Why Make specifically?
Unlike Zapier, Make has a generous free tier (1,000 operations per month) and is more visual and powerful. Most nonprofits don'"'"'t exceed the free tier even after implementing 4-5 automations.
Each automation here is built as a story: what'"'"'s the trigger, what are the steps, and what'"'"'s the benefit. Start with just one - the first success will give you the push to build the rest.
Automation 1: From donation form straight to mailing list
Trigger: New donation in Jaffa / PayPal / iCount.
Steps: Make receives the data, adds the donor to a mailing list in Smoove, creates a record in Google Sheets for annual reports, and sends a personal thank-you email within a minute.
Benefit: 0 minutes of manual work instead of 5-10 minutes per donation. For a nonprofit with 50 donations a month, that'"'"'s a 5+ hour saving.
Automation 2: Automated volunteer management
Trigger: A new Google Forms submission from a potential volunteer.
Steps: Create a new record in Monday with automatic tagging by interest area, create a Calendar event for the interview, and send a WhatsApp message with interview details (via WhatsApp Business API).
Benefit: A new volunteer gets a response in minutes instead of days. The conversion rate from form submission to actual interview rises dramatically.
Automation 3: Automated monthly board reports
Trigger: The 1st of the month at 09:00.
Steps: Make pulls data from Google Sheets, Stripe, Smoove, and Google Analytics, generates a designed report in Google Docs with charts, and emails a PDF to board members.
Benefit: A report that took 4-6 hours to build manually is produced in 30 seconds with no human errors.
Automation 4: Sync between WhatsApp Business and CRM
Trigger: Incoming message on WhatsApp Business.
Steps: Automatically create a new ticket in Monday/HubSpot with tagging by keywords, alert the right coordinator on Slack, and draft an automatic reply using AI.
Benefit: No inquiry gets lost. Average response time drops from 24 hours to 2 hours.
Automation 5: Automatic Zoom meeting summaries
Trigger: A Zoom meeting ends.
Steps: Make downloads the recording, sends it to OpenAI Whisper for transcription, passes it to GPT-4 for summary and tasks, and creates a Notion record with the summary and tagged action items.
Benefit: No decision from a meeting is forgotten. Every meeting automatically becomes full documentation and follow-up tasks.
How to actually get started
- Choose one automation - the lowest effort and highest benefit. Automation 1 is usually the right starting point.
- Open a free Make account - 1,000 operations per month is usually enough for 3-4 active automations.
- Build, test, let it run for a week - don'"'"'t add a new automation until the first one runs without issues.
- Document everything - who built it, what'"'"'s the trigger, where are the passwords. Avoid the situation where only one person knows how everything works.
At B.S.A we specialize in building Make automations for nonprofits. In a 30-minute consultation, we'"'"'ll map out the automations that will save you the most time.
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