Which lapsed donors are worth a call?

Your gifts

Your fiscal year

One row per gift, dates like 2026-03-14 or 3/14/2026. Refunds and zero amounts are ignored. A fiscal year that is not over yet is left out of retention rates; its donors are still classed as current or lapsed.

Upload or paste your gifts, then click Analyse.

Result

Retention by fiscal year

Lapsed donors to contact first

LYBUNT: gave last fiscal year, not this one

SYBUNT: gave earlier, not in the last two years

Back-test

How it is calculated

Retention: of the donors who gave in a full fiscal year, the share who gave again in the next. First-year retention counts only donors whose first-ever gift was that year; repeat retention the rest; dollar retention is what last year's donors gave this year divided by what they gave last year, so upgrades count. The range is the middle 80% of 300 seeded resamples of last year's donors. A first year that starts more than two months in is left out of every rate.

Ranking lapsed donors: at each date a year or more before your latest gift, donors are classed as current, LYBUNT or SYBUNT and by number of years they have given (1, 2, 3 or more), and the share who gave within the next 365 days is counted. Those shares, pulled toward the overall rate when a group is small, give each lapsed donor a chance; multiplied by the median of their last three gifts that gives the expected dollars used to sort. The back-test fits on older dates only and predicts how many donors gave in the year after the most recent one; a miss over 25% is called unstable.

Not modelled: why donors lapsed, gift type (recurring, event, major, in-kind), solicitation history, wealth or capacity, deceased or moved donors, matching gifts and pledges. Overlapping years share donors, so the snapshots are not independent. Unverified: tested on simulated donors with known giving odds and hand-counted examples, not on a published dataset. A ranking helps you choose whom to contact; it does not tell you whether to contact someone, and you remain responsible for consent and opt-out rules that apply to your donors.

Common questions

What is a good donor retention rate?

Nonprofit benchmark studies commonly report overall retention somewhere around 40 to 50 percent, with first-time donors keeping at roughly 20 to 30 percent and repeat donors at 60 percent or more. Those figures vary by cause, channel and size, so the more useful comparison is your own rate from year to year. This tool computes yours, split into first-year and repeat donors, with a range.

How do I calculate donor retention rate?

Take the donors who gave in the earlier fiscal year and count how many of them gave again in the next one. Divide the second number by the first. A donor who gave in both years counts once however many gifts they made. Paste one row per gift and the tool does this for every pair of full fiscal years.

What are LYBUNT and SYBUNT donors?

LYBUNT means Last Year But Unfortunately Not This year: the donor gave in the previous fiscal year and has not given yet this year. SYBUNT means Some Year But Unfortunately Not This year: they gave at some earlier point but not in the last two. The tool lists both, ranked by what a reminder is worth, and exports the full list as a CSV.

How does it decide which lapsed donors to contact first?

For each lapsed donor it multiplies their typical gift (the median of their last three) by the chance that a donor in the same position gave again within the next twelve months in your own history. That chance is counted at past dates from your own gifts, by status and number of giving years, and pulled toward the overall rate when a group is small. It is a ranking by expected dollars, not a promise.

How much data do I need?

At least 30 donors, 60 gifts and two full fiscal years. The giving-probability model also needs a point in your history at least a year before your latest gift and about 100 donor observations; without that, you still get retention by year and the lapsed lists, ranked by what donors gave. With fewer than 100 donors in a year the tool tells you to read the range, not the point.

Why does it say my giving pattern is unstable?

The model is fitted on older snapshots and then asked to predict the most recent year it can see. If it misses the number of donors who actually gave by more than a quarter, something changed, for example a campaign, a new database or a recession year, and the probabilities should be read only as a ranking.

Is my donor list uploaded anywhere?

No. Donor names, emails and amounts are read and analysed in this browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server, there are no accounts or cookies, and the tool does not store your gifts. It works offline once the page has loaded. You can use donor ids instead of names if you prefer.

Does it replace a donor database or CRM?

No. It reads an export, does the retention arithmetic and the ranking, and forgets the data when you close the tab. It does not send appeals, track consent or keep a record, and it is not a fundraising or accounting service.