Tim Scott is a semi-retired Certified Fund Raising Executive with almost 50 years of nonprofit fundraising experience, including many local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. This guest contribution was originally published in The Conway Daily Sun.

About a quarter century ago, I wrote an article for The Mountain Ear on the subject of fundraising, or philanthropy, which was then a rapidly accelerating phenomenon in our valley. Back then there were about 90 nonprofits registered in Carroll County, where today there are more than 700. It’s no wonder that this expansive growth in organizations devoted to, and for the most part, making life better in our valley, has also spawned greed, debate and donor burnout.

Philanthropy, defined as love of humankind, has existed for as long as we have as a human race. The idea of neighbors helping neighbors has long been embedded in how societies, and communities, work. From time to time the government steps in to help as well, but the lion’s share of both caring for others as well as creating or preserving programs for worthy causes continues to fall on the good graces of regular people. Making qualified donations tax deductible is just one way that the government incentivizes giving, but it has never been at the core of why people give.

Locally there is visible evidence of how important philanthropy has become in our daily lives. Over just the past 10 years campaigns to build a new Community Center, a better Library, a Ski Museum, a Rec Path, as well as major support for land preservation, have inspired donors from all walks of life to step forward. When the community decides, together, that something is important, most generally fundraising goes well.

That’s the good news. What is more concerning however is the way giving has changed during the same years and how it will have an outsize effect on fundraising going forward. When I started in this field almost 50 years ago, we relied on something called Pareto’s Principle which, in effect, said that 80% of the money will come from 20% of the people. This held true for a very long time. What has changed, however is that the distribution of wealth has drifted dramatically both upward and downward. Meaning that the people at the top have more and the people in the middle and bottom have less. The picture today resembles our world 100 years ago when a handful of super wealthy controlled almost everything.

What’s different now is that it’s more like 98% of the money comes from fewer than 2% of the people. This is sobering news for those who believe our community needs can be met by broad-based charitable support. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t have 10 significant donors at the top of your giving pyramid, giving most of the stated goal, your campaign simply won’t succeed.

As an aside, there are those who believe special events are the way to raise significant funds, but the truth is that after all the time committed by volunteers and staff, such events succeed mostly at raising friends. With a few exceptions, the net dollars, while important, rarely move the needle of success. Also here in our valley we have an extraordinary gift of many local Foundations which have been at the lead of so many of the projects in recent years. While generous, their assets are more finite; so they cannot be relied on for endless support of everything our community needs in the years to come.

But back to pure philanthropy, which is about people asking people to support worthwhile causes. At its core it only works if people are willing to ask others to join them, and this maxim has been under a lot of pressure lately. Sophisticated systems of mailings and internet devices, as well as the very public understanding of community wealth, have taken people’s attention away from the ball. Just because people have money doesn’t mean they’ll give it. Ability to give, and Willingness to give, are not, and never will be, aligned.

So when some group asks me if they can raise the money to do some important community project, my response is a qualified yes, but only if you have leaders willing to step up and enough people at the top of your giving pyramid to commit most of the money. Again, a broad-based community campaign of say, $100 donors, simply won’t deliver the millions required to meet the goal.

And there’s one more caution to this; and it is that a new building, cause, or program needs an endowment which, simply stated, is an invested capital reserve fund that ensures that all the shiny new things stay shiny. Organizations generally forget this need and later find that needs for upkeep strip their ability to raise new funds. There are several local examples right now that illustrate just this situation.

Is there an abundance of money in our valley? Absolutely. Will it find its way to your project? Only if you convincingly present the needs, in person and face-to-face, to those who have the resources. It’s hard work, it’s full of disappointments and surprises, but it’s the time-tested framework of how important organizations came into being and have then thrived. And of course, you need that champion at the top who can inspire others’ generosity, often by their own example. These people are worth everything yet are rare, indeed.

- Timothy G. Scott, CFRE, The Country Consulting Group

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A once-in-a-decade winter storm is coming for the Mid-Atlantic—the kind that shuts everything down with roads impassable, power grids strained, and supply chains interrupted. Virginia has already declared a state of emergency, and I suspect Pennsylvania and other states will follow. For forty-eight hours, maybe more, the ordinary infrastructure of daily life will simply stop working.

I find myself thinking about seemingly unrelated things: whether we have enough firewood, which neighbors might need checking on if the power goes out, how we’d coordinate if cell service becomes spotty. These are the immediate, practical questions that surface when you can see the systems you depend on preparing to fail.

