Key Takeaways

The Question Behind the Question

A staffer opened a call with me recently with what sounded like a housekeeping request. She wanted everyone on the same page about who was actually in the organisation’s branded giving community and what the plan was for each segment. Then she added, in the same breath, that maybe the confusion was hers.

It was not hers. Nineteen minutes later she got to the real thing, and the real thing was not about data at all.

“My concern about that group specifically is they’re getting all of this communication that is telling them you’re a part of this community, this community, this is a group of people who give this and this, and they’re like, I know I don’t give that.”

And then:

“It feels like the marketing emails and the marketing content, the newsletter, the webinar, is telling them something that’s not true.”

She came in with a segmentation question. She left having named a trust problem. I have been doing this for twenty-five years, and I do not think I have heard it put better.

What Is Your Mid-Level Program Actually Promising?

Mid-level donors fundraising is the part of the file the sector forgot. In our world people call it the missing middle, or the murky middle. Everyone is interested in acquiring new small-dollar donors and everyone is interested in the gifts with a lot of zeros. The people in between get a newsletter and a receipt.

So when an organisation finally builds a mid-level donors program, it usually does the sensible thing and gives it a name, a threshold, and a set of benefits. Join at this level, get this. Quarterly briefings, a webinar, an inside look, a sense of belonging to something.

That is a good design. It is also a promise, and promises have a maintenance cost that almost nobody budgets for.

The Membership Fiction

Here is the failure mode. The community launches. People qualify. The list gets built. And then, quietly, over two or three years, a slice of that list stops giving at the qualifying level. Some stop giving entirely.

Nobody removes them, because removing people feels unkind and because there is no process that says when to do it. So the communications keep going out. Every one of them says, in one way or another, you are one of us, you give at this level, you are part of this group.

The donor reads that and knows it is not true. They know exactly what they gave last year, which is nothing.

Call it the membership fiction. It is not a data hygiene issue, and it is not a cosmetic one. Every message in that stream is now quietly teaching a person that your organisation does not actually track what they do. Which is, of course, the precise opposite of what a mid-level donors program exists to communicate.

The bitter part is that the fiction is most damaging to the donors who cared most. A person who never engaged will not notice. A person who gave faithfully for four years, hit a hard patch, stopped, and is still getting mail addressed to their old self will notice every time.

Why the Person Closest to the List Notices First

There is a pattern worth naming here for executive directors. The person who spots this is rarely the person who designed the program. It is the person who sends the thank you notes.

That is not an accident. Segmentation logic looks fine in a spreadsheet and looks absurd in an inbox. The staffer writing personal notes is the only one experiencing the list as a set of individual people rather than as counts in four buckets. When that person tells you something feels dishonest, they are not being precious about tone. They are reporting a finding from the only vantage point that can produce it.

Listen accordingly.

Why Does the Lapsed Segment Break Everything Downstream?

A lapsed group sitting inside an active program does more damage than its size suggests, and it does the damage in three directions at once.

It corrupts your numbers. Your open rates, click rates, and community size are all being measured against a denominator that includes people who left. So every report you look at understates how well your real community is performing and overstates how big it is. You will make decisions off both distortions.

It eats your cadence. A mid-level donors calendar is expensive. Four newsletters, four webinars, a couple of impact emails a month, a text program. That is a serious amount of production for a small shop, and a meaningful fraction of it is being aimed at people who are not there.

And it costs you the reactivation. This is the real loss. A lapsed mid-level donors is one of the highest-probability reactivation targets you will ever have. They gave repeatedly. They gave at a real level. They chose you. But you cannot run a reactivation appeal to someone you are simultaneously addressing as a current member. The two messages cancel each other out, and the one that survives is the one that is not true.

How Should You Actually Cut the List?

Four decisions, none of them are complicated. All of them get postponed.

1. Cut on the Calendar Year

Rolling twelve months is very hard to operate and harder still to explain. Fiscal years are worse, because your fiscal year is an internal accounting convention that no donor has ever thought about.

Use the calendar year. Donors think in calendar years. They think about December. They think about what they gave “last year.” When you cut on the same clock your donors use, your segments stop drifting, and your messages stop contradicting people’s own memory of what they did.

2. Give the Lapsed Group One Honest Re-Entry

Pull everyone in the community who has not given at the qualifying level within the window and take them out of the membership stream immediately. Not eventually. Immediately, because every additional membership email is a small withdrawal from an account you are about to ask them to refill.

Then send them one thing. One honest, specific, non-tier communication built entirely around what their gift did. More on what that sounds like below.

3. Drop the Non-Responders to the General File in January

If they do not reactivate by the end of January, move them to the general file.

This is the step people resist, and I understand why. It feels like giving up on someone. It is not. It is the difference between a list you can actually work on and a list you are performing at. Your list gets smaller, and you get more intentional. Those two things are the same sentence.

They are not gone. They will still hear from you. They are simply no longer being told they belong to something they do not belong to.

4. Spend the Reclaimed Cadence on Fewer, Better Touches

Here is the part that surprises people. When you shrink the list, the correct response is usually to reduce the volume of communication too, not to increase it.

