— KEY TAKEAWAYS
Reactivating lapsed donors is one of the most cost-effective strategies to combat donor attrition, as these individuals have already demonstrated a prior commitment to your cause.
- Donor attrition is a critical threat to organizational sustainability; as of 2025, nonprofits retain non-recurring donors at a rate of just 32.41% year over year.
- Reconnecting with past donors is highly cost-effective because they have already demonstrated a clear affinity for your cause.
- Effective reactivation requires identifying lapsed donors in your CRM and properly tagging them to remove them from automated communications that no longer apply to them.
- The most successful recapture campaigns personalize outreach by tying previous donations to specific outcomes and offering non-financial ways to re-engage, such as volunteering.
What takes as much effort as finding donors and is critical to your organization’s success? Keeping donors! When donors disappear, understanding why and crafting a strategy for lapsed donor reactivation is so important.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that over 50% of donors who gave in 2024 did not give in 2025. That’s just one reason to prioritize communicating with lapsed donors.
Often, lapsed donors receive the same communication as current donors or stop hearing from you altogether. But one major key to reconnecting with lapsed donors is handling them differently from your current or potential new donors.
If you use a constituent relationship management (CRM) tool with donor management features, you’ll want to ensure that you have a process for properly tagging lapsed donors to remove them from automated communications that no longer make sense for them. That way, you have all lapsed donors in one place and can better tailor your outreach to them.
Reconnecting with past donors is more cost-effective than trying to find new donors since you know they’re already invested in your cause (or at least they were at one point!). Let’s look at how you can reconnect with this crucial supporter base.
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QUICK ANSWER
What is a lapsed donor?
A lapsed donor is an individual who previously contributed financially to a nonprofit organization but has since stopped donating. While the exact period of non-donation varies by organization, a lapsed donor typically hasn’t been an active supporter in at least one year.
Understanding lapsed donors is crucial for combating donor attrition. Donor attrition—or donor churn, as it’s sometimes called—refers to the loss of donors over a period of time.
Your donor attrition rate is the rate at which supporters of a nonprofit organization or charity stop making donations. Lapsed donors are valuable targets for re-engagement efforts, which aim to improve your donor recapture rate—the rate at which lapsed donors resume giving after a period of inactivity.
Key distinction: A well-designed lapsed donor reactivation strategy goes beyond standard appeals. It requires intentionally removing these individuals from your current donor communications and treating them as a distinct segment with messaging that makes them feel uniquely valued and missed.
Why Do Donors Stop Giving?
A report by Bank of America discovered that 30% of wealthy donors stopped giving to an organization they supported the previous year. They also uncovered the top five reasons these donors stopped giving:
- Too many solicitations or solicitations asking for an inappropriate amount
- A change in organizational leadership or activities
- The donor decided to support other causes instead
- Changes in the donor’s personal financial situation
- The donor was no longer personally involved in the organization
Your lapsed donors may have one or a combination of many of these reasons. Understanding their reasons empowers you to develop a stronger retention strategy and address the root causes of donor attrition. Sending a survey to lapsed donors is one way to gain insight into the reasons your donors lapse.
Monitoring and addressing donor attrition is essential for nonprofit organizations’ long-term sustainability and impact. By paying attention to lapsed donors and making every effort to reactivate them, nonprofits can improve donor retention, reduce attrition rates, and maintain a more stable and reliable donor base.
3 Steps to Start Reactivating Lapsed Donors
Since your lapsed donors have already demonstrated some level of commitment to your cause, they’re prime candidates for reactivation. But before you reach out to them, there are a few things you need to do first.
This section outlines three crucial steps to start reactivating lapsed donors: identifying them through your donor database, crafting a thoughtful messaging strategy, and launching a personalized reactivation campaign.
