Blackbaud in the News: 10 Things You Need to Know About Reactivating Lapsed Donors

As featured in Fundraising Success

By Lawrence Henze, Managing Director, Target Analytics, a Blackbaud company 

The more you know about your lapsed donors — their characteristics, interests and relationships to your organization — the better prepared you are to recapture these donors or, more importantly, prevent them from lapsing in the first place. Prevention is perhaps the strongest strategy in addressing lapsed-donor issues. Consider the following when developing your donor-retention strategy:

1. Proactive research
Acquisition for the sole purpose of bringing in new donors, without an eye toward donor retention, might be the major factor in high attrition or lapse rates. Why build an acquisition profile on a group of donors with a 50 percent to 75 percent attrition rate?

The solution is to build acquisition-to-retention model profiles that identify the characteristics of acquired donors who persist in their giving for two to three years. It's a much better strategy because you can identify persistent donors and their common characteristics and focus on acquisition lists that mirror these characteristics. Better yet, use a donor-retention model to score acquisition lists, and only mail prospects with a high likelihood to respond and persist over time.

Read the full article.