Many organizations have recurring gifts. Few have engineered recurring revenue infrastructure.

In this customer case study, we share how we redesigned our monthly giving program inside Raiser’s Edge NXT by building a governed recurring donor lifecycle model powered by automation and SKY API integrations.

Our challenge: recurring donors were active, but status updates were manual, tenure segmentation did not exist, and reporting definitions conflicted across teams. Monthly donor maintenance required 6–8 hours of manual review each month, making program growth unsustainable without automation.

Rather than adding more reports, we rebuilt the system by:

• Establishing recurring gift records as the source of truth
• Designing a governed data hierarchy (Custom Fields → truth; Constituent Codes → usability; RENXT Queries & Lists → execution)
• Implementing tenure-based lifecycle segmentation (Early, Established, Committed)
• Automating status, tenure, and upgrade signals via SKY API and low-code workflows
• Creating suppression logic and upgrade timing rules
• Building a recurring plan snapshot model to support Active Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) tracking

As a result:

• 100% automation of recurring donor status updates
• 85% reduction in monthly manual processing time
• Elimination of conflicting “monthly donor” definitions
• Validated recurring revenue metrics for executive forecasting

This session includes a live architecture walkthrough of the lifecycle model—data schema, automation flow, and reporting structure—demonstrating how extensibility within the Blackbaud ecosystem enables scalable automation without heavy IT lift.

Attendees will leave with a replicable governance framework, automation pattern, metric definitions, and a practical 90-day roadmap.