When Whizz-Kidz planned its Christmas direct mail appeal last year it cast its net wide. Very wide. Donors who hadn’t given to the charity in ten years suddenly received packs in the post. Re-introducing your charity to long lost donors can be profitable, reports James Allport.

When is a lapsed donor, lapsed?

It is a question we have all asked ourselves, probably every time we look at selection counts for a warm mailing and consider the costs of mailing them and the likely return on investment (RoI).

Most times, fundraisers won’t waste their effort on supporters who have not donated for two years or more for fear of making a loss. None of us are in the business of wasting money.

But do we always ask ourselves why a donor lapses? Some people may have forgotten what we did and why they had supported us. They need to be reminded, they need to be told something new.

Last Christmas, Whizz-Kidz decided to go back, way back, into its database of larger givers for our annual direct mail appeal – and we found, with the right messaging, lapsed donors can become the prodigal sons of your supporter base. Welcome them back and they could reward you.

The right case support, and the right donors

It's the old elevator question; if we cannot sell our cause in a minute to someone then something is wrong. To get lapsed donors back and giving, we needed something succinct and powerful.

Before the Christmas lapsed donors appeal, we wrote to a sample of our donors with a questionnaire and asked them simply, why they support Whizz-Kidz along with some more general questions.

The answers were varied, interesting and powerful. They backed my initial thinking that people believed - like us - that disabled children should have the independence to move around; and that some people knew how disabled kids could become left out. But what was really telling was that only three people who responded knew it is virtually impossible for children to get a wheelchair that gave them independence from the NHS.

Respondents also let us know in the feedback that they would like to hear how the right wheelchair had helped a young person in the beneficiary’s own words. This is key for all charities; we must amplify the voices of those that we support. We are just conduits between the donor and the beneficiary.

We tested this NHS line in a telemarketing campaign to donors who had not given for over four years, and that’s when we had our eureka moment. With this punchier call to action we went from a 4.5 per cent conversion to regular giving to an average of more than 13 per cent - and on some days as high as 24 per cent. Our 12-month RoI ended up at 1.93:1 and it broke even in around six months.

Buoyed by these results, for our lapsed donor Christmas campaign we decided to reference the average spend on a child's wheelchair by the NHS (£130) compared with that funded by Whizz-Kidz (from £5000 upwards). The stark reality of the disparity was twinned with a personal yet simple Christmas card that was designed and signed by young Whizz-Kidz beneficiary, Lauren. The direct mail was taking shape.

We selected our target prospects based on the value of donations: any one who gave more than £500 up to ten years back, which is a long time. The main worry was that people would have forgotten Whizz-Kidz and why they supported us. But the volume was low, and in turn our financial exposure very limited. Rather than the mailing labour the point that it had been a long time since we had heard from the donors, we opted to stick to our strengths.