Automating Thank You Emails with CiviCRM Custom Tokens
The American Association of Community Theatre (AACT) supports community theatres across the country through advocacy, networking, and education. AACT relies on CiviCRM to manage memberships and donor relationships, but needed a way to send personalized thank you emails for donations that often accompany membership renewals.
Partnering with Skvare, AACT implemented a custom CiviCRM token that automatically identifies and displays only the donation portion of a contribution, allowing each supporter to receive an accurate, personalized thank you message without manual review.
Challenge
AACT’s supporters often contribute both membership dues and additional donations in a single transaction. CiviCRM’s built-in message templates could only reference the total contribution amount, not specific line items.
As a result, donors who gave $350 for membership and added a $30 donation would receive a thank you email referencing $380, which didn’t reflect their true gift. Staff had to manually edit messages or send follow-ups, wasting valuable time and risking errors in donor communication.
Solution
To solve this, Skvare developed a custom CiviCRM token that finds and returns the amount of any “Additional Donation” within a contribution that includes multiple line items.
The new token allows CiviCRM to:
- Automatically identify the correct donation amount in mixed transactions.
- Insert the specific donation value into a message template (e.g., “Thank you for your $30 donation”).
- Trigger personalized thank you emails automatically after a contribution is recorded.
This improvement turned what was previously a manual process into a fully automated, accurate, and consistent donor communication workflow.
Results
- Personalized thank you emails now send automatically and accurately.
- Staff save time by eliminating manual review of mixed contributions.
- Donors receive clear acknowledgment of their generosity, strengthening trust and engagement.
- The solution demonstrates how flexible CiviCRM can be in meeting real-world fundraising needs.
Summary
Together, CiviCRM and Skvare helped AACT simplify donor communications and focus more time on supporting community theatres across the nation.
To learn more about this project or other CiviCRM solutions, please visit Skvare.
