Case Study — Compassion Australia

One email. Thousands of versions.

A suite of Salesforce Marketing Cloud communications that adapt to every supporter — by country, by child, by gift and by relationship — so each person feels personally known.

ClientCompassion Australia
SectorCharity
DisciplineCRM & Lifecycle Email
PlatformSalesforce Marketing Cloud

Every supporter, spoken to like an individual.

Child sponsorship is a deeply personal, years-long relationship — and no two supporters are the same. One sponsors a single child in Kenya; another supports six across three countries. Some give gifts; some are correspondents rather than financial sponsors.

So we built emails that change for each of them. Behind a single send sits a layer of dynamic content and decision logic, quietly assembling a version tailored to that supporter's child, country, gift history and relationship. The result is communication that feels handwritten — at the scale of an entire supporter base.

It starts in the subject line

Personalised before it's even opened

Every subject line is dynamically composed from the supporter's data — their child's name and country, the occasion, and how they give. A few real examples (names tokenised):

Country welcome🌎 What in the world is poverty? — Discover the reality of poverty in [Country].
Birthday[Child]'s birthday is coming up soon!
Multiple children[Child], [Child] and [Child]'s birthdays are coming up soon!
Gift attachedYour birthday gift for [Child] is coming up this month.
Child's letter[Sponsor], you have mail from your sponsored children!
Arrears win-back[Supporter], we may need to cancel your sponsorship.
Dynamic content in action

The Child Sponsorship Welcome journey

A four-part onboarding series for new child-sponsorship supporters. Every email is assembled in real time from the supporter's data — so each of the thousands who receive it gets a version that's genuinely their own.

Full emails

All four emails in the journey, in full

Email 1 loop
Email 1 · Welcome

Thank you for sponsoring

A warm welcome that thanks the supporter and explains how sponsorship works, pointing them to their handbook.

What changes: the child's name and country woven through the copy
Email 2 loop
Email 2 · Connect

Write a letter

Encourages the supporter to write to their child, with simple prompts to get started. The "Write a letter" button is deep-linked straight to their own destination — a supporter with one child lands directly on that child's "Write a Letter" page in My Account, while supporters with multiple children arrive on a page to choose who to write to first.

And when a child lives in a sensitive country, the email inserts a tailored letter-writing guidance section — country-specific dos and don'ts that help keep the child safe and protect the local work.

What changes: the child's name, the button's deep-link destination, and — for sensitive countries — a tailored letter-guidance section
Email 3 loop
Email 3 · Engage

What kind of neighbour are you?

An interactive "Good Neighbours" quiz that deepens engagement through the parable of the Good Samaritan. If the supporter has already completed the survey, this email is skipped entirely — and the rest of the journey adjusts around it.

What changes: the greeting and children's photos — and whether this step sends at all, based on survey completion
Email 4 loop
Email 4 · Immerse

Where your child calls home

A spotlight on the child's country, grounding the supporter in the real place and community their sponsorship reaches. The progress steps in the header and the "Part N" numbering in the subject line also adapt to what the supporter has already done — if the quiz was skipped, that step drops out and the sequence renumbers (Part 4 becomes Part 3).

What changes: the country hero, imagery and facts — plus the progress steps and "Part N" numbering, driven by the supporter's completed actions
Orchestrated behind the scenes

The engine behind the personalisation

Before a single email sends, a Marketing Cloud automation aggregates and shapes the CRM data — the supporter, their children, countries and history — into a clean audience. That audience feeds an automated journey, which delivers the four emails on a paced schedule, each dynamically composed for the individual. It also handles overlap intelligently — a supporter who qualifies as a major giver and sponsors a child in the same transaction receives a single sponsor welcome, then branches into a tailored major-giver communication series.

Marketing Cloud automation aggregating CRM data
The automation that aggregates CRM data into a clean, journey-ready audience
Child Sponsorship Welcome journey canvas in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The Child Sponsorship Welcome journey — entry, decision splits and timing
Major-giver welcome branch journey canvas
Overlap handled — major-giver sponsors get a single welcome, then a tailored major-giver series
The wider suite

More journeys in the ecosystem

The Child Sponsorship Welcome journey is one of a connected suite we design and run across the supporter lifecycle — from revenue protection to moments of delight.

Arrears Recovery →

EmailSMSPrintCall queues

A multi-channel win-back for supporters whose payments have lapsed — coordinated email and SMS, a physical print piece, and hand-off into the internal supporter-service call queues, all sensitively sequenced to protect the child relationship.

~$958K
digital-attributed revenue · 2025

Digital only — offline recoveries via print and the call queues are additional.

Child Letter Notifications

A customised "delight" piece that lets a supporter know a letter from their sponsored child has arrived — turning a magic moment into re-engagement.

~$376K
digital-attributed revenue · 2025

Child Birthday Notifications →

Timely reminders of a sponsored child's birthday — the most intricately segmented journey, adapting to relationship, number of children, gift history and country.

~$110K
digital-attributed revenue · 2025

Major Giver Welcome

A welcome track for supporters who give beyond sponsorship, tailored to the product family they chose — Critical Needs, EOFY Appeal, Mums & Babies and more.

Failed-Payment Recovery

An automated safety net triggered the moment a charge-card deduction is missed — prompting a fix before a lapse ever happens.

The techniques

The engineering behind the empathy

01

Dynamic content & decision splits

Layered decision splits and dynamic content blocks let one email serve dozens of variants — by child, country, gender, gift status and relationship type.

02

Progress-aware sequencing

Journeys are triggered by data and behaviour — a new sponsorship, a missed payment, an upcoming birthday — and reshape themselves around what a supporter has already done, skipping completed steps and renumbering the sequence so the message always fits where they are.

03

Relationship-aware routing

Careful handling of sponsor vs correspondent and single vs multiple children ensures the most emotive communications always reach the right person.

04

Sensitivity by design

A sensitive-country flag governs what can be shown, and arrears messaging is tuned to protect the supporter relationship — care built into the logic, not bolted on.

One system, thousands of individual conversations

From a first welcome to a child's birthday, dynamically-composed Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails let Compassion Australia speak to every supporter as an individual — at the scale of their entire base. In 2025, the wider suite drove significant digital-attributed revenue: ~$958K from arrears recovery, ~$376K from letter notifications and ~$110K from birthday notifications — with offline arrears recoveries (print and phone) on top.

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Steve Baird
Steve Baird
Chief Marketing Officer, Compassion Australia