And I also find myself thinking about how much of our discourse about capitalism has nothing to do with moments like this. We have spent a lot of time refining critiques of extraction, commodification, and market logic. We debate whether capitalism can be reformed or must be abolished, whether wealth should be redistributed or production reorganized. These arguments are serious, often sophisticated. But they operate in a register that assumes the continuity of the systems being critiqued, as if markets and states will keep functioning while we decide what to do about them.

What happens when they don’t? What actually holds social life together when the infrastructure we take for granted stops working? And why are so many of our critiques of capitalism completely unprepared to answer that question?

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Many of my colleagues in the social sector have declared capitalism incompatible with justice. Then we professionalized impact measurement, optimized donor retention, and made reciprocity legible to wealth advisors. Something here is not working.

The critique has become ubiquitous: capitalism is extractive, broken, incompatible with the flourishing of communities and care. These positions are often sincere, morally serious, born of lived frustration with systems that reward accumulation while eroding trust and participation. But the critique changes little.

Foundations still design grantmaking around wealth preservation. Nonprofits still build fundraising systems that treat generosity as consumer preference. Consultants still help organizations “leverage” capital, “mobilize” philanthropy, and “align” wealth with impact. The language of opposition is everywhere. The logic of capital remains undisturbed.

This is not hypocrisy. It is something more structural. The problem is not that we lack moral clarity about capitalism’s harms. The problem is that moral condemnation substitutes for understanding how societies actually coordinate life and what would coordinate it if capital were no longer central. We have named capitalism as bad without asking what makes societies hold together in the first place, what capital quietly depends on, or what reasserts itself when markets fail.

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Markets do not create trust. They require it. States do not generate social cohesion. They formalize it. Contracts do not produce obligation. They convert existing relationships into enforceable terms.

This is what the social sector keeps forgetting. We speak as if capitalism invented coordination, as if markets were the natural state of human interaction. But, long before markets, people survived through obligation, bound to one another through acts that could not be priced, optimized, or made voluntary.

The Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani calls this Mode A: gift and reciprocity. It operates through social expectation rather than contract, through relationship rather than transaction, through binding obligation rather than voluntary exchange. In The Structure of World History, Karatani contrasts this with Mode B (rule and redistribution through states) and Mode C (commodity exchange through markets). Where Marx read human history through modes of production, Karatani reads it through modes of exchange—a shift that reveals these modes as coexisting and competing rather than replacing one another in linear succession.

Karatani develops this framework with help from Marcel Mauss, whose anthropological work showed that gifts in traditional societies weren’t voluntary; they were obligatory. The gift created binding expectations: the obligation to give, to receive, to reciprocate. You couldn’t opt out. The gift was the social bond. This matters because it means Mode A isn’t a moral preference or a psychological disposition. It’s a structure with its own logic, its own binding force that operates independently of state enforcement or market pricing.

The crucial insight is that these modes do not replace one another. They coexist. Mode C—capitalism—does not eliminate the gift. It suppresses it, abstracts it, pretends not to need it. Genevieve Vaughan argues it’s parasitic. Mode C, like civilization itself, cannot function without the obligations the gift creates. Trust must exist before contracts work. Care must exist before it can be professionalized. Social bonds must exist before authority becomes legible.

The gift is not a stage we evolved past. It is the ground floor of social life—the condition that makes all other forms of coordination possible. I have heard colleagues dismiss Mauss’s obligations of the gift as primitive, insisting they are no longer relevant to modern life. That argument only holds while the state and market remain intact. When they fail, the gift will still be there because it never left. This truth appears most clearly in disasters.

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Rebecca Solnit noticed something strange about disasters. When earthquakes level cities, when hurricanes flood neighborhoods, when systems collapse we expect chaos. But that’s not what happens. Strangers pull each other from rubble. Neighbors pool food and share generators. Informal networks of care emerge faster than official response. People who have never met become responsible for each other’s survival not because someone organized them, but because crisis strips away the fiction that obligation is optional.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit documents this pattern across San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Mexico City’s 1985 quake, 9/11, Katrina, and beyond. When everything falls apart, people do not wait for new systems to be designed. They fall back on older, more proximate forms of coordination. They rediscover dependence. They improvise obligation.

But here is what Solnit also documents: elite panic. Authorities expect disorder and respond with control. They impose curfews, restrict movement, suppress the mutual aid networks already operating. What fails in these moments is not social capacity. It is the ability of institutions to trust that capacity.

When communities organized mutual aid networks during COVID, sector leaders couldn’t refrain from asking: “How will you sustain this?” The question sounded reasonable, responsible. But listen to what it actually means: How will you convert gift logic into grant logic? How will you turn obligation into metrics? How will you make reciprocity reportable?

