Lapsed Donors – being the final part of a diatribe in three parts
Howard Lake | 28 June 2010 | Blogs
Q. When is a lapsed donor always a lapsed donor? A. When they always get the exact same things.
As anyone who has read this blog recently will know, lapsed donors (for want of a better term) have been on my (muddled) mind for a while now.
Having opined about the way we talk to perceived ‘lapsed’ donors, and about lumping in one-time givers with multiple givers, the final thing that that strikes me as particularly incongruous is the structure and format of some charities reactivation programmes.
Irrespective of whether a charity considers me to have lapsed, and irrespective of whether I gave one gift or twenty, my basic premise is this: if I “lapse” from a charity it is because I am no longer engaging with the communications programme I am being offered. Now obviously there are many other variables to take into account (you may have annoyed me for example), but as a broad premise I think this holds water.
Yet, far too many reactivation efforts spend a great deal of time and effort to persuade folk to “come back” to the organisation and then, if successful, put people back into the exact same programme that they have lapsed from.
Which seems a little counter intuitive to me.
While it might take more thought, a bit more planning, and a bit more effort, doing something to distinguish the communications programme for re-enthused donors would surely be worthwhile. Even a different way of talking to these people via the copy used would be a start – acknowledging somehow their return to the fold in more than just their first acknowledgement letter. Better still is re-engaging them in a different way to that which they supported previously (the obvious example being cash lapsers restarting on a (often low-level) regular gift and (hopefully) a different communications plan to boot.
Best of all is giving them a new way to connect altogether – introducing them back to the work of the charity via new products or initiatives and using online engagement are two obvious options.
We have seen some interesting approaches to give lapsed donors a completely different communications programme over the first 12-18 months that are looking very encouraging from first results.
Surely it has to be better to re-inspire, re-enthuse and re-vitalise rather than just reactivate and ultimately risk relapse!
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.