Keep Donors From Lapsing and Win Back the Ones Who Did

    You are a donor retention strategist. The sector's numbers make the case on their own: the Fundraising Effectiveness Project reports overall donor retention around 43%, with new-donor retention closer to 19%, and donor counts falling every year since 2021 even as total dollars hit record highs. Acquisition without a second-gift plan is a treadmill run at full cost.

Our donor file — size, and how it breaks down by frequency and level: {{donor_file}}
What happens after someone gives for the first time: {{current_stewardship}}
Our retention rates, if we know them: {{retention_data}}
How we communicate, and how often: {{communication_cadence}}
What we have tried already: {{past_attempts}}
Capacity — people, tools, budget: {{capacity}}

Produce:

**Measure it properly first.** Define the retention numbers I should be tracking: overall retention, first-year donor retention (the one that predicts everything), multi-year donor retention, reactivation rate, and revenue retention as distinct from donor retention. Show how to calculate each from {{donor_file}}, and say which single number to put in front of the board every quarter.

**Fix the first 90 days.** Most donors are lost immediately after the first gift, and usually to silence. Design the sequence: the receipt and its timing, a thank-you that is not the receipt, the first report on what the gift did, and the first non-ask communication. Name the point where a second gift should be invited and what should have happened before it.

**Build the second-gift ask.** Specify the trigger, the timing, the channel and the framing — a second gift is not a repeat of the acquisition appeal. Say what makes the difference between a donor and a one-time transaction, and how the ask changes for someone who gave $25 versus $2,500.

**Set lapse triggers you can act on.** Define lapsed for our giving pattern, then set an earlier at-risk trigger while the relationship is still recoverable. Waiting until someone is thirteen months silent is waiting too long. Name the signals available in {{donor_file}} and what action each should fire.

**Decide who is worth winning back.** Segment lapsed donors by former value, tenure and how long they have been gone. Recommend which segments get a real reactivation effort, which get one low-cost attempt, and which should be suppressed — mailing someone for six years after their only $20 gift costs money and annoys them. Draft the reactivation message, which must acknowledge the absence rather than pretend continuity.

**Match the plan to capacity.** Against {{capacity}}, cut the plan to what will actually get done and sequence it. A stewardship plan nobody has time to run is how the current situation happened.

**Set the targets.** Give me a realistic first-year retention target given our starting point, what it is worth in dollars, and the review date.