The question is not innocent. It is Mode C trying to exploit Mode A capacity while suppressing its logic.

The social sector does this constantly. We encounter forms of mutual aid and community care that are functioning well and then ask: Is it sustainable? Can it scale? Does it have measurable outcomes? We do not ask these questions out of cruelty. We ask them because we have been trained to believe that anything not legible to Mode C is fragile, amateurish, or illegitimate.

So we professionalize it. We turn volunteers into staff. We replace social obligation with job descriptions. We convert informal care into service delivery. We impose reporting requirements that make reciprocity administrative. We call this “capacity building.” But what we are often doing is taming the gift in favor of behavior that Mode C can recognize.

This is what Karatani helps us see. What we call “alternatives to capitalism” are almost always Mode C dressed in Mode A language. We use gift vocabulary—community, mutual aid, solidarity, reciprocity—to describe relationships that remain fundamentally transactional. We want the aesthetics of the gift without its obligations. We want mutual aid without dependence; reciprocity without binding claims; and generosity that is voluntary, measurable, and optimizable.

The gift binds and obligates. Capital liberates and promises options. You cannot design systems that serve both. Only one really works when everything falls apart. And the social sector’s inability to admit this is why our critique of capitalism remains theoretical while our practice remains extractive.

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What allows the social sector to avoid this contradiction is a single belief: that obligation is optional. We have come to believe that genuine autonomy means never being bound by claims we didn’t explicitly choose, that real generosity must be voluntary, that legitimate obligation requires consent.

This is the essence of why the social sector's critiques of capitalism fall short: they can't tell us how things are going to work without it. You won't find much discussion of human obligation—the binding claims people make on one another simply by living together. Sure, kick capitalism to the curb. But if this storm gets out of hand, my hopes aren't going to be in Walmart any more than Washington. What actually ensures we survive? What coordinates care when the infrastructure stops working? The critiques are silent on the very thing that actually holds societies together when systems fail.

“Donor-centric” fundraising treats generosity as elective preference rather than social duty. The donor decides whether to give, when to give, how much to give, and what impact to demand in return. Obligation flows in one direction from recipient to donor, never the reverse. “Impact investing” wants transformation without dependence — capital flows to social good only if returns are competitive and exits are possible. In each case, the powerful retain the right to choose their obligations. The vulnerable do not.

This is presented as liberation from paternalism and coercion. But what we built instead was a system that made some people’s obligations escapable and others’ inescapable— a system in which the wealthy can choose their generosity but the poor cannot choose their need and where institutions can opt out of responsibility but communities cannot opt out of harm.

The gift was never fair. It was never supposed to be. It was mutual. What we call freedom now is the right of the powerful to remain unbound.

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The social sector keeps asking how to “leverage” capital for social good, how to “mobilize” philanthropy for justice, how to “align” wealth with impact. These questions assume capital must remain central—that the gift must justify itself in Mode C’s terms, that any form of coordination not legible to markets is incomplete or unsustainable.

There is another option: stop asking for Mode C’s permission. Stop treating wealth as the prerequisite for social change. Stop designing systems that require the gift to prove its efficiency before it is allowed to operate.

This would mean accepting that we cannot serve both Mode C and obligation; that serving donors and serving communities often means opposing things; and that gift-centered work might not scale, might not attract investment, might not generate the outcomes that make philanthropists comfortable.

The social sector is not ready for this choice which is why the critique of capitalism remains theoretical while the practice of philanthropy remains extractive. We can name the contradictions, cite the theory, acknowledge the harm. We just cannot afford to stop.

Because stopping would mean admitting that much of what we call social change work is actually the management of capital’s relationship to inequality; that our organizations often exist, not to challenge the terms of exchange, but to make them feel less violent; that we are the buffer between wealth and obligation, ensuring that generosity remains voluntary and that the powerful never have to experience binding claims on their autonomy.

The gift does not care whether we are ready. When the systems we have built to suppress it finally fail, the gift will not ask for our approval. It will reassert itself, not as an ideal, but as a necessity.

When the snow storm arrives tomorrow evening, some of us will check on neighbors without being asked. We will share generators, coordinate childcare, clear driveways for those who cannot. We will do this not because we have optimized our mutual aid strategies or because a foundation funded our capacity building. We will do it because the infrastructure has failed and obligation has become visible again.

The question Solnit’s book asks us all is whether we will recognize what we are doing when we do it. Or whether, when the roads clear and the power returns, we will immediately try to professionalize it, measure it, and make it legible to those in charge.