1. Identify Your Lapsed Donors
The first step of lapsed donor reactivation is pretty simple: find out who they are! Your donor database, which can also be called a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system, can streamline this process. Neon CRM, for example, allows you to see the real-time results of your retention efforts, including immediate insight into lapsed, retained, and recaptured donors. Neon CRM’s built-in email and workflow automation also streamlines how you find and communicate with donors who have lapsed.
CRM systems allow you to track donor activity and flag individuals who haven’t donated within your defined lapse period. This is a perfect time to employ a donor segmentation strategy. Create targeted lists for lapsed donor re-engagement campaigns and send them personalized communications (more on that in point number three!).
2. Define Your Messaging Strategy
Once you’ve identified your lapsed donors, it’s time to investigate the “why” behind their inactivity and determine how you’ll reconnect with them. Analyzing donor feedback, surveying lapsed donors, and reviewing the past donation data available in your database can shed some light on the factors contributing to donor attrition. These reasons should inform your messaging strategy.
Establish clear parameters for your communication with lapsed donors. What tone will you use? Which angle will you take? For example, you can choose three words to define your approach, such as empathetic, positive, and inviting, to help ensure the message comes off as intended. You may choose to approach lapsed donors as if they’re family members you haven’t heard from in a while and use a “come back into the community” angle.
Perhaps most importantly, messaging for lapsed donor reactivation should denote thankfulness, appreciation, and warmth. It should include detailed, positive updates and highlight achievements that have happened since their last donation. The goal of this messaging is to make lapsed donors feel valued, communicate that they’re missed, and encourage them to re-engage with your mission.
3. Create a Personalized Lapsed Donor Campaign
Finally, develop a personalized campaign specifically targeting lapsed donors. Whether through digital channels, direct mail, or a combination of methods, this campaign should be designed to reactivate lapsed donors in a targeted, thoughtful way.
You can use personalized (and even handwritten) letters, emails, one-on-one meetings, or phone calls to reach lapsed donors, but what you choose to say is most important. First, you’ll want to reference their past support and tie their previous donations to specific outcomes showing their impact. Also, share impact stories, exciting updates, new initiatives, invitations to exclusive events, and future goals—anything you think would pique their interest and inspire them to renew their commitment to the cause.
The key is as much personalization as possible. If seeing an example is helpful, check out the resource below for a sample lapsed donor letter or email:
STEP BY STEP
How do you reactivate lapsed donors?
- Identify your lapsed donors in your CRM Track donor activity and flag individuals who haven’t donated within your defined lapse period. Segment these supporters so you can remove them from standard, automated communications.
- Gather data and investigate the “why” Do not assume why a donor lapsed. Use automated surveys or timeline features in your CRM to understand their history, original motivations, and reasons for leaving.
- Define an empathetic messaging strategy Establish clear parameters for your communication. Use an empathetic, positive, and inviting tone that expresses thankfulness and makes the donor feel like a missed community member.
- Share your progress and impact stories Remind them why they donated in the first place by sharing personal stories and showing exactly how their previous contributions made a difference.
- Give them new options to engage Make it easy to donate in smaller amounts, or offer non-financial re-engagement options like volunteer opportunities to keep them in your ecosystem until they can contribute monetarily again.
Pro tip: Shake things up to catch their eye! If you’ve always contacted them via email, try a direct phone call, mail a handwritten letter, or invite them to an exclusive event.
8 Ways to Reconnect with and Reactivate Lapsed Donors
Reconnecting with and reactivating lapsed donors is one of the most essential parts of growing your nonprofit. Their renewed engagement can have a huge impact on your financial vitality! Let’s explore eight effective strategies to rekindle your relationship with lapsed donors and turn them back into dedicated supporters.
Let Your Lapsed Donor Know How Important They Are
Donors need to be reminded that you cannot do your work without them. They need to understand that their contributions made a difference.
Communicate to them how their donations were used, what work still needs to be done, and how they can make an impact by renewing their support. Get as visual or tactile as possible when demonstrating where their money goes—donors who lapse may not have understood the impact of their gift.
