FundSvcs Community

Generally the definition I encounter most often for "lapsed" and thus ready for "reactivation" or "re-acquisition"  is 24+ months. In other words, SYBUNT = lapsed = reactivation/reacquisition. SYBUNT itself doesn't expire, though you'll use different approaches to segmentation as you get deeper into lapse.  For instance, Blackbaud's Target Analytics recommends 2-10 years as 'lapsed' and 10+ as 'deep lapsed'. However, in a DM context, you'll probably want to do a lot of additional segmenting on your 5+ year lapsed donors to really target your best bets while controlling your costs. 

Ultimately, the strategies guiding reactivation of longer lapsed donors don't weigh length of lapse very heavily. They're more likely to look at capacity, depth of previous engagement, evidence of continued generosity, overall age of the donor, etc. As we get out to longer lapses, the correlation between length of lapse and reacquisition rate drops, and even more importantly, the correlation between the dollar returns on reaquisition and length of lapse falls apart, as big-dollar winbacks make the whole distribution very top-heavy. Put another way, once you get 5+ years out, the success of your winbacks is going to rest on a few very large gifts on low single-digit winback rates. Those big gifts can't be predicted based on length of lapse. 

Thank you,
Isaac Shalev
Data Strategy Expert
Sage70, Inc.
(917) 859-0151
isaac@sage70.com