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed

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Not long ago, a trusted consulting colleague shared something rather matter-of-factly, as if describing a preference for email over phone calls. said simply, “Lots of people who give big gifts don’t want to be in a gift officer portfolio.”

At first pass, this can sound unremarkable. I’ve heard some version of this logic many times: donors aren’t obligated to have coffee; if they don’t want to meet, that’s perfectly fine; generosity shouldn’t require proximity. Taken on its own, that posture can sound reasonable, even principled. But, as she went on to describe what she was seeing, it became clear that this wasn’t merely about preference. It was about what kind of relationship donors were being asked to enter into and why opting out had begun to feel like the least bad option.

“For many,” Tracy said, “they don’t need that kind of engagement. They don’t feel like they are missing anything. Or they don’t feel like they are being offered any value.” Others, she believed, had simply grown weary: “They have been subjected to a rotating cast of bad gift officers.” Donors, she told me, used the phrase “used car salesman” with surprising frequency. And, for others, the issue was more practical than philosophical: “They had lives, jobs, hobbies, family and didn’t see any reason to give time and attention” to a relationship that felt like a competition rather than a shared undertaking.

Taken together, this does not sound like donors rejecting relationship as such. It sounds like donors rejecting a degraded version of it—relationship reduced to performance, turnover, entitlement, and competition for attention. When people feel the need to step away from contact in order to continue giving, something has gone badly wrong.

What struck me most wasn’t the account itself but how ordinary it sounded. Inside the profession, this kind of disengagement has become normal. Fundraisers explain it by saying donors “don’t want relationship,” that distance feels respectful, that outreach risks intrusion. Detachment is framed as virtue. Silence becomes professionalism. Yet we remain surprised when generosity doesn’t last—when loyalty is thin, when relationships evaporate once the transaction clears. We behave as though generosity should flourish best at arm’s length and then puzzle over why it doesn’t.

If this pattern feels familiar, it should. The idea that generosity works best at a distance is not something fundraisers invented on their own; it is something we’ve inherited. When Mary Douglas wrote the foreword to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, she began, not with ancient rituals, but with modern charity for precisely this reason. Charity, she observed, is where the logic of the gift becomes most confused—where giving is treated as a one-way transfer rather than a relationship that unfolds over time. Money moves, receipts are issued, gratitude is expressed, and everyone is encouraged to remain unencumbered. The appearance is generosity; the structure is detachment.

Douglas’s warning was simple and unsettling: there should be no free gifts. What’s wrong with the so-called free gift, she argued, is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts—to give without ever being positioned to receive. A gift is supposed to cost us something, yes; but, more fundamentally, it’s supposed to bind us. By “free” Douglas meant unbound, stripped of mutual obligation. A gift that refuses reciprocity, that places the giver permanently above the receiver, is not elevated; it is inert. In Mauss’s account, a gift is not an event but a total social fact, something that circulates between giver and receiver in an ongoing moral relationship. When that circulation is blocked—when one party refuses to receive—the gift doesn’t become purer; it becomes thinner. It loses the very quality that makes it capable of sustaining social life.

Paulo Freire would have recognized this pattern. He called it false generosity—charity that preserves the giver’s position rather than risking genuine solidarity. False generosity alleviates symptoms while protecting the conditions that make charity necessary in the first place. The giver remains structurally superior, the receiver remains dependent, and the gift becomes a tool for reproducing hierarchy rather than dissolving it. Douglas is diagnosing the same pathology from a different angle: when the giver refuses to receive anything in return, the relationship cannot transform either party. It can only confirm who they already are.

What allows this pattern to persist is what I refer to as the Myth of Charitable Exceptionalism. It’s the belief that because charity is morally good it is exempt from the obligations that inform all other gift relationships: that obligation contaminates generosity, that reciprocity compromises virtue, that the purest gifts are those that ask nothing and bind no one. This is why we say things like, “We never want donors to feel obligated,” as though obligation and connection were not intimately bound together. This myth reassures donors that detachment is admirable and fundraisers that restraint is professional. It flatters everyone while quietly dismantling the social logic that makes giving meaningful.

This myth didn’t remain abstract. It was reinforced, normalized, and eventually professionalized in ways that perfectly illustrate Douglas’ warning. Research by Lesley Alborough helps explain how this happened. She describes what she calls an instrumental view of fundraising: a way of understanding the fundraiser’s role that narrows responsibility to identifying what compels a donor to give and designing mechanisms to elicit that response. From this vantage point, fundraising is not primarily about mediating a relationship; it is about producing an outcome.

