How to use the Long Term Lapse Priority List analysis
This analysis takes your long-term lapsed donors - those whose last net-positive giving fiscal year was at least four years ago - and ranks them by a composite Recapture Score so you can focus on the ones most likely to be recovered and most worth recovering. It builds on your Gifts and Constituents data, computes lifetime giving net of writeoffs, identifies each donor's longest consecutive giving streak and peak fiscal year, and compares peak-year segment to typical (average-annual) segment to flag donors who once stretched into a higher tier than their average behavior would suggest.
The score itself combines years of giving and longest streak as loyalty signals, peak fiscal-year giving and average annual giving on log-scaled bands as capacity signals, the typical segment as a tier-based weight, a stretcher bonus when peak segment exceeds typical segment, a warm-exit bonus for donors whose longest streak ended close to their final gift, and a staleness penalty that grows with each fiscal year past the four-year threshold. Backtest tuning weighted the capacity signals far more heavily than the loyalty signals because they correlated much more strongly with post-recapture giving. The output gives you, for each donor, the score plus every input feeding it - last gift date and amount, first and last gift fiscal years, years of giving, longest streak and its end fiscal year, peak fiscal year and amount, peak-year and typical segments, stretcher flag, lifetime and net giving, constituency, and assigned fundraiser - so the ranking is fully transparent and easy to defend.
Strategically you should use this list to drive personalized long-lapse recovery work that simply cannot be done at scale. Run it at the start of each fiscal year and again before any major campaign that could carry a reactivation theme. Major gift officers should take the top of the list - high score, high peak FY giving, stretcher flag set - for personal outreach. Mid-level officers should work the next tier, and the rest can feed a targeted long-lapse direct response track with messaging that references the donor's peak giving year and impact at the time.
Measure your impact by tracking the percentage of contacted donors who give again within twelve months, the average and total dollars recovered, and the share of recoveries that come from above-threshold stretcher donors. Over time you should also recheck the score's calibration: rising recovery rates concentrated at the high-score end of the list and low recovery rates at the low-score end is the cleanest indicator that the weighting is working as intended for your population.
Analytics Reference: QX206