With Thanks — Charity Thank-You Video Platform

Project Overview

Retention is the quiet engine of fundraising, and nothing moves it like a donor feeling genuinely thanked. The problem is that personal does not scale — a hand-made video for every gift is impossible above a handful of donors. The With Thanks portal solves that: it generates a personalised thank-you video for each donor, delivers it by email, and measures exactly how donors respond.

We built the portal — the product behind portal.with-thanks.co.uk — as a multi-tenant Laravel platform with a Filament operator panel and an Inertia/React member experience.

The Strategic Challenge

• Personalisation at volume. Every donor needed their own video, generated without a human editor.
• Reliable delivery. Thousands of emails had to land, with bounces, complaints and unsubscribes handled properly.
• Provable impact. Charities needed to see opens, clicks, plays, completions and watch-time — per recipient, per campaign.
• No accidental sends. Importing a donor file must never fire emails before a human confirms the preview.

How We Built It

A pipeline, not a script

Each thank-you flows through a four-stage job chain — prepare → generate media → deliver email → finalise — running on Laravel Octane with split queue workers so long FFmpeg jobs never block ordinary sends.

Video without an editor

We generate a personalised intro with ElevenLabs text-to-speech, stitch it to the charity’s template with FFmpeg, and push the result to Cloudflare Stream for adaptive HLS playback behind a signed, expiring link. The donor just clicks and watches.

Measurement built in

Email goes out through Resend with open, click and unsubscribe tracking; the watch page reports plays, progress and completion. The campaign report rolls it all up — email and video side by side, with a geography view of where donors engage — and exports to PDF for trustees and funders.

Thank-yous on autopilot

An hourly Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge sync discovers qualifying new gifts and creates thank-you deliveries automatically, so gratitude happens whether or not anyone remembers to press send.

Results & Impact

The portal turns a one-line “thank you” email into a measurable engagement channel. In a representative campaign, personalised video drove roughly a 73% open rate and a ~79% video completion rate, with every open, click, play and completion captured per recipient. Imports are safe by design — nothing sends until the preview is confirmed — and the Blackbaud sync keeps thank-yous flowing without manual effort.

Technology

Laravel 13 + Octane, a Filament admin and an Inertia/React 19 portal, with Cloudflare Stream video, FFmpeg + ElevenLabs for generation, Resend for tracked email, and a Blackbaud SKY API integration.

Run a charity or membership organisation? We build custom platforms and workflow automation that turn manual processes into measurable ones. Talk to us.