Once generosity is framed instrumentally, the gift becomes an event rather than a process. The fundraiser’s task is to anticipate motivation, deliver the right message at the right time, secure the gift, and move on. Whatever happens after the transfer is secondary. The middle—the slow, ambiguous space where obligation, trust, and mutual recognition would normally take shape—is quietly designed out of the system.

This helps explain why so many donors experience portfolio management not as relationship but as interruption. If engagement is reduced to scheduled touches, rotating representatives, and thinly veiled solicitations, opting out is not a rejection of generosity; it is a rational response to a relationship stripped of substance. The donor is not refusing connection. They are refusing to play a role in a system that treats connection as a tactic rather than a bond.

The problem becomes clearer when we step outside fundraising altogether. Consider something far more ordinary: helping a child through college. The tuition bill I pay next week is real, material, and consequential; but it is not the relationship. It is one expression of a relationship that began long before the invoice arrived and will continue long after it is paid. Detached from that larger story, the payment is meaningless. No one would describe parenthood as a sequence of isolated transactions even though money changes hands regularly. The relationship is not episodic; it is cumulative.

This is what Mauss meant by calling the gift a total social fact. Remove the story, the obligation, and the future, and you are left with a transfer—legible to accounting systems, perhaps, but incapable of carrying social weight. Fundraising, however, has come to operate as if the opposite were true. We behave as though generosity can be reduced to discrete moments: the ask, the gift, the acknowledgment. We build systems to optimize each moment independently and then wonder why nothing holds together.

Lewis Hyde offers a useful metaphor for what happens next. Writing about Alcoholics Anonymous, he describes the “two-stepper”: someone who embraces the first step and then jumps straight to the twelfth, skipping everything in between. They want the legitimacy of transformation without submitting to its labor. In AA’s middle steps, people take inventory, make amends, practice ongoing discipline—the unglamorous work that actually changes a life. Fundraising has quietly become a two-step profession. We are very good at the opening moment—the invitation to give—and increasingly sophisticated at the closing ritual—the thank-you. But we avoid the middle where the gift would normally be allowed to work on both parties. The middle is where the donor offers advice that the organization actually takes, where mistakes are named and forgiven, where the gift stops being a transfer and becomes a shared story.

This is why the lunch table has become such a fraught symbol. It isn’t that donors necessarily want coffee or proximity on demand. It’s that the middle—the space where meaning is negotiated and obligation acknowledged—has been hollowed out. When fundraisers say donors “don’t want relationship,” what they often mean is that donors don’t want this version of relationship: instrumental, repetitive, and unmoored from reciprocity. The question is not whether donors want relationship. The question is whether we are offering one worth staying for.

Mary Douglas warned that a gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction. The evidence of that contradiction is now everywhere: fragile loyalty, disappearing donors, generosity that flickers briefly before dissolving. These are not failures of technique. They are the predictable consequences of treating the gift as an event rather than a relationship.

Which brings us back to the donors who want out of portfolios. Their departure is not evidence that relationship no longer matters. It is evidence that we have forgotten how to inhabit it. The tragedy is not that donors opt out. The tragedy is that we built systems and norms that made opting out feel like the most honest response.

What would it mean to take the gift seriously again? It would mean admitting that much of what we call professionalism has been built to avoid the very demands generosity makes of us. It would mean recognizing that stewardship is not something we do for donors but something we do with them. We steward not the donor, but the relationship the gift initiates.

The gift was never meant to keep us separate. The idea that we can opt out of its demands is a contradiction. It was meant to bind us together. And, until we recover the courage to inhabit the messy middle of what a gift relationship requires—to accept the obligations generosity places on us as recipients, institutions, and professionals—generosity will continue to arrive quietly and, just as quietly, leave.

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed

Next week, we’re launching Taming the Gift in partnership with Seed - a series exploring the limits of contemporary fundraising and reimagining it as a practice that activates cultures of wild generosity. We’ll begin with how modernity domesticated the gift and the effects on civil society, professional norms, and the experience of givers and receivers. If these questions matter to you, I hope you’ll join the conversation.

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Writing Projects

• Read our latest article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

• Read our latest article in The Giving Review.

• Order your copy of The War for Fundraising Talent.

• Order your copy of The Fundraising Reader.

Job Opportunities

• If your organization has a job opportunity you’d like to promote, please feel free to let us know.

Work With Us

• Do you need a trusted advisor? Let’s talk. Email us.

