What happened to last year's new donors

That gap is not carelessness. It is structural, and it repeats for the same reason every year.

Ramadan gets a plan, a team and a calendar. The month after it gets an exhausted staff, a backlog, and a set of reports that are already late. By the time anyone lifts their head it is May, and someone who gave you money on the 27th night has heard nothing since. April has no budget line. Nobody is failing at a job here. The job was never created.

The number that should be on every trustee agenda

The sector-wide studies keep landing on the same number: around nineteen in every hundred first-time donors ever give again.

Read it the way it usually gets read and it sounds like a retention statistic, filed next to all the others. Read it the other way round and it is a spending decision: you spend the most expensive month of your year bringing people in, and four in five of them are gone by the summer. Next February, you pay to bring them in again. The same acquisition cost, for the same person, every single year.

A donor who stays costs you three emails. A donor who lapses costs you next year’s marketing budget. Those are the two prices on the table, and most charities pay the second one without ever being shown the first.

The three April emails

The charities that break out of this do something unremarkable:

1. The thank you. It says what the money actually did, in the plainest terms available, and it is sent while the feeling is still there. Not a receipt. A sentence a person would write.
2. The impact note. Six weeks later. One photograph, one number. Nothing else. The restraint is the message: we did what we said, and we are not asking for anything today.
3. The quiet invitation. A single ask to give monthly, phrased as carrying on rather than starting something new. The donor already decided to trust you in February. This email just removes the need to re-decide.

Three emails. Written in January, when there is time. Scheduled before the season begins. Left to run while everyone recovers.

Why it never happens

Because in January the sequence competes with the season itself, and the season wins. The appeal emails have a deadline that everyone can see. The April emails have a deadline nobody can see, because their cost only shows up a year later, disguised as next year’s acquisition spend.

This is the cheapest growth available to a charity, and it is the first thing to fall off the list, every single year. We build the April month into every Ramadan programme we run, because a season that leaves nothing behind is a season you have to start again from nothing.

If you already write April before Ramadan starts, you are in a small minority, and we would genuinely like to know how you protect the time for it.