Lapsed Donor Re-Engagement via Direct Mail

The Challenge
The Salvation Army wanted to re-engage lapsed donors without having to pay the cost of acquisition, knowing it costs much more to acquire new donors than to reactivate lapsed ones. They came to Summit Marketing and inquired about Boomerang, our signature lapsed donor reactivation program.

The Solution
Summit employed our exclusive holiday lapsed re-engagement strategy via direct mail. We identified lapsed donors who had not given in five or more years, evaluated their giving potential and invited them to support the organization’s mission again. We utilized expert segmentation, carefully choosing not to mail to every lapsed donor, but only those with the highest propensity to make another gift. We examined the ratio of profitability to probability to determine the likelihood of re-engaging these lapsed donors.

The Results
A total of 1,298 donors were reactivated, bringing in $109,413 in lapsed re-engagement revenue. Of those re-engaged donors, 26.8% gave a re-engagement gift of $100+, which is a significant predictor of positive lifetime value. Furthermore, 17 of the re-engaged donors gave a re-engagement gift of $1,000+ which accounted for $25,814 (or 23.6%) of total revenue.