• How about hosting a ‘sensemaking retreat’ with your team? Email us.

Every once in a while, the market makes a claim that feels less like marketing copy and more like a confession of faith. You can tell because it doesn’t just describe a tool; it reveals a cosmology. What counts. What fails. What needs fixing. And who, exactly, deserves to be in control. Lately, in the land of contemporary fundraising, those claims have been about ‘autonomous fundraising’ and the rise of the unstoppable Virtual Engagement Officer. The claims are familiar by now: massive scale, lower costs, improved retention, more revenue. Human fundraisers are expensive and slow. Software is tireless and consistent. So far, nothing surprising.

But one claim really caught my attention: “It doesn’t allow your donors to lapse.” That sentence is doing far more work than the rest of the advertisement combined. So it’s worth slowing down and reading it carefully, not as practitioners hunting for a new tactic, but as interpreters trying to understand the theology underneath the promise.

In fundraising, “lapse” is usually treated as a neutral metric. A donor gave, then didn’t. Something broke. Something failed. We track it, benchmark it, and build strategies around preventing it. But outside of dashboards and CRM reports, lapse isn’t a technical failure. It’s a human moment. A season change. A shift in priorities. A loss of trust. Sometimes it’s financial stress or illness or grief. Sometimes it’s simply the end of a chapter. Calling that a lapse already frames the story from the institution’s side. The donor didn’t just stop giving; they deviated.

That’s why the phrase “doesn’t allow” matters so much. In a gift relationship, continuity is never enforced. It’s invited, renewed, and sometimes refused. That’s not a flaw in the system; it’s the moral condition of the gift. But “doesn’t allow” signals a fundamentally different posture. Silence isn’t something to be received or interpreted; it’s something to be corrected. Absence isn’t meaningful information; it’s a system error. Exit isn’t a right; it’s a threat to be neutralized. Agency quietly shifts from the donor to the system. The relationship is no longer governed by consent renewed, but by continuity maintained, by design, not by choice.

Underneath the language of engagement is a framework borrowed straight from subscription economics. In that world, churn is the enemy. Retention is success. Exit must be anticipated and crushed. The ideal customer never has to consciously choose again. That logic makes perfect sense if you’re selling software or streaming services. It makes no sense at all if you’re talking about voluntary generosity. A gift is not a renewal. It’s a fresh act of judgment. Each time, the donor decides again whether the relationship still holds meaning. A system designed to prevent lapse treats that decision as friction, something to smooth out, optimize away, or engineer around.

This is where claims about increasing donor participation start to collapse. Participation is a rich word. It implies agency, presence, judgment, and sometimes dissent. It suggests people are choosing to show up, not just responding to stimuli. A system can absolutely increase activity. It can drive opens, clicks, responses, and repeat gifts. It can reduce silence and keep money moving. But activity is not the same thing as participation. If donors are still acting, but only inside a tightly managed behavioral loop designed to preempt their exit, then what’s being measured isn’t engagement. It’s compliance.

What’s especially telling is that lapse is often the most honest feedback a donor can give. It says something changed. Something no longer fits. Something broke, or something else now calls for attention. Human fundraisers can hear that. They can ask questions, wait, learn, accept disappointment, or even let go. Autonomous systems can’t do that. They can only escalate touches, adjust tone, optimize timing, and increase pressure while sounding solicitous. Silence becomes noise to be suppressed. What disappears isn’t just lapse; it’s listening.

Read closely, and the worldview behind autonomous fundraising crystallizes. Donors are treated primarily as predictable behavior patterns. A good relationship is one that doesn’t stop. Human presence is inefficient. Judgment is risky. Continuity matters more than consent. Once you accept those assumptions, autonomous fundraising isn’t radical at all. It’s the logical terminus.

But if you start from different ground, if you believe generosity is a human encounter, fragile and voluntary and meaning-bearing, then “not allowing lapse” isn’t an innovation. It’s a threat. It’s the difference between a relationship where someone can leave and a system where exit has been designed out. One requires presence. The other only requires persistence.

This isn’t a Luddite argument. The technology is impressive. The efficiency gains are real. The ROI spreadsheets will pencil out beautifully. The real question isn’t whether these systems can raise more money. It’s whether preventing donors from lapsing is actually the outcome we want to design for, and what kind of institutions, and donors, that choice inevitably creates. Because once generosity no longer requires presence, the cost won’t show up on a balance sheet. It will show up in the slow erosion of something we won’t know how to name until it’s already gone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

- , Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed

Top Essays

Writing Projects

• Read our latest article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

• Read our latest article in The Giving Review.

