4,800 donors. Every thank-you, personal.
The challenge
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.
What we built
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.
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
We mapped three giving tiers — entry, mid, and major — and built a distinct video template for each. Not dramatically different in structure, but calibrated: the major donor template includes a bespoke impact statement from the Executive Director; the mid-tier template features programme footage and a thank-you from a beneficiary; the entry-tier template is warm, brief, and brand-consistent.
Each video is dynamically assembled with data pulled from Salesforce: the donor’s first name, their giving tier, the specific campaign they supported, and the impact metric associated with their contribution level.
Make.com monitors the CRM for new gift records. When a qualifying gift is logged, the automation fires — pulling the donor record, matching it to the correct template and tier, assembling the render job, and dispatching the finished video via a personalised Mailchimp sequence.
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.
Ready to build your pipeline?
Tell us about your video need. We'll design the system.
Start the conversation →