Trouble shooting automation to tag recurring donors

Hey ​@ndann!

This can probably be handled without using automations, but only using Count field and Formula field. For more info on Count Fields you can check this post.

If you have a Count field on your Donors table, which counts how many Donations the Donor is linked to, then you can have a formula which would look something like:
 

if({Count of Donations}>1, "Recurrent Donor", "Regular Donor")

 
Make sure to replace {Count of Donations} with the actual name of your Count field.
Now, you can set the output of your formula field to be shown as a Single Select -see image below.
Make sure to include the possible options (i.e. “Recurrent Donor” and “Regular Donor” as options for the single select)

 

This should be way better than automations as you’ll make sure it does not break and it does not consume any automation run.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks Mike! This makes sense and I’ll give it a try. But it wouldnt distinguish between someone who has a monthly recurring donation and someone who donates more than 1x  in response to a new ask. Do you have a suggestion for that? 

Oh! That was not clear to me ​@ndann.
Would you mind providing some further detail?

How does that work?

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Donors might have donated twice, once this year and once last year, or this year and then in response to a rapid response ask again later, but that’s not the same as signing up to donate monthly.

On my Donations table, the donation is labeled with a recurrence number and also categorized as eitehr one time or perpetually recurring. That’s why I wanted to automate something to apply from the Donation type, to the Donor field. Ultimately what I want is a view with just monthly recurring donors on the Donor table, and the ability to create a view of people who have donated more than once and would be good prospects to ask to sign up for a recurring donation.

But is recurring monthly donation something they sign up in advance for?
If so, you could just have the dropdown on the form for them to choose right?

I feel I am still missing smth. Sorry for so many questions!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Appreciate your help! 

Donations are made on an external platform (in this case ActBlue) and i am manually downloading the transaction history into Airtable to keep track of all our donors, follow up interactions, and outreach assignments. They select on the ActBlue form that they want to give monthly and the export from Actblue includes information indicating that the donation is recurring monthly. 

The simplest solution here is to add a lookup to your donor table looking up the categorization field in the donations table. It’ll list all the single selects, and then you can filter your view on that. You could also add a count field or a rollup field counting specific donation records as necessary to finish the view.