How to Re-Engage Lapsed Donors with Mobile Touchpoints

How to Re-Engage Lapsed Donors with Mobile Touchpoints

As your nonprofit prepares for the year-end giving season, now is the time to shore up donations. With 85% of nonprofits expecting to see increased service demands, maintaining support and reeling back in lapsed donors is essential. 

Donors lapse for all sorts of reasons, and many supporters are only interested in making a single gift. However, nonprofits without re-engagement strategies often lose donors they could otherwise reconnect with. To secure sustainable support, your nonprofit needs a structured framework for identifying and communicating with lapsed donors. 

One of the most effective ways to get in touch with lapsed and at-risk donors quickly is through text messages. In this guide, we’ll explore how to create SMS marketing touchpoints that resonate with recently lapsed donors and inspire reengagement with your cause.  

Identify types of lapsed donors. 

“Lapsed donors” refers to anyone who donated to your nonprofit and then stopped doing so. This definition is not particularly useful when it comes to identifying lapsed donors you have a chance of reconnecting with, so you’ll need to narrow this category down further. 

Use your nonprofit’s donor data to organize lapsed donors into three groups:

• • Regular recently lapsed donors. If a supporter gives on a predictable basis and suddenly misses two or more gifts in a row, you can assume they have lapsed. For example, if a donor in your recurring giving program gives monthly and misses three usual payments, you can assume they have lapsed and take action. 
  • Irregular recently lapsed donors. If a donor gives on a less frequent basis—such as once a year—and hasn’t given in the last 18 months, they have lapsed. These supporters and regular recently lapsed donors have the highest chance of re-conversion. 
  • Long-term lapsed donors. Supporters who have not made a gift within the past 18 months or more are long-term lapsed donors. These donors are less likely to re-engage. 

Organizing donors into these groups helps you plan your approach. For example, for regular recently lapsed donors, you might send a simple text reminder to give. Sometimes the cause behind a lapse can be as simple as forgetfulness or an expired credit card. 

In contrast, if your nonprofit aims to re-engage long-term lapsed donors, you will likely find more success by working to rebuild their connection first. To do so, you might share an impact story or ask them to complete a feedback survey about their experiences with your nonprofit. 

You might also confirm whether a donor wants to continue engaging with your nonprofit at all before moving forward. Consider sending them a text message asking them to confirm whether they would like to continue receiving SMS content from you. If they opt out, that might close the donor on supporting your nonprofit, but it also means you won’t waste time pursuing a dead lead. 

Leverage mobile engagement channels. 

On your nonprofit’s end, text messages are a fast way to connect with donors at scale. Then, on the donor’s side, text messages feel like an easy, low-commitment method of connecting with a nonprofit. This combination of urgency and informality makes mobile communication an ideal channel for re-engaging lapsed donors. 

Give supporters multiple ways to connect with you through their phones by leveraging:

• • SMS. With limited characters, SMS is the perfect format for delivering a single, clear call to action. Use your donor data and marketing automation tools to create personalized messages for each of your lapsed donors, inviting them to re-engage with your nonprofit. This might be an appeal to make an urgent gift, an update on a campaign they supported, or a request to complete a survey about their experiences.
  • Mobile-optimized email content. While you might think of SMS as the de facto mobile communication method, most of us also check our email on our phones. With this in mind, ensure your emails are optimized for both mobile and desktop. Design content for vertical scrolling, keep paragraphs short, and ensure any clickable buttons are large and easy to press. 
  • Mobile wallet donations. The most difficult step in the donor re-engagement process is the final one: getting them to complete a new donation. To get a lapsed donor to recommit, consider adding mobile wallet options like Apple Pay and Google Pay directly to your mobile-optimized donation page. This enables donors to complete their gifts in a few button presses, rather than going through the process of re-entering their contact and payment information. 

As you prepare your mobile engagement strategy, ensure your phone numbers for lapsed donors are up-to-date. When donors change contact information, they can easily lose touch with your nonprofit, even if they’re still interested in your cause. 

