Every Monday morning, the major gifts team at a nonprofit development office used to sit down and manually pull their lapsed donor list from Raiser’s Edge NXT. Filter by date. Export. Format. Email. Three hours, every week, before they could even start making calls.
I automated all of it. Here’s how.
The Problem
Lapsed donor outreach is one of the highest-ROI activities in nonprofit fundraising — but only if it happens consistently. The challenge isn’t that teams don’t care about lapsed donors. It’s that the process of finding them is tedious enough that it slips when things get busy.
The manual workflow looked like this:
- Log into RE NXT
- Navigate to Query, build or run a saved query for donors with no gifts in 12+ months
- Export results to Excel
- Segment by giving level
- Format the spreadsheet for readability
- Email to the team
Total time: 2-3 hours. Every single week.
The Solution
Using the RE NXT API and Microsoft Power Automate, I built a flow that:
- Runs every Monday at 7:00 AM via a scheduled trigger
- Calls the RE NXT Constituent List API with a filter for donors whose last gift date is more than 365 days ago
- Segments the results by cumulative lifetime giving (major donors, mid-level, general)
- Formats an HTML email with each segment as a table, including direct links back to each constituent record in RE NXT
- Sends the email to the appropriate team members for each segment
Key Technical Details
RE NXT API Authentication
Power Automate connects to the RE NXT API using an OAuth 2.0 connection. You’ll need:
- A Blackbaud SKY API application
- Client ID and secret
- The appropriate subscription key
Once configured as a custom connector in Power Automate, you can call any endpoint in the SKY API catalog.
Filtering for Lapsed Donors
The constituent list endpoint supports date-based filtering. The key filter:
last_gift_date less_than [date minus 365 days]Power Automate’s expression engine makes it easy to calculate dynamic dates:
addDays(utcNow(), -365)Building the Email
Rather than exporting to Excel (which requires additional steps), I opted for a formatted HTML email — faster to act on, no file to open or download. Each row includes:
- Constituent name
- Last gift date and amount
- Lifetime giving total
- A direct deep link to the constituent record in RE NXT
The Result
The Monday morning digest now arrives automatically at 7:00 AM — before the team even sits down. Zero manual work. The team goes straight to outreach instead of spending the morning on data prep.
Time saved: 2-3 hours per week, every week.
Want something similar for your organization? Get in touch — I’d love to hear about the manual workflows your team is doing right now.