Blackbaud offers many classes on the importance of automated welcome emails, and also on their design, but actually setting one up in Luminate inevitably feels "hacky". The next 2 paragraphs detail our current problematic workflow - so please skip to the last paragraph to get to the idea for a resolution.

In our case, the "hackiness" because generating a group based on Luminate's "first transaction" query doesn't take into account transaction information from Raiser's Edge, which means most "first transactions" are not really constituents' first transactions. That means we need to generate queries in RE. But then RE doesn't have the same query options as Luminate, so things get tricky. To make it work, we need to hand off that first transaction email list to another group to line up the second email. If the emails are to be one week apart, it's not terrible; group A sends an email to the RE query of the last week's first transactions, and group B sends an email the next week, querying the contents of group A, and so on.

The logic quickly gets even messier when you want to send a welcome series on the timelines recommended by Blackbaud's own classes; in order for an email to go out every week (for an organization that relies on transactions only listed in RE), the contents of each group have to be handed down the line between multiple groups, including "dummy" groups which merely hold the contents of a group to pass on week-by-week until they reach a "sending" group at the right time. A healthy database, this workflow does not make.

If you got lost in the above 2 paragraphs, that's exactly why this idea is so important. This could all be avoided if we simply had a unified and dedicated welcome series interface or campaign type in Luminate. Ideally it'd be able to query all transaction records from across Blackbaud products - not only online donations made through Luminate - and receive basic parameters as far as the timing and recipient parameters (e.g. send 3 days after first donation, then 2 weeks after that, etc.). Then the precise groups and queries are run in the background, and each donor gets their welcome emails at the exact right time.