If you notice that several text messages are failing to send, consider conducting a phone number append. 360MatchPro’s guide to phone appending explains that these are: “a data management process used to update and enhance a database by adding missing phone numbers to existing contacts’ records.”

Data appenders have access to several third-party databases that contain information individuals have shared with various organizations and websites. When your nonprofit provides the information you have about each supporter, such as their name and address, the data appender can use that data to search their databases and match it to the corresponding up-to-date phone number. 

Some appending services will add a confidence score to the data they provide. This indicates how sure they are in their accuracy, and allows your nonprofit to make thoughtful decisions about how you use your appended data. With an append, you can reach out to supporters to confirm their new contact information and ask them to update their information, helping you reconnect with lapsed donors. 

Create easy asks. 

Lapsed donors might feel hesitant about reconnecting with your nonprofit. To rebuild their trust and investment in your cause, ensure your first asks are as easy as possible. 

A few ways you can make saying “yes” to your ask simple include:

• • Making a low-dollar request. Growing gifts over time is far easier than re-engaging lapsed donors with a large ask. Start with a small donation request to get these supporters back in your nonprofit’s communication and stewardship pipeline. For example, if a donor previously gave $50 every month, you might ask them for just $25 or even $15, then slowly work them back up to giving their prior $50. 
  • Providing an impact example. When donors know the tangible impact their gift will make, it’s far easier for them to commit to giving. For example, an animal shelter might share a text message stating that: “Just $15 keeps one of our shelter cats fed for a month.” This encourages supporters to translate their monetary gifts into direct outcomes. In the example given, a supporter might then make the leap in logic that donating $30 feeds two cats, $45 three cats, and so on. 
  • Emphasizing urgency. While lapsed donors don’t want to feel pressured, adding a deadline to your first request can help them make a decision. For example, during your year-end giving campaign, you might stress how you would like the donor to help your nonprofit hit its annual fundraising goal before December 31. 

These asks should also be personalized. Lapsed donors have a history with your nonprofit, and you should acknowledge their past contributions when reaching out to them. Using data from your CRM, reference how they’ve supported you before to show that their previous gifts mattered and that you rely on their specific donations. 

Design a re-engagement cadence. 

Reconnecting with lapsed donors requires more than a single message. To rebuild relationships with supporters, create a planned communication sequence that involves varied content. 

For example, you might create a communication cadence that includes:

• • Initial reconnection message. Once you have identified that a donor has lapsed, send your first re-engagement message. This shouldn’t be a donation request but a quick reminder to check in with your nonprofit and confirm their interest. For example, you might include a call to action for reading an impact report, completing a survey, or watching a short video. Monitor engagement with these messages to determine whether the recipient is still engaging with your content. 
  • Direct ask. Approximately a week after your first message, make a re-engagement donation request. This should be a personalized text with a clear impact statement that asks for a small dollar donation. Add a link to your donation page, so supporters can give immediately after receiving your message. 
  • Feedback and final outreach attempt. If your previous message does not receive a response after seven days, send a final message confirming whether the donor wants to continue engaging with your nonprofit. Rather than asking for a donation, this message should focus on whether the donor still has interest in your cause. This message might ask what your nonprofit can improve to regain the donors’ interest or if now is a bad time for them to give. Include a link to a survey where lapsed donors can explain why they stopped giving. 

To inspire interest in your first messages, try experimenting with multimedia. Mogli’s guide to MMS marketing explains that 32% of people feel more connected to brands that use visuals like images, GIFs, and videos in their text marketing strategies. 

As re-engagement messages’ goal is to rebuild connection, including visuals can be a helpful shortcut for jumpstarting these relationships. Include images of your nonprofit in action or share thank-you videos. For example, during the end-of-year giving season, you might send lapsed supporters a holiday video to get them into the giving spirit. 

The year-end giving season is an optimal time to take stock of your donors, solidify relationships, and reconnect with those who have drifted away. With mobile touchpoints, you can contact these donors instantly and in a low-stress manner. 

Optimize your mobile giving experience to make connecting via phone as easy as possible. Then, plan your outreach cadence and start sending your first round of personalized, low-lift text messages. 

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