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What Relae is

Relae does two jobs. It turns the gifts arriving from all your different channels into one clean record per donor. Then it uses that record to tell you who is worth a conversation this week.

The first job: one record per donor

Section titled “The first job: one record per donor”

Money reaches a small arts charity through a lot of doors. Tickets, a giving portal, cheques in the post, bank transfers, a gala, a grant, whatever the box office collected. Each channel writes the donor’s name its own way, so the same person shows up several times over and nobody’s giving history is complete.

Relae reads all of it, works out which entries are the same person, and merges them into one record with one lifetime total.

How a gift becomes a clean recordThree channels send gifts naming the same donor three different ways: a ticketing platform sends Margaret Okonkwo, a giving portal sends M. Okonkwo, and a bank transfer sends OKONKWO, MARGARET. All three enter matching. Gifts the engine can resolve go straight to the donor record. The ones it cannot resolve go to the review queue first, where a person decides, and then on to the same record. The record holds all three gifts as one giving history.Three channelsMargaret OkonkwoTicketing · $250 · 4 MarM. OkonkwoGiving portal · $500 · 18 JunOKONKWO, MARGARETBank transfer · $1,000 · 2 NovMatchingresolvedunsureReview queuea person decidesMargaret Okonkwo3 gifts · $1,750 lifetimefirst 4 Mar · last 2 NovOne recordOne donor. Three spellings. The review queue sees only the third.Every decision you make in review is remembered and applied on the next import.

Most of that happens without you. Where the engine is confident, the gift lands on the record. Where it is unsure, the gift waits in the review queue for you to say yes or no, and it remembers what you said so the same question never comes back.

The second job: who to talk to next

Section titled “The second job: who to talk to next”

Once the giving history is true, it can be read. Relae ranks your donors on the three things fundraisers have always used to pick who to approach: affinity, access and capacity. It turns that into a worklist, which is a short, ordered list of the conversations that would move a relationship forward.

You decide what to do. Relae drafts the note, keeps the record, and tracks whether the conversation happened.

What it is built on top of

Section titled “What it is built on top of”

Relae sits over your existing setup rather than replacing it. If you have a CRM, it reads from it and exports back to it, and you stay in control of what goes back. If you have no CRM, Relae holds the record itself.

Nothing writes back to your CRM on its own. Exports are something you run, at a time you choose.

What it does not do

Section titled “What it does not do”

Being clear about the edges saves you time:

  • It does not send email on your behalf. It drafts, you edit, you send from your own email.
  • It does not predict who will give. It ranks on what your data shows.
  • It does not sync back to your CRM automatically. Export is human-run.
  • It does not decide a donor’s capacity or an ask amount for you.

Next

Section titled “Next”