UpStage Automations: Critical Workflows On Autopilot

You built the segment. You ran the query. You tagged everyone who’d crossed $500 in lifetime giving, and it felt great for exactly as long as it took someone to donate $501 the next morning.

That’s the problem with any list you build by hand: it’s accurate for about as long as it takes a patron to do something new. Automations fixes that by doing the watching for you.

What Automations Does

Automations is a rules engine built into your CRM. You set the conditions once. The system checks every patron against those conditions once a day and takes action automatically the moment someone qualifies, no spreadsheet, no manual tagging, no one quietly falling out of your segment because nobody re-ran the query.

How It Works

The process runs in four steps, every single day, without anyone touching it.

Donation: a patron completes a purchase or gift, and the system recalculates their lifetime total.
Evaluation: once daily, the system compares that total against the levels you’ve set up.
Tagging: when a patron crosses a threshold, the tag you assigned to that level gets applied to their profile.
Enrollment: if you’ve attached a membership product to that level, the patron is enrolled in it automatically, benefits and all.

Building A Rule

Rules are built around “Levels,” and each Level combines a timeframe with a trigger, like a cumulative donation amount over a set period. From there, you choose what happens: which tag gets applied, and whether crossing that Level should also enroll the patron in a specific membership product.

You’re not limited to one condition per rule, either. Add as many as you need, and choose whether all of them have to be true (AND) or just one (OR). Each condition gets its own product type, metric, operator, and time period, so a rule can be as simple or as specific as the segment demands.

What You Can Automate

Rules can run against:

• Donations
• Single Tickets
• Ticket Packages
• Memberships
• All Products Combined

And for each of those, you can build conditions around:

• Lifetime Total Amount
• Annual or Monthly Total Amount
• Number Of Purchases
• First or Last Purchase Date
• Average Purchase Amount
• Days Since Last Purchase

Before You Activate A Rule

Before a rule goes live, you can run it against your current patron data first. The system shows you exactly how many patrons qualify and what actions would fire, without changing anything. If that number comes back higher than expected, the system flags it as a high-impact rule so you can double-check your conditions before anything actually happens. Nothing is saved until you say so.

Real-World Rules You Can Set

A few examples of what this looks like in practice:

• Cumulative Donor Level: automatically tag and enroll donors once their giving crosses a threshold over a defined period.
• First-Time Ticket Buyer: apply a welcome tag the moment someone completes their first single ticket purchase.
• Repeat Attendee: flag patrons who’ve bought three or more single tickets in the current year.
• Package VIP: tag and enroll patrons once their lifetime ticket package spending crosses $500.
• Lapsed Donor: catch donors who haven’t given in more than 365 days, before they’re gone for good.
• Multi-Channel Supporter: combine ticket and donation behavior with OR logic to catch patrons who show up in more than one way.

What Your Patrons See

Nothing, and that’s the point. The moment a patron crosses a threshold, their tag updates and their membership activates in the background. No wait, no staff member processing a batch update at the end of the week, no benefit sitting unused because the enrollment hadn’t caught up yet.

Your CRM already has this data. Automations just makes sure it’s actually being used, every day, without anyone having to remember to check.