Ortto is a number assigned to each supporter that reflects their level of engagement based on actions you define. It updates automatically as behaviour changes, which means it always reflects current reality rather than a snapshot from your last data export.

You choose what goes into the score. You decide which actions are worth points, how many points each action is worth, and whether points should decay over time if someone goes quiet. Ortto then calculates and maintains the score across your entire supporter base without any manual work on your end.

The result is a live, dynamic measure of where each supporter stands, one you can build audiences from, trigger journeys with, and use to prioritise your time.

Why this matters more than you might expect

Most fundraising teams already have a sense of who their engaged supporters are. They know their top fundraisers by name. They know which donors always open their emails. The challenge is that this knowledge does not scale, and it does not catch the supporters who are slipping away before it is too late.

A well-built score surfaces things you would otherwise miss:

• The regular giver whose engagement has been declining for three months before they cancel

• The one-time donor who has visited your website four times this week

• The fundraiser who created a page, posted once, and then went silent

• The corporate contact who opened every email from your last campaign

These are meaningful signals. Without a score to surface them, they disappear into the noise of a busy list.

The scores worth building

You can create as many scores as your program needs, but most nonprofit teams get immediate value from four core types:

Fundraiser engagement score

This is the score most relevant for peer-to-peer campaigns. It tells you which fundraisers are actively working their pages and which have gone quiet, so you can respond with the right support at the right time.

Signals to consider:

Donor engagement score

This score gives you a read on how connected each donor is to your organisation right now. It combines giving behaviour with communication engagement and website activity.

Signals to consider:

Regular giving health score

For organisations with a monthly or recurring giving program, this score surfaces stability and risk. It helps you protect your most reliable revenue stream.

Signals to consider:

• Failed payment in the past 30 days (negative signal)

• No email engagement in the past 90 days (negative signal)

• Consistent payment history (positive signal)

• Recent click or website visit (positive signal)

• Any donation upgrade or increase (positive signal)

Major donor readiness score

For organisations with a major gifts program, this score helps you identify which mid-level donors are showing the behaviours that indicate readiness for a deeper conversation.

Signals to consider:

• Total lifetime giving above a defined threshold

• Giving in multiple consecutive years

• Event attendance

• High email engagement over the past six months

• Website visits to legacy or major gifts pages

How scores work on two levels

Scores in Ortto are not just a way to glance at individual supporter health. They work on two levels that make them significantly more powerful than a simple ranking.

As a high-level picture of supporter health, scores give you an immediate read on where each person stands. Open any profile and you can see at a glance whether someone is highly engaged, coasting, or drifting away. This is useful for your team when making individual decisions about outreach or prioritisation.

As a mechanic to filter audiences directly into your journeys and communications, scores become a building block for automation. You can create an audience of "fundraisers with a score below 10" and feed that audience into a rescue journey. You can trigger a congratulatory message when someone crosses a score threshold. You can filter your appeal audience to only include supporters above a certain engagement level. This adds a whole new level of power and ease to your marketing automation.

Turning scores into audiences

A score on its own is interesting. A score connected to an audience is actionable.

Once your scores are live, you can create audience segments based on score ranges and use them to send the right message to the right group without manually sorting through your contact list.

Some examples:

Fundraisers with a score below 10 and no self-donation receive an automated setup nudge. A short email or SMS prompting them to add their profile photo, make a self-donation, or share their link for the first time.

Fundraisers scoring between 20 and 60 with page sessions but no donations yet receive an encouragement sequence. Practical tips, social media templates, and a message that acknowledges the work they are already doing.

Fundraisers scoring above 60 receive recognition. A congratulatory message, perhaps an invitation to be featured in your campaign communications, or an introduction to a corporate matching opportunity.

Regular givers with a declining health score enter a re-engagement journey before they cancel. A personal check-in, a reminder of impact, or a gentle conversation about pausing rather than stopping.

Mid-level donors with a high readiness score are flagged for a personal outreach from your fundraising team, rather than sitting unnoticed in a general appeal list.

A note on getting started

You do not need a perfect model on day one. Start with two or three signals your data already supports and build from there.

For a fundraiser engagement score, donations received and self-donations are a strong starting pair. For a donor engagement score, donation recency and email engagement will get you most of the way there immediately.

The goal is a score that gives you enough confidence to act, not a model that tries to capture everything at once. As your data matures and your tracking deepens, you can layer in more signals and refine your weightings.

Scores recalculate every 24 hours at midnight in your account timezone. Give them a day to populate, then check the results in your People view. From that point on, they update automatically as behaviour changes.

Try it in your 14-day trial

In the 6 Step Guide to Ortto at the end of the playbook, Win 2 walks you through creating two engagement scores: one for fundraisers and one for donors. The recommended starting point is the fundraiser engagement score using the signals above, followed by a donor engagement score to give you a read on your giving base.

Once your scores are live, your audiences from Win 1 will immediately become more powerful when you layer in score-based criteria. Your peer-to-peer fundraiser engagement score drops when someone stops logging in to their fundraising page or has not shared their link in two weeks. This triggers a supportive check-in message with tips and encouragement, helping them get back on track before they give up entirely. You can even send yourself a Microsoft Teams notification so your team is across it in real time.

Start your free 14-day trial

Next in the series: Win 3: Build audiences once, use them everywhere. Learn how to create smart, dynamic segments that update automatically and power every campaign you run.