• Order your copy of The War for Fundraising Talent.

• Order your copy of The Fundraising Reader.

Job Opportunities

• If your organization has a job opportunity you’d like to promote, please feel free to let us know.

Work With Us

• Do you need a trusted advisor? Let’s talk. Email us.

• How about hosting a ‘sensemaking retreat’ with your team? Email us.

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A couple of years ago, I promised myself I would never wade back into the donor centricity debate again. The topic had long since worn me out—not because it didn’t deserve attention, but because the outcomes had become painfully predictable. Every time it came up, the same arguments were put on the table, the same mobs reached for their pitchforks, and nothing really changed. It felt like trying to persuade a loyal Fox News viewer of the merits of a left-wing candidate: the battle lines were already drawn. So I made a promise—no more.

I don’t intend to break that promise today.

What follows is something different: a close reading—or what scholars might call an exegesis—of a statement by one of the field’s most frequently cited thinkers, Adrian Sargeant. The line appears in a 2021 piece reflecting on the origins of donor centricity. But, rather than engage it to argue for or against the concept itself, we’re going to use it to surface a deeper set of questions: Where do theories and frameworks come from in the nonprofit sector? What assumptions do they carry with them? And what does our pattern of adoption—more reflexive than reflective—reveal about the way our field has put together its body of knowledge?

Whenever I found myself caught in this or similar debates, it always felt like a trap that both sides had become quite skilled at setting. My hope is that this exegesis will be useful to anyone still engaging in this debate and maybe even offer a way out of the trap. This isn’t about settling an argument. It’s about asking better questions before deciding which arguments matter. And it’s as much about the theories we’re debating as the ones we might be tempted to put in their place.

The Vocabulary of Borrowing

We have to start by asking ourselves where theories come from. In many cases, they’re not original ideas; they’re migrations from somewhere else where they served a different purpose. This is especially true in the nonprofit sector where our intellectual infrastructure has long been shaped by what Whetten, Felin, and King call the practice of theory borrowing. In their paper, they offer a crucial distinction: not all borrowing is created equal.

Vertical borrowing occurs when theories are transferred within a single domain—say, from one corner of the market to another. This kind of borrowing stays within the same basic logic even as it adapts to a new context. A theory about customer retention in tech, for example, can be applied to retail and still operate within the assumptions of market exchange: transactional relationships, competition, and self-interest. That may or may not be appropriate, but at least the logic remains coherent.

Horizontal borrowing, by contrast, moves a theory across domains—say, from the market or the state into the nonprofit sector. This is where things get riskier. The assumptions that held in the original domain may not transfer, but the vocabulary often does. As Whetten et al. warn, conceptual stretching becomes a real danger. We keep the words but lose the meaning; or, worse, we displace the meaning native to our domain and replace it with imported scaffolding. Horizontal borrowing isn’t inherently wrong. But, when it goes unexamined—when it becomes reflex rather than choice—it threatens the coherence of our field.

This isn’t rare. It’s a well-worn pattern. Ideas flow downhill from the more dominant sectors and are often adopted with a shrug rather than a question. We inherit the prestige of the theory without interrogating its assumptions. We speak the language of measurement and efficiency without asking whose standards we’re using. And, eventually, we lose the ability to say what the nonprofit domain is for beyond serving as a halfway house between government failure and market shortfall.

To be clear, theory borrowing is not the sin. Every field borrows. The sin is doing so uncritically, especially across domains with fundamentally different logics. When we take a bureaucratic tool from the state or a commercial framework from the market and apply it without rethinking the assumptions it carries, we aren’t innovating; we’re outsourcing our identity. We allow other domains to define our purpose, our values, and our metrics for success. Over time, the result is predictable: a sector that forgets its purpose and ends up playing junior partner, helping someone else feel better about theirs.

That, in the clearest terms, is fundraising’s original sin. Not a tactic or a slogan, but the deeper belief that our legitimacy should be imported—that our best ideas and concepts have to originate from someone else. That we can save time and resources by adapting someone else’s logic rather than doing the harder work of making sense of our own.

As we’ll see later in this series, the fundraising profession has a long-standing habit of uncritical theory borrowing that stretches back to the early twentieth century. Theories like donor centricity didn’t create the problem. They’re just haunted by it.

A Sentence Worth Unpacking

The first sentence of Sargeant’s statement does more work than it might seem. While it aims to contextualize the rise of donor centricity, it also offers something deeper: a compact map of how ideas are borrowed, stretched, and mythologized in our field.

