How to Write a Great Lapsed Donor Email
Writing a lapsed donor email sounds good in theory. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with people who have supported you in the past. That should be pretty easy, right?
It sounds simple, but writing any email—let alone an email to someone who’s disengaged from your cause—can be intimidating.
If you need to write a lapsed donor email but are feeling stuck, these tips will help.
Why Send a Lapsed Donor Email?
Loyal donors who return year after year to help fund a nonprofit’s work are invaluable. According to data from our Individual Giving Trends Report, donors who give regularly tend to support their favorite nonprofits for years, and they are six times more likely to leave a nonprofit in their will or make a legacy donation.
But what happens when loyal donors turn into lapsed donors?
It’s worth every effort to re-engage them. After all, it costs 5x less to retain current donors than to gain new ones. If you want to reach donors who have stopped giving, email is going to be a useful tool for you. It’s one of donors’ most preferred communications channels!
What Should a Lapsed Donor Email Include?
If your goal is to get a lapsed donor re-invested in your cause, you’ll want to include these key elements in your email.
A Personalized Salutation
Have you ever gotten an email from a friend that opened with “Dear Friend” or “Dear Valued Acquaintance?”
Probably not.
People support nonprofits because they feel personally and emotionally connected to their cause. If you want to establish personal relationships with your lapsed donors, you can’t use an impersonal salutation like “Dear Friend” or “Valued Donor.” You need to use their names!
It’s a small detail, but a personal salutation is an important way to make a good impression on your donor and inspire them to read the rest of your message. Your nonprofit CRM should store your supporters’ names and make it easy for you to use them in your emails. You may even be able to use other details in your donors’ records—like their last donation date or amount—to make your message even more personal!
A Reference to Their Past Support
Did you know a common reason donors lapse is simply because they forgot they gave in the first place? It’s easy to think that every person in your nonprofit’s database thinks about you all the time—you live, eat, sleep, and breathe your mission, after all! But the reality is that people can easily get busy and just… forget.
That’s why it’s important to include an acknowledgement of someone’s past support in your lapsed donor email. Something as simple as “Your $75 gift last year made a big impact, and we wanted to share a little bit about what’s happened since then” or even “We miss you!” can remind someone that they cared enough about your cause to make a donation in the past.
A Compelling Story
A personalized salutation is an important part of establishing an emotional connection between yourself and the person you’re addressing. But the real magic happens when you establish a connection between that person and your work.
Your donor may not have made a gift lately, but the fact that they’ve done so in the past is a good indicator that they’re personally invested in your nonprofit’s work and the community you serve. You can reconnect them with that work by sharing a story with them.
As you think about what story you’ll tell your lapsed donors, remember that people don’t usually give to nonprofit organizations. They give through nonprofits to the people or causes they love. Don’t tell someone a story about your organization. Tell them a story about a person who’s benefitted from your community’s generosity—show them the real-life outcomes of their generosity. Just make sure you tell that story ethically!
A Call to Action
Once you’ve reinforced your lapsed donor’s connection to your cause and the community that has benefitted from their past support, it’s time to ask them to make a gift. At this point, you’ve shared a story that reminds them of why they gave in the first place—asking them to give again should feel like a logical next step.
When you write your call to action, tie it to your story and be as specific as you can.
Here’s an example.
Say you’ve just told your reader a story about Marcella, a local mom who benefitted from your program that helps people find new jobs. You’ve shared how she got coaching for her new resume, new clothes for interviews, and even help with childcare during her search.
Now, you can invite your reader to make the same outcomes possible for others in your community by saying something like, “Thanks to the generosity of people like you, Marcella got the support she needed to land a stable, steady job. Will you give today and make the same thing possible for others in our community?”
Spend some time writing a natural-feeling but compelling (and specific!) call to action. Then, make it easy for your reader to take the next step. Make sure you include multiple links to your donation form throughout the email and use a mix of hyperlinks, buttons, and linked images. That way, your reader can make a gift easily regardless of what device they’re using to read your email.
Tips for Great Lapsed Donor Email Subject Lines
Did you know that 35% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone?
It’s true—and that’s why we dedicated a whole section of this article to subject lines. You could have written the most beautiful, compelling lapsed donor email in the history of fundraising, but it won’t do you much good if nobody ever reads it!
The Secret to a Great Subject Line
Research from Neon One revealed that email subject lines that evoke positive emotions outperform those that are emotionally neutral or elicit negative feelings.
This is the secret to writing a great subject line! Focus on writing something that will make your readers feel good. Work to make them feel pride, optimism, gratitude, or excitement.
Here’s another secret: Pair your uplifting subject line with good preview text. Preview text—the snippet of content you see in your inbox next to the sender’s name and the subject line—helps people understand what they’ll find when they open your message.
Combining a positive subject line with thoughtful preview text will catch people’s attention and make them curious about what you have to say.
Subject Line Ideas
Knowing all of that is well and good. But writing a subject line from scratch can be really hard. Here are 12 engaging subject line ideas you can use for your lapsed donor email. Get creative with them!
- [Name], your generosity made a difference
- Re: your gift to [Organization Name]
- [Name], we miss you! Let’s catch up.
- Thank you for your support. Will you join us this year?
- Your gift provided [number] diapers last year.
- We have two big updates just for you
- [Name], can we count on your support?
- Let’s solve this problem together.
- [Name], we couldn’t have done it without you
- Your support created results (here are 3 of them)
- [Name], we need you on our team
- [Name], will you help [Organization Name] again this year?
Check Out Neon One’s 2023 Email Report
Want to learn more about how your nonprofit can utilize email best practices? Check out Neon One’s Nonprofit Email Report! We surveyed 37,472 email campaigns sent by 1,495 nonprofits. In it, you’ll find troves of data and recommendations covering nonprofit email benchmarks like send times, open and click-through rates, subject lines, and more!
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