Back in May, I argued that you haven’t really acquired a donor until they’ve given permission, information, and/or a second gift.

Let’s look at the end of a donor lifecycle – the moment they lapse.

That one is easy, you say. We have a business rule that says someone is lapsed after they haven’t given for 12 months. We purge them from our email list (if they haven’t opened something in six months. They get dropped back into acquisition fully after 24 or 36 or whatever months.

But that’s not when they really stopped giving to you.  For some, they may not have given, but they don’t consider themselves lapsed.  Take the “lapsed” 70+-year donors to the ASPCA, giving $10 or less at a time who may have not have given in the past two years.  They found those donors to be a key part of their planned giving audience, lapsing only when they needed to save for end-of-life care.  These donors are so committed, they will expire before their support of you will.

On the other hand, take the person who not only hasn’t given, but hasn’t opened an email from you in the past year. You are right to call this person lapsed, but wrong to think it happened on day 366. Rather, they made the decision they were done with you far before that. You are trying to bring home flowers after they’ve put your stuff on the lawn, moved, changed their Facebook relationship status, and, when you tried to call them, told you that you have the wrong number in a fake British accent.

All this is a way of saying you don’t determine when a donor has stopped giving; the donor does.

And a corollary: the closer your estimation is of when a donor is done to their estimate, the better off you are.

You don’t want to make the mistake of cutting off communications to a potential bequest donor or someone who is pausing their giving because of temporary financial reasons. Similarly, you don’t want to waste your time and energy boomboxing “In Your Eyes” when the relationship is as dead as Latin.

This is vital information. It’s also information you can get only from the donor her/himself. Yes, you can get a model from transactional or appended data that will “predict” lapsing. But those models will always be inferior to those that account for a donor’s own words. This is especially true because the most important variables are ones only the donor knows:

• How much do I care about the organization? (commitment)
• What type of donor am I? (identity)
• How have my interactions with the organization been? (satisfaction)

You can imagine how difficult it would be for Apple to know whether you are going to buy the new iPhone without knowing whether your last iPhone repair was because you loved the phone to death or because you intentionally threw it under a Zamboni in a rage. Same thing here.

Remember, the donors knows if they’ve lapsed. You don’t – take your cues from them.

If you’d like to learn more, we have a video called How to Stop Donor Churn Before It Starts below:

And if you like that, please subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more videos like this one.