Lapsed Donors: LYBUNT, SYBUNT and How to Win Them Back

A lapsed donor is someone who has given to you before and has stopped. To re-engage lapsed donors, build two lists, LYBUNT (gave last year but not this year) and SYBUNT (gave some earlier year but not this year), sort them by how recently and how much each person gave, and work the top of each with a short sequence that thanks first and asks second, at the amount they last gave. Expect a low response: across the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s panel, only 3.0% of lapsed donors gave again in 2025. Yet recaptured donors still made up 14.3% of all donors and 12.3% of all dollars that year, which is why a lapsed list deserves a process rather than a once-a-year appeal.

This page covers reactivating donors who have already lapsed. Catching them before they go is covered in how to tell a donor is about to lapse, and the retention benchmarks are in the donor retention rate guide.

LYBUNT and SYBUNT, defined

The two lists answer different questions. LYBUNT is a renewal list: these people gave a year ago and have simply not given yet, and many will without any special effort. SYBUNT is a reactivation list: these people have actually stopped. A LYBUNT donor in September of your fiscal year is a renewal you have not yet earned. A SYBUNT donor lapsed three years ago is closer to a warm prospect than a current donor.

“Lapsed” has no standard definition. Most organizations use no gift in 12 months, measured from the last gift; some use no gift in the current fiscal year. Pick one, write it down, and use the same rule in every report, or the number will move every time someone else runs it.

Fiscal year or calendar year, and the date rules

LYBUNT is normally run on your fiscal year, because that is the year your budget and board report use. Three details catch people out:

• Running it too early. In month two of the fiscal year almost everyone from last year is a LYBUNT. The list is useful from about month four, and most useful in the last third of the year, when the remaining LYBUNT donors are the ones at real risk.
• December donors on a calendar-year file. Someone who gives every December looks lapsed for eleven months. Compare each donor with their own usual month, not with January.
• Pledges and recurring gifts. A donor paying a multi-year pledge in installments, or whose monthly card has failed, can appear on a LYBUNT list for reasons unrelated to their intent. Flag them and handle them separately; a failed card needs a payment update, not an appeal.

Building the list in any database

Most donor databases have a LYBUNT and SYBUNT report. Use it if yours does, but check what it counts. Many include soft credits and event ticket purchases, which pad the list with people who never chose to give. Building it yourself once in a spreadsheet, from a gift-level export, tells you what the built-in report is doing.

The same export drives RFM analysis, and the RFM calculator will score the lapsed list for you: recency and frequency together are the best predictors of who comes back.

How many come back

Three per cent sounds hopeless until you notice the other two rows. Recaptured donors were a seventh of everyone who gave in 2025, because every organization’s lapsed file is large: years of accumulated donors who did not renew. A small rate on a large list is a lot of people.

The 3.0% is also an average across everyone who has ever lapsed, including donors gone for a decade. The recently lapsed come back far more often than that, and your own history will show you by how much. Before you plan anything, measure it: take everyone who lapsed in a past year, and count how many gave again in each following year. Most organizations find the rate falls steeply after the second year without a gift, which is the argument for working the list early and suppressing the oldest records rather than mailing everyone forever.

Sort the list before you write anything

The common mistake is to send one reactivation appeal to everyone who has lapsed. It wastes money on donors who will never return and under-serves the ones worth a phone call. Sort first.

Tier 1 is short and valuable. A donor who gave $1,000 a year for four years and then stopped is not a reactivation target, they are a relationship that something interrupted: a death in the family, a move, a job change, a bad experience with you. Find out which before you ask. Their history belongs in the donor profile and the conversation belongs in your moves management pipeline, not an appeal.

The reactivation sequence

For tiers 2 and 3, a short sequence that rebuilds the relationship before it asks for money:

Ask at the last gift amount, not more. Upgrading is for current donors. A lapsed donor who returns at their old level has been recaptured; one asked for 50% more may not return at all.

Name what their gift did. “Your gift in 2023 helped fund 40 nights of shelter” works better than “we need you back”, because it reminds the donor why they gave in the first place.

Give a reason to reply. A short survey, a single question (“what made you support us originally?”) or a reply-to address that a person reads. A donor who replies has re-engaged even if they do not give this time.

What to say, a sample

Dear Maria, you supported our tutoring programme every year from 2020 to 2023, and I wanted to say thank you and tell you what that helped build. This year 214 students finished the programme, and 81% moved up at least one reading level. We have not heard from you in a while, and you do not owe us anything. But if you would like to hear more, I would love to tell you, and if something we did put you off, I would really like to know. Warm regards, Jo, Development Director.

Note what is missing: an ask, a deadline, a matching gift and a guilt line. That comes in week six. The donation letter templates include a renewal letter for the ask itself.

When to stop

• Suppress the dead and the moved. Run your mailing file through the US Postal Service’s change of address service (NCOA) and a deceased suppression before any reactivation mailing. Writing to a donor who has died is the fastest way to lose the family.
• Respect an opt-out completely. Someone who asked not to be contacted is not lapsed; they are finished. Mark the record so no list includes them again.
• Cap the effort by tier. Tier 5 donors, one gift more than four years ago, are rarely worth printed mail. Email them once a year, or archive them, especially if your database charges by record.
• Know your break-even. If a mailing costs $1.20 a piece and the average recaptured gift is $60, you need a 2% response to break even on the first gift, before counting the years they stay.

Measuring whether it worked

Track three numbers for each campaign: the share of each tier that gave again, the average gift from recaptured donors, and the share of last year’s recaptured donors who gave again the following year. The third is the one most organizations miss. A donor who comes back once and then lapses again was a response, not a recapture, and if that happens to most of them, the problem is what happened after the first gift, which is a stewardship problem.

Where software helps

The lists and the sorting are spreadsheet work. Where software adds something is keeping watch on the top tiers continuously, so a valuable donor is noticed the month they drift, not at the year-end LYBUNT run.

Bloomerang users already have predictive insights that flag supporters at risk of lapsing; use those first. On Salesforce for Nonprofits or Little Green Light, Gratefully, an AI donor intelligence and stewardship platform built for nonprofits, does the same job for your most valuable donors. It reads the CRM and email engagement, and each morning lists who to contact with the reason, including lapsed pledges and stewardship moments due, and answers questions about any donor’s history with a citation to the record, so the note a person writes starts from facts. Its alerts cover the top 25 donors on Essential ($79 a month billed annually), the top 300 on Professional and the top 500 on Advanced, so it fits tier 1 work, not a mass reactivation mailing. It is wrong for a LYBUNT file made up mostly of small one-time donors, which is a mailing and email job; for databases with little history; for Raiser’s Edge NXT users, who connect only by file import; and for organizations that need a completed SOC 2 Type II audit, which the company expects in the fourth quarter of 2026. The free plan covers one person with five weekly tasks, which is enough to compare its list with your own tier 1.

How this page was put together

The recapture and life-cycle figures are from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s full-year 2025 report, read at publications.fepreports.org on 8 October 2026. FEP changed its method from the first quarter of 2026, so compare future figures with FEP’s own restated prior year. The tiers, sequence and sample letter are our own working method and are offered as a starting point, not as tested benchmarks. Gratefully is a company we cover closely; its pricing was read on its own site.

This is reference information, not legal or tax advice. Rules vary by state and change over time. For a decision that carries real consequences, check the current text at irs.gov or your state registry, and talk to a nonprofit attorney or CPA.