Differentiate Their Experiences
Before you classify a donor as lapsed in your CRM or elsewhere, be clear about how you define lapsed.It’s up to you to decide when and how you’ll target a lapsed donor based on things like how long it’s been since their last donation, how frequently they gave, and how much they typically gave. Segment and target your donor list based on those criteria so that you’re not spending too much time on those donors you’re less likely to win back.
Neon One Tip: To help users get started with donor segmentation, Neon CRM comes with built-in donor segments for at-risk and lapsed donors in the “Saved Reports” section.
Learn More About Neon CRM
Gather Data
Perhaps one of the worst things you can do is assume why a donor has lapsed. Instead, gather factual data to help make clear decisions about how to move forward. Maybe a donor felt unappreciated or that not much progress was being made toward your mission. Perhaps they thought there was a lack of communication on what was going on with one of your initiatives.
Or it’s possible that your donor could no longer afford to contribute but wished they could. Surveys provide a great deal of valuable information. You can use your CRM to automate the sending of a survey and to organize the data from respondents.
If you have the capacity, you may even want to add a personal touch by reaching out via phone to have a one-on-one conversation about why they chose not to stay involved with your work.
Go Back to Their Beginning
Donors are motivated to give for different reasons. Try to understand where their motivation originally came from. What is the timeline of interactions they’ve had with your organization? When did they first donate, start to volunteer, or sign up for your email list? Was it after a particular campaign or event?
Your re-engagement approach should be based on their history with your organization. If you’re using a segmented list of lapsed donors (which we hope you are), tailor your messages to appeal to each segment directly.
Neon One Tip: Using the Timeline feature in Neon CRM, you can gain a more holistic view of a supporter’s relationship with your nonprofit, from donations to event and class attendance to volunteer opportunities.
Share Your Progress
Include your lapsed donors in your organization’s successes. Showing them the impact current donors are having will remind them why they donated in the first place and make them want to be part of that movement.
When outlining progress, focus on the individualized impact your organization has on real people—that’s why the donor came to support you in the first place. Big numbers often have the opposite effect on donation engagement, so sharing personal stories and small moments of victory will help create a meaningful reason for a lapsed donor to come back.
Tell An Impact Story
Storytelling is the oldest and most effective way to engage people. Lapsed donors likely still feel connected to your cause because they’ve been a part of it. You need to bring those connections back to the surface.
Share a personal story about how your work changes lives and makes a difference. Perhaps showcase the story in a video or have someone affected by your organization’s work write an email or letter. Just make sure you tell those stories ethically!
Your action guide to build relationships that drive growth.
In this playbook, we’ll dive into insights that can help and simple steps you can take to start putting relationships first in your day-to-day work.
Connect With A Lapsed Donor In a New Way
Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Shake things up!
If you’ve always contacted your donors via email, try a phone call, social media post, or direct mail. You can change the scope even if you don’t switch up the medium.
Do a Facebook Live event instead of a static post, email a visually stunning newsletter instead of a text email, or mail a handwritten letter instead of a preprinted piece. Trying something different will catch the eyes of your lapsed donors.
Give Your Lapsed Donor New Options
Lives change. And though a lapsed donor may still be passionate about your mission, their capacity to donate may have changed. Provide more options that will get them engaged with your work again!
Talk about how every dollar makes a difference, and make it easy to donate in smaller amounts or over time. You may even consider re-engaging lapsed donors with volunteer opportunities that call for their time instead of their money. It’s a great way to keep donors engaged so that when they’re able to contribute monetarily again, they’ll think of you first.
Donor Retention Beats Donor Recruitment
Retaining your existing donors is far more cost-effective than recruiting brand-new donors. Use the strategies laid out in this article to engage your lapsed donors and reignite their commitment to your organization and your mission.
For a deep dive into donor retention, check out the comprehensive guide below:
