Marketing & Growth

How to send a weekly marketing report as Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams

Marketing & GrowthFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your four-person ops team produces a weekly marketing report by opening three browser tabs — your donor portal, your foundation's Salesforce instance, and a Google Sheet someone built in 2021 — and copying numbers into a slide deck by hand. If you run any paid promotion (event announcements, year-end giving campaigns, LinkedIn outreach to prospective grantees), the performance data lives in separate platform dashboards you check individually. There's no single view of what's working. The report takes two to four hours every Friday afternoon, it's stale by Monday, and if the person who built the Sheet is out, nobody else can reproduce it reliably.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly marketing report that pulls from your live data sources — PostHog traffic data, Gmail engagement, Salesforce contact activity from the integration catalog — and lands in your inbox every Monday morning without anyone opening a dashboard

A Growth Analyst app that surfaces the three numbers that actually moved this week: web traffic to your grant application page, email open rates on donor updates, and referral sources driving new foundation inquiries

A reusable Presentation Agent output (coming soon framing aside, the Growth Analyst digest itself serves as the report body) you can paste directly into your board packet prep or send to your communications officer as a ready-to-use update

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Growth Analyst Email Agent

Data sources & config

Growth Analyst connects to PostHog and Gmail — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and queries PostHog live when the digest runs. For Salesforce contact activity (new grantee inquiries, event RSVPs, newsletter signups), connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live each time the report runs. If your donor portal or event registration system doesn't have an API, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Every Monday at 7am, pull last week's PostHog data for traffic to our grant application page and our 'About Our Work' page, compare it to the prior week, identify the top three referral sources, and email me a plain-English summary with the numbers and one suggested action.

Connect our Gmail account and track open rates on the donor update emails we sent this month. Summarize which subject lines performed best and flag any recipients who haven't opened a single message in 60 days.

Build me a weekly marketing digest app that combines our PostHog traffic report, Gmail donor engagement data, and any Salesforce contact activity from our integration catalog into one email I can forward to our communications team every Monday morning.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail: Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule. This gives Growth Analyst access to sent donor update emails, open/reply signals, and thread history without you exporting anything.

2 Connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live to pull new contact records created this week — grantee inquiries, newsletter signups, event RSVPs — and includes them in the weekly count.

3 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog. Growth Analyst queries it live each Monday to get last week's page views, signup conversion rates, and referral source breakdown for your grant application and program pages.

4 If you run a donor portal (Benevity, YourCause, or a foundation-specific platform), Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull submission counts and campaign performance numbers into the same report.

5 Open the Growth Analyst app and type your first prompt describing the report you want. Be specific about which pages matter (grant application page, annual report page, event landing page) and which metrics your communications officer actually uses.

6 Set the digest to deliver every Monday at 7am so it's in your inbox before your team standup. The report covers traffic changes, top referrers, email engagement, and one prioritized action item — no dashboard required.

7 Add the Email Agent to triage replies that come in after donor update sends. It summarizes long threads, drafts acknowledgment replies in your foundation's voice, and flags any major donors who haven't responded to your last two outreach attempts.

8 For the monthly board packet, copy the Growth Analyst digest output directly into your board update template. The numbers are already formatted as plain English with week-over-week comparisons — no re-formatting needed.

9 If your foundation sends event promotion emails through Mailchimp or a similar platform, connect it from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries campaign performance live and folds click-through and open rates into the weekly digest alongside your PostHog data.

10 Each Friday, Starch runs a secondary check: any Salesforce contacts added this week who haven't received a welcome email get flagged in the digest with a one-click draft from Email Agent ready to send.

11 Customize the report format quarterly — adjust which metrics appear, add a new grant program's page, or change the comparison window from week-over-week to month-over-month — by describing the change in plain language. No one needs to rebuild the Sheet.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Week of March 24, 2026 — Spring Grantee Cohort Outreach

Sample numbers from a real run

Grant application page visits (PostHog)	847
Prior week visits	612
Week-over-week increase	235
Top referral source: LinkedIn post (CUA-tracked)	318
Donor update email open rate (Gmail sync)	61
New Salesforce contacts created this week	14
Contacts who haven't opened last two emails (flagged)	7

