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Donor Retention Down? Look at Your Email Lists First

Most nonprofits don’t lose donors because their mission fades. They lose them because their emails do.

One of our clients found out that nearly half of their active donors (and 3/4 of lapsed ones) hadn’t clicked a single message in seven months. They discovered the culprit was a well-meaning HubSpot “suppress” checkbox. Removing that block and re-engaging those addresses ignited a 56% lift in retention and a 308% jump in reactivations in just four months.

If your own retention graph is sliding, your email list is the first place to dig. 

Here’s a step-by-step play, built on Avid’s system-first philosophy, to find the leak, patch it, and turn silent donors back into supporters.

1. Spot the Silent Majority

Pull the leading indicator

Lagging numbers (year-end retention) can’t save you today. Instead, generate a list of donors who haven’t opened or clicked in the last 90 days. If that list is more than 20% of your total donor emails, you have a visibility problem. 

Avid surfaces this automatically in the Scorecard, but you can export it from any ESP.

Ask: “Are they truly unreachable, or just un-targeted?”

In Luther’s case, addresses were technically “deliverable,” yet a segmentation rule kept them off every send. Filtering errors, preference-center quirks, or stale suppression lists are common culprits.

These are the kinds of issues that never show up on your dashboard but silently kill your email performance and retention.

2. Audit the List Logic (and Fix the Easy Stuff Fast)

Here’s what to look for (and what to do about it):

Quick CheckWhat to Look ForFast Fix
Suppression RulesAre donors excluded by default because they gave offline, opted out of newsletters but not appeals, or were marked “inactive” by an automation rule?Remove or narrow the rule; re-flag donors as “eligible”; run a re-engagement campaign.
Multiple CRMs / IDsDoes the same donor appear twice, one record subscribed, the other suppressed?Merge records so engagement in any channel keeps the address warm.
Preference CenterDo options confuse donors (e.g., “Unsubscribe from all” at top)?Rename buttons, reorder choices, and set a default “core updates” list that stays on.
DeliverabilityAre bounces hard (dead inbox) or soft (temporary)?Purge hard bounces; retry soft bounces on next send.

Time investment: < 1 day. Potential upside: thousands of addresses brought back into rotation.

3. Re-Engage with Value

Reuse your best lead magnet

Luther didn’t create new creatives; they simply ran the same devotional ebook ads they use for acquisition and pointed them at the lapsed list through Facebook Custom Audiences. 

Cost? Just a few dollars a day. 

Result? Record reactivations.

Send a “You missed this” series

  1. Hook: Surface the resource (“Your 7-Day Devotional Is Waiting”).
  2. Context: “We noticed you haven’t downloaded our most-requested guide yet.”
  3. Value: Explain why it matters now (new stories, refreshed data, etc.).
  4. Soft CTA: “Grab your copy—on us.”

No guilt trip, no heavy ask, just relevance.

4. Automate the Safeguards

Manual uploads work once; systems keep you safe forever. Avid’s Impact Architecture pushes every new donor, lapse, or upgrade into the right Pathway automatically, so no checkbox can strand them again.

Even if you’re not on Avid yet, schedule a monthly script (or Zapier flow) that:

  • Re-imports CRM donor status to your ESP.
  • Flags anyone who clicks/opens back to “active”.
  • Drops the remainder into a re-engagement ad set

5. Measure What Moves

After 30 days, track three metrics:

  1. Re-engaged rate – % of former non-clickers who opened/clicked.
  2. Reactivate rate – % of lapsed donors who give again.
  3. List health delta – Reduction in “inactive” segment size

A single-digit lift here could compound into six- or seven-figure revenue over three years. For one organization, simply slowing the slide of donor retention rates forecasts to a $2.5 M increase over 3 years.

See Your Silent Donors and Bring Them Back with Avid

Retention woes aren’t a mystery, they’re often hiding in your ESP. Start with the audit, re-engage those emails, and watch the green arrows return.

Want the shortcut? Connect your nonprofit CRM, ESP, and ad accounts to Avid and you’ll see your own silent-donor count (and how to fix it) in under an hour.

The old way was more tools. The new way is systems.

When your system shows you who’s slipping, and re-routes them automatically, retention becomes a growth lever, not a headache.

Ready to make that shift? Book a demo and see how Avid turns email silence into sustainable revenue, no new staff required.