If your webinars are drawing thin and your text sign-ups are getting no response, that is data. I would rather run three genuinely good moments across a calendar year for a community that is actually there than four mediocre ones for a partly fictional community. If a channel is not working after a fair run, be honest about it and stop, rather than continuing because it is on the calendar. Programs do not fail because leaders tried something that did not work. They fail because nobody was willing to say out loud that it was not working.

This is the same discipline we wrote about in the blog why your fundraising strategy isn’t raising money. The plan is rarely the problem. The unwillingness to revise the plan in public is.

What Does an Honest Re-Entry Sound Like?

Short. Specific. Almost entirely about them.

The template I give clients is close to this:

Dear [Name], since your last gift in August of 2023, here is how we have taken your generosity, paired it with others, and gone about changing the world.

Then the accounting. What happened. Who it reached. What is different now.

There is exactly one variable piece of copy in that letter, which is the gift amount and the gift date. Everything else can be written once and used across the whole lapsed segment. That is what makes it possible for a small shop to actually send it.

Notice what the letter does not do. It does not say “we miss you,” which is about you. It does not say “your membership has expired,” which is about your system. It does not lead with a new appeal. It reports back on money someone already gave, which is the single most under-delivered thing in this entire sector. Donors consistently say they are not told enough about where their money went. Retention keeps sliding. Those two facts are related.

And when you do get one of them on the phone, resist the urge to run an agenda. The posture is: you can ask whatever you want, this is your time, we are focused on you. That sentence, meant sincerely, will do more for a lapsed mid-level donors than any brochure you own.

What If Nothing You Send Gets a Response?

This is the quiet fear underneath most mid-level donors programs, and it deserves a straight answer. As one staffer put it to me: if I am just sending emails into the abyss, I do not really know who is engaging and who is not.

Two things.

First, look at what is already working before you build something new. In that same conversation, the thing quietly outperforming the entire mass program was her own personal thank you emails. Not the newsletter. Not the webinar. The notes she was writing individually, one at a time, with a personal line in them. That is not a small finding. That is the program telling you where its energy actually lives.

Second, understand that mid-level donors programs run on a person, not a system. Hillary and I worked years ago with a fundraiser who ran a mid-level donors community and essentially lived inside it. He made short, unpolished videos every other week. Not produced. Just:

Hey, here is who I talked to this morning, I want you to meet them. He referred to the members as his coworkers. Hey guys, you’re my coworkers, we’re doing this together.

He had one of the best mid-level donors programs I have ever seen, and he built it with a phone camera and an unreasonable degree of personal ownership.

You cannot template that. You can only staff it and then get out of the way.

If you are the executive director reading this and you do not have anyone who feels that way about your mid-level list, that is the actual finding, and it matters more than which segmentation rules you choose. The same principle applies at the top of the file, which is why our post on how to turn a major donor into a partner keeps coming back to proximity rather than mechanics.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many segments should a mid-level donors program have?

Three or four is plenty, and most organisations should start with three. A top tier you treat almost like a small major-gift portfolio, a middle tier that gets the full community experience, and a tier you steward and thank and report to without expecting significant growth. The reason to cap it there is operational: every segment you add multiplies the amount of copy someone has to write, and the number of segments a small shop can actually maintain is usually one fewer than the number it designs.

Should I remove a lapsed donor from the community immediately or wait?

Remove them from the membership stream immediately and give them the honest re-entry instead. The waiting period applies to the decision about the general file, not to the decision about the fiction. Every week you leave someone in a stream that misdescribes them is a week of small damage for no upside.

What if a donor gave a lot for years and stopped for reasons I do not know?

Then call them. This is the single most common situation where the right answer is a phone call, and the actual behaviour is another email. You do not need a reason or a pretext. A long-standing donor who went quiet is not offended by being asked how they are. They are much more likely to be offended by three years of automated mail that pretends nothing happened.

Is it worth naming the giving community at all, given the maintenance cost?

Yes, if you will maintain it. A name creates identity and identity drives giving in a way that a threshold never will. But a named community with no enforcement is worse than no community, because it converts a neutral list into an active misstatement. Name it only if someone owns it.

Our mid-level donors never respond to surveys, texts, or engagement asks. Should we keep trying?

Try a different ask before you conclude the audience is dead. Requests for phone numbers and channel sign-ups almost always underperform because they ask the donor to give you something with no obvious benefit to them. Requests that offer something specific and personal do far better. And if you have run a channel fairly for a year with nothing to show, retire it and put the hours into the notes that are already working.

Wrapping Up

Segmentation looks like a technical problem. Cut points, thresholds, windows, streams. It is not a technical problem.

Every segment you build is a claim you are making to a person about who they are to you. When the claim is accurate, it does exactly what you hoped it would do. When the claim is stale, it quietly teaches a good donor that nobody at your organisation is watching.

Your donors are not confused about what they gave. They know. The only question is whether your communications know it too.

Go find out who is still actually in your community. Then tell them the truth, and only the truth, and watch what that alone does.