Lapsed Donors – part two of a diatribe in three parts…
Howard Lake | 21 June 2010 | Blogs
Q. When is a lapsed donor not a lapsed donor? A. When they never were a donor in the first place.
To the best of my memory, I think Joe Saxton was the first person I heard saying a donor who has only ever given one gift to your organisation cannot lapse, because they were never really engaged enough to be a donor in the first place.
Like most of the eminently sensible things he says, it strikes me that there is a lot of truth in this. In the relatively recent past, I managed to count up six organisations that I had a vague recollection of donating to once (for a variety of reasons), but which I hadn’t ever given a second gift too (for a variety of reasons).
Like Joe says, I don’t really consider myself lapsed from these charities, for the simple reason that I was never motivated enough to make a donation a second time. In fact I can’t even recall now what motivated me to give a gift in the first place.
However, what does strike me is that including these one-time only donors in any kind of reactivation programme where they receive the same communications / messages as lapsed donors who have given multiple times is both clumsy and almost certainly not as productive as it could be.
After all, there is a world of difference between someone who has only ever given once a couple of years ago, and someone who has given four or five or six times over a period of two or three years or more. At the very least the level of understanding and engagement must be different,
Now while this might seem obvious, I have been surprised at how many organisations I have come across that happily put all these lapsed donors into one big pool and then tried to persuade them all, irrespective of individual histories, to come back to their charity.
With a little bit of the same attention and planning that goes into segmenting a warm appeal, much improved results can be achieved. For example, just at the simplest level, we have seen some interesting (and positive) results from re-mailing one-time lapsers with the pack that they gave to in the first instance. We have also seen some greatly improved responses from tailoring copy (and scripts) to accurately reflect that donor’s previous connection or interests with the charity – from single givers to duplicate givers to multiple givers. In some cases the results have been nothing short of startling.
Using this readily available knowledge appropriately in communications can reap real rewards. And in these days of squeezed purses and shallower pockets, getting increased benefits from carefully reactivating ex-donors has to be easier and cheaper than finding new ones.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.