On Monday, March 25 at 7am, your Growth Analyst digest lands in your inbox. It shows that grant application page traffic jumped 38% week-over-week — from 612 to 847 visits — driven primarily by 318 sessions from a LinkedIn post your program officer published on March 21. Starch queried PostHog live at 6:55am and pulled the referral breakdown automatically. The digest also notes that your March 18 donor update email hit a 61% open rate across 92 recipients (Gmail sync pulled that data overnight), which is 12 points above your trailing four-week average. Fourteen new contacts appeared in Salesforce this week — Starch queried your Salesforce instance live — including four from the same community foundation, which the digest flags as worth a personal follow-up. Seven contacts who received your last two outreach emails haven't opened either one; Email Agent has draft re-engagement emails ready, written in the LP-adjacent tone your donor comms require, waiting for your one-click review. Your communications officer gets the digest forwarded at 8am. No one opened a dashboard. Total time spent: two minutes to review and hit send on three of the seven re-engagement drafts.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Grant application page traffic week-over-week (and which referral sources are driving it)

Donor update email open and reply rates by segment (major donors vs. general list)

New Salesforce contacts created per week from foundation outreach and events

Percentage of donor contacts with no engagement in 60+ days (re-engagement queue size)

Board packet prep time — hours spent assembling the monthly communications update

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Mailchimp reports + PostHog dashboard + Salesforce reports (manual stitching)

Each platform gives you accurate data in isolation, but combining them into one weekly report is a manual copy-paste job that takes 2-4 hours and breaks whenever someone changes a dashboard filter or a Salesforce report view.

Fluxx or Foundant (purpose-built grants management)

Purpose-built for grants workflow but costs six figures, assumes a dedicated grants team, and doesn't help with external marketing reporting or donor communications analytics at all.

Google Looker Studio connected to Sheets

Free and flexible, but requires someone technical to set up and maintain the data connections, and the resulting dashboard still needs a human to write the narrative summary before it can go to your board or communications officer.

Hiring a fractional marketing analyst

Gets you the weekly narrative you actually need, but at $2,000-$4,000/month for part-time engagement, and they're not available at 7am Monday when your team standup starts.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — growth analyst, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Salesforce but it was set up by consultants three years ago and the schema is a mess. Can Starch still query it?

Yes. When you connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog, the agent discovers your actual schema — whatever field names and object structures your instance uses — and queries it live against those. You describe what you want in plain language ('new contacts added this week tagged as grantee inquiries') and Starch figures out which fields to look at. You don't need to know the Salesforce object model or clean up the schema first.

Does Starch store our donor email data or grant application data on its servers?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database to power the weekly digest. Salesforce and PostHog are queried live — that data is not stored in Starch between report runs. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, so if your foundation has a strict data residency or compliance policy, that's worth surfacing to your board before connecting donor-identifiable data.

Our donor portal (Benevity, YourCause, or similar) doesn't have a standard API connector. Can Starch still pull data from it?

Yes. If your donor portal is web-based and you can log in through a browser, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. Starch navigates the portal, reads the campaign or submission data you'd normally export manually, and includes it in the weekly digest. This works even for platforms with no formal integration.

The Growth Analyst app mentions PostHog. We use Google Analytics, not PostHog. Does that work?

Growth Analyst is built with PostHog as its primary analytics connection. Google Analytics 4 is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent can query it live — but the pre-built Growth Analyst digest is optimized for PostHog's data model. You can describe a custom marketing digest app that pulls from GA4 instead, and Starch will build it. It won't be a one-click install from the App Store, but it's a real thing you can build in a conversation.

How do we make sure the donor update tone in Email Agent drafts matches how our foundation actually writes?

When you set up the Email Agent, include examples of past donor letters in your prompt — paste in two or three that represent the right tone. Describe what you want explicitly: 'Match the formal but warm tone of this letter, avoid fundraising clichés, and always acknowledge the specific program the donor supported.' The agent uses those examples as a style guide for every draft it produces.

We send our weekly report to our board chair and two program officers, not just internally. Can we automate that distribution?

Yes. When you describe the automation, include the distribution list: 'Email the digest every Monday at 7am to these three addresses.' Starch runs the report and sends it to all three. You can also set it up so the email goes to you first for a 30-minute review window before forwarding — describe whichever version matches how your team works.