How long to wait before a win-back ask

Most win-back lists get built the same way. Someone exports every donor whose last gift is more than twelve months old, the list goes into the spring appeal as a lapsed segment, and the response comes in low enough that nobody is surprised.

A donor who has given $60 every eight weeks or so since early 2024, and stopped in March, will not be on that October export. She has been quiet for seven months, close to four of her usual gaps, and the list will find her next March. A few rows away is a donor who has given every eighteen months for a decade and last gave thirteen months ago. He is right on schedule, and he is on the list.

Most win-back asks go out too late because lapse gets measured against the calendar. A donor has lapsed when they miss their own rhythm, and for anyone who gives more than once a year that happens months before a twelve-month rule notices.

Where the twelve-month window comes from

The twelve-month window makes sense for benchmarking. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which tracks giving across a panel of US nonprofits, defines lapsed donors as individuals who "donated in a prior period but did not donate in the current period". Its figures for 2025 put overall donor retention at 43.3 per cent, so fewer than half of the donors who gave in 2024 gave again in 2025. Comparing one year with the next is how a trend like that becomes visible, and a period-based definition is what lets thousands of organisations be compared on the same terms.

The trouble starts when the same definition becomes the trigger for an ask. A period is the same length for every donor, and donors do not give at the same pace. A twelve-month window treats the eight-week donor and the eighteen-month donor as the same kind of silence, and it has nothing to say about either until the year has closed.

Seven months quiet, and still reachable

An eight-week donor who has been silent for six months is three gaps overdue. Something has changed, and at that distance the change could still be small: a new email address the organisation never received, a few tight months in the household budget, appeals that stopped reaching her inbox. A short, specific note can do something about reasons like those. By month twelve she has had half a year to settle into not giving, and possibly to start giving somewhere else.

Nobody can promise that a note at month six brings her back. It can still thank her for two years of steady gifts, mention the last one by date, and offer a link to give the same amount again, and each of those depends on the gift being recent enough to mention.

The donor who has not left at all

The same window makes the opposite mistake with donors who give slowly. A supporter whose gifts arrive every eighteen months or so, or every second year when a particular campaign comes round, spends a large part of each cycle looking lapsed to a twelve-month rule. A "we miss you" email to that person is a small misfire, and it tells a loyal donor that the organisation does not know them very well.

Plenty of donors give well on a schedule of their own, and many of them would describe themselves as regular supporters. They fall outside the narrow test most teams use for a recurring donor, which is whether something is on a monthly debit. For any quiet donor, how long they have been silent matters only against how long they usually go between gifts. Once that is the yardstick, the eighteen-month donor who is on schedule stops looking lapsed at all, and the eight-week donor rises to the top of the list months before a twelve-month rule would even open the file.

How Together decides a donor is overdue

Together scores lapse risk against each donor's own history rather than a fixed window. The score compares the days since a donor's last gift with the average gap between their earlier gifts, and starts to rise once the silence runs past about 1.2 times that gap, with further steps at one and a half, two and three times. The ratio is down-weighted for donors whose gaps have been irregular, so one long gap does not flag a donor who has never been steady. A donor with more than 60 per cent of their gifts landing in the same three calendar months, or whose average gap runs from around 500 to 1,000 days, is treated as a seasonal or long-cycle giver, and their lapse risk is held down between gifts. Each score carries the reasons behind it, in plain language such as "Last gift 190 days ago, normally about every 60", so a fundraiser can see why a name is on the worklist.

A separate reactivation score ranks donors who have already been quiet for six months or more. It weighs a donor quiet for under a year well above one quiet for two, and rates donors with three or more past gifts, or recent engagement with the organisation, as more likely to come back when asked.

A donor with two gifts has one gap on record, which is thin evidence for a rhythm. A donor with one gift has no rhythm at all, and the score falls back on how old that gift is. For those donors the calendar is still the only clock available, and the ask that matters is the second gift, which belongs well before any lapse rule would fire.

A list worth building this month

Trying this does not need new software. A team can take every donor with three or more gifts, work out each one's average gap between gifts in a spreadsheet, and sort by how many of those gaps have passed since the last gift. Donors more than twice overdue and quiet for less than a year are the win-back list a twelve-month rule would not have found until next year. For them the ask is a short note that names the last gift and offers a link pre-filled with the amount they usually give, sent this month, ahead of the next appeal.