Donor retention is an ongoing issue for nonprofits.
Budgets are often focused on bringing new donors in the door. But when donors don’t give again in the next year, they fall into a category called “lapsed.”
A donor can lapse for many reasons.
Some give due to a momentary crisis or disaster that hits particularly close to home. While we appreciate their gift—this type of giving doesn’t always lead to a long-term affinity.
Others might start giving a monthly donation, but then later find themselves in a tighter financial position—forcing them to reduce some of their giving.
Still others give an initial gift to a meaningful cause, but don’t ever feel thanked, welcomed, and invited into a community of donors. As a result, they choose to give their money elsewhere now.
What can you do when your donors stop giving?
- How do you know what caused them to lapse?
- Can you actually win them back?
- How much does reactivation really impact revenue?
This is the question that Ardee Coolidge and NextAfter set out to answer along with the fundraising team at Luther Seminary.
Watch the LinkedIn Livestream below as Nathan Hill and Ardee Coolidge discuss how Luther Seminary increase donor reactivation—or keep reading below.
The Problem: Every Donor Segment Was Down
“Everything is down, and we’re just not sure why.”
Every fundraiser has faced a dilemma like this at some point. You might try a new channel, hope for the best in your next campaign, or test a slightly updated messaging strategy.
Maybe you even make that call to the one major donor you have in your back pocket who you know can close the gap for you if you really need it.
Oftentimes we get stuck in these dilemmas because we don’t understand why.
Why is everything is down? Why are donors not retaining? Why are lapsed donors not coming back?
This lack of understanding isn’t because fundraisers are lacking the skills.
It’s because they’re lacking the system:
- The system to unify all their data.
- The system to make sense of what’s happening.
- They system to deliver insights on what to do next.
Ardee Coolidge, his team at NextAfter, and the fundraising team at Luther Seminary didn’t get stuck here.
“You can’t get frozen by either a green or a red arrow. You have to let them be a launching point to the next step.”
Ardee Coolidge, NextAfter
In fact, they radically turned their results around. They were able to diagnose the root cause.
The Discovery: Lapsed Donors Shared an Alarming Trend
To discover what’s happening under the hood of your data, you usually need some heavy lifting:
- Big data exports from all your various tools
- Dumping data into spreadsheets, Looker Studio, maybe even Power BI
- Finding some magical way to normalize all your donor & contact records to make them talk to each other
If you’re lucky enough to have those skills on your team and you stick with it, you might find some interesting insights.
But getting these insights usually take days, weeks, or even months.
Let’s be real–—most fundraisers should be spending their time on relationships. Not spreadsheets.
For the Luther Seminary team, Avid simplified this process. In an instant, they drilled in to see exactly what was happening under the hood.
Email Engagement Was Falling Off a Cliff
Because Avid was connecting their CRM to their email automation tool, Luther Seminary had instant insights into a hard-to-spot trend.
Roughly half of existing donors and 75% of lapsed donors had not opened an email in over 7 months.
Yikes.
Now it would be tempting to think these donors simply got bored of the emails they were receiving.
But Ardee and his team dug deeper and found a checkbox field in the email tool that was keeping a large chunk of donors from receiving emails altogether!
Double yikes.
This sent Ardee and the NextAfter team to work on building a plan.
The Plan: Using Ads to Re-Engage
A traditional approach to reactivate these lapsed donors might be to send them a dedicated email appeal in the next campaign.
But Ardee and the team knew that emailing these donors out of the blue would result in lots of unsubscribes and emails marked as spam.
They had to be re-engaged before they could be re-activated.
Step 1: Create the Pathway in Avid
It was a matter of seconds before Ardee and his team had all the audiences ready to target with new ads and emails.
Without Avid, it may have taken days to target, export, deduplicate, clean, and upload the right audiences to the right tools.
With Avid, it took a few clicks to create a custom audience for these un-engaged lapsed donors.
And with one extra click, these donors were live in Facebook Ads manager, ready to be targeted in a brand new re-engagement campaign.
All of this was done in a matter of seconds.
Not hours. Not days. It was instant.
And this audience was kept up to date automatically every day.
Step 2: Launch the Re-Engagement Campaign
The plan for the campaign was to offer these lapsed donors a free piece of content to engage with.
Once they engaged and downloaded the offer, they would be opted back into the email list.
They also would be given an opportunity to give right away—as well as in future emails.
Avid was able to keep both their Facebook Ad and email audiences up to date—refreshing the data daily to suppress newly re-activated donors.
This constant data sync from Avid helped keep ad costs low and performance high.
The Result: A Little Goes a Long Way
When Luther Seminary first noticed their issue with Lapsed Donor reactivation, their reactivation rates were down by 12%.
After running this new re-engagement campaign for 3 months, they used Avid to analyze how the progress.
The result?
Lapsed donors reactivated, big time. There was a 308% increase in reactivation from where Luther Seminary had started at their last check-in.
In fact, Luther Seminary now had more reactivated online donors than at any other point in the previous 5 years.
Forecasting: Understanding the Impact Over Time
To understand the true impact of a metric like lapsed donor reactivation, we often have to look to the future.
In the case of Luther Seminary, they saw a major impact on their fundraising right away. But the long term projection is where the biggest impact lies.
A tool like Avid puts predictive analytics at your fingertips to help you make better strategic decisions right now.
With the flick of a slider, you can see how even a small uplift in reactivation can improve your organization’s fundraising revenue over the course of the next 3 years.
Without these predictive analytics, you’re left flying blind—hoping that decisions you make today will pay off in the long run.
Avid gives you a clear line of sight to make decisions that ensure you can have an even greater impact on your mission for years to come.
Features: The Tools That Fueled the Win for Luther Seminary
Connections: Bringing All the Data Together
Avid’s “Connections” allowed Luther Seminary to bring all their tools into one cohesive system:
- Their CRM data
- Their Email performance
- Their Advertising tools
Insights: Analyzing the Biggest Changes
Avid’s “Insights” served up the biggest changes happening with Luther Seminary’s fundraising program—allowing them to identify concerning trends before they got out of hand.
Pathways: Building and Syncing Audience
Avid’s “Pathways” tool allowed Luther Seminary to instantly push their target audiences out to their email and advertising tools.
Plus, Avid kept these audiences updated every day—avoiding the need for ongoing manual work.
Scorecard: Predicting Impact Over Time
Avid’s Scorecard allows Luther Seminary to see the long-term impact of their work—ensuring better organizational health and mission impact.
Ready to See What’s Possible?
Luther Seminary didn’t just clean up data. They unlocked a smarter, faster way to fundraise—with clarity about what matters most and a system that helps them act on it.
That’s what Avid makes possible.
Whether you’re navigating a complex CRM migration, trying to re-engage lapsed donors, or just tired of feeling stuck in reactive mode, Avid gives you the clarity to act and the confidence to move.
Let’s stop patching tools together. Let’s start building momentum.
