Somewhere between your budget meeting and your year-end appeal, someone asks a version of this: who gave last year and hasn’t given this year?
It’s the right question. Lapsed givers are the most reachable money in your church — they’ve already decided to support you once, which is the hard part. And a household that stopped giving is often telling you something that has nothing to do with money.
Here’s how to actually get the list.
Doing it in Planning Center Giving
Planning Center Giving does not have a “lapsed givers” report, so this is a two-export job.
- Pull last year. In Giving, go to your donations and set the date range to the full prior year. Export to CSV. You want donor name, email, donor ID if it’s included, total amount and number of gifts.
- Pull this year. Same export, date range from January 1 to today.
- Compare them. In a spreadsheet, put both on separate tabs and use a lookup from the prior-year list against this year’s. Anyone in last year’s list with no match in this year’s is a lapsed giver.
- Sort by last year’s total, descending.
Match on donor ID or email, never on name. Name matching will silently break on “Mike” versus “Michael”, on a marriage, and on every household where the gift is recorded under one spouse some years and the other spouse in others. Every church has more of these than they expect, and each one produces a false positive — a family you’ll be told has lapsed when they haven’t.
That last step is the one people skip, and it’s the one that makes the list usable. Fifty names in alphabetical order is a data set. The same fifty sorted by what they gave last year is a call list, and the top ten are most of the money.
That’s the whole method. Depending on how much your name matching needs cleaning up, expect an hour or three.
Read the list before you act on it
Do not send this list to anyone yet. Roughly a third of it is usually wrong, in predictable ways.
| False positive | How to catch it |
|---|---|
| Households that give under two names — the most common by far | Check any surprising name against the household record before you call |
| People who moved or died | Cross-check People for anyone marked inactive or archived |
| Annual and seasonal givers | Compare like for like: this year’s January-to-July against last year’s January-to-July, not against a full twelve months |
| Fund switching — general fund gifts now going to the building campaign | Re-run without the fund filter. If you filtered by fund, that’s on the report, not on them |
| Expired card on a recurring gift | Check for failed payments. Worth finding fast — it’s an accident, not a decision |
Two of those deserve a note. Somebody who gives once each December has not lapsed in June, so the seasonal comparison matters more than people expect. And the expired card is the one worth chasing first: a short “your card expired, here’s the link” recovers real money from people who never meant to stop.
Working through those will take the list down substantially, and what’s left is genuinely worth a conversation.
The number won’t tell you which conversation to have
Now the harder part, and the reason a giving-only list can mislead you.
Two households both stopped giving in March. On the export they’re identical. In reality:
One has been at church every Sunday since, still serves on the parking team, still shows up to their small group. Something changed financially. That’s a pastoral conversation about their circumstances, and asking them for money would be the wrong move.
The other hasn’t checked in since February and quietly came off the serving rota in January. They didn’t stop giving. They stopped coming, and the giving was simply the last thread to break.
Same row on the spreadsheet, opposite situations, opposite responses. Giving on its own cannot distinguish them, because giving is the slowest signal your church produces — a recurring gift can outlive the relationship by six months purely because cancelling it takes a decision and a login. By the time it shows up on a report, whatever happened, happened a while ago.
So before you call anyone, check two things per household: have they attended recently, and are they still serving. That’s Check-Ins and Services, which means two more exports and more matching — and it’s why this whole exercise usually happens once a year instead of quarterly.
Then make it a conversation
The best framing I know for the call is that you’re not calling about the money.
For the household whose circumstances changed, that’s obviously true — and if they’re still showing up every week while things are tight, the last thing they need is a reminder about pledges.
For the household that drifted, the giving was the symptom. Calling about a lapsed gift will get you a polite apology and nothing real. Calling because you noticed you haven’t seen them in a while might actually get you the truth.
Either way the useful sentence is an ordinary one: we’ve missed you, how are things?
Making it repeatable
The honest weakness of the export method isn’t the work. It’s that the answer expires. Do this in October for your year-end appeal and by February it’s meaningless, so you do it again — and most churches quietly stop after the second or third round.
If you want it standing rather than annual, that’s what Parable does with your Planning Center data. It reads Giving, Check-Ins, Groups and Services nightly, so “who gave last year but not this year” is a question you type rather than a morning you spend, and each name arrives with attendance and serving history attached — which is exactly the context that tells you which of those two conversations you’re about to have.
You can also point SQL or Google Sheets at the underlying data if someone on staff would rather build it themselves.
But whether it’s automated or a spreadsheet twice a year, the sequence is the same: pull the list, clean the false positives, sort by what they gave, check attendance and serving before you dial, and make the call about the person.
The households on that list already decided once that your church was worth supporting. Most of them haven’t unmade that decision. They just haven’t been asked how they’re doing.