Here’s the full statement, but focus on the opening sentence:

“As often happens in the nonprofit sector, ‘good’ ideas are simply borrowed from elsewhere (in this case the business world) and applied with little apparent thought. The notion of donor centricity was born.”

Let’s take it clause by clause.

“As often happens in the nonprofit sector…”

Sargeant opens with a knowing sigh—an acknowledgment of something long observed but rarely interrogated. Ideas in the nonprofit sector often arrive secondhand. We tend not to cultivate theory from within. We import it from the state or the market, adapting it just enough to appear contemporary, efficient, or credible. The move is rarely malicious. Often, it’s just pragmatic. But behind that pragmatism is a quieter anxiety: the belief that our work needs validation from somewhere else.

Whetten et al. describe this as a structural weakness: a lack of internal disciplinary identity that leads sectors like ours to reach for borrowed sophistication. When a theory “emerges from a more developed field,” they note, it arrives with built-in prestige. But that prestige comes at a cost. We take on assumptions we haven’t tested. We use language that doesn’t quite fit. We adopt tools made for different problems in different domains. Over time, those misalignments add up until we forget the logic we were meant to serve.

“‘Good’ ideas are simply borrowed from elsewhere…”

Sargeant puts good in quotes, and rightly so. The “goodness” of an idea can’t be judged apart from the context it was designed for. What works in the market—where exchange is shaped by self-interest, competition, and cost-efficiency—may not work in a domain grounded in moral obligation, reciprocity, and public care. Yet, too often, nonprofit leaders treat business frameworks as inherently superior, mistaking fluency in market logic for intellectual rigor.

That admiration—sometimes even envy—reflects a deeper insecurity. Many nonprofit leaders fear being seen as soft or inefficient, so they reach for models that signal strength and clarity. But clarity isn’t the same as coherence. And, when we import ideas that look sharp but weren’t made for us, we end up weakening the foundations we’re trying to build.

“(In this case the business world)…”

This parenthetical seems casual—just a clarifying aside. But it’s doing more than it lets on. It names the source without fully owning the consequences. In that sense, it functions as a kind of plausible deniability: a nod toward business-world influence, without confronting what it means for a sector to continually import its logic.

But there’s no real mystery here. Sargeant, like anyone who’s studied the field closely, knows just how much of our fundraising infrastructure is built on borrowed business frameworks. From strategy to language to mental models, the business world has been treated not as one reference point, but as the default authority. This aside gestures at that fact but doesn’t press it. It performs awareness without taking responsibility.

That’s the risk. When we casually reference the market as the source of our tools, we make normalization look like neutrality. But it isn’t neutral. This is how a domain loses its distinctiveness—sentence by sentence, aside by aside. When the logic of fundraising starts to sound more like commerce than care, we shouldn’t be surprised by what’s lost. The market isn’t just a source. It’s become the template we measure ourselves against.

“…and applied with little apparent thought.”

Here the critique sharpens. Sargeant isn’t just naming the source; he’s describing the uptake. The nonprofit sector didn’t test or translate the idea. It adopted it reflexively. The original marketplace theory was rebranded, repackaged, and slotted into use without much examination. Less translation; more decoration. A buzzword; not a blueprint. The speed and superficiality of it all say more about our habits than the idea itself.

To be fair, thinkers like Sargeant have worked hard to correct this, bringing rigor to a field that often built its knowledge out of whatever frameworks were most accessible. But the question remains: how much bending do we have to do to make those borrowed theories fit? At what point does it make more sense to start fresh?

As noted earlier, this is what Whetten et al. call conceptual stretching: the illusion of rigor without real coherence. We keep the words but lose the meaning—or worse, forget our own. We grow fluent in frameworks that don’t belong to us and gradually mute the language that does.

The danger isn’t just confusion. It’s forgetting why this domain exists at all.

Asking Where Our Theories Come From

The sentence we’ve just unpacked—“As often happens in the nonprofit sector, ‘good’ ideas are simply borrowed from elsewhere (in this case the business world) and applied with little apparent thought”—serves as Sargeant’s origin story for donor centricity.

But it also offers a deeper provocation: a chance to ask whether we’ve ever truly understood where our theories most often come from and what they carry with them. Only by grasping their origin stories can we begin to understand what these theories are trying to do and why they so often fail to serve the purpose this sector was meant to fulfill.

We focused on this sentence because it reveals a familiar pattern: the gravitational pull of dominant domains, the prestige of borrowed logic, and the uncritical posture that continues to shape our field. The problem isn’t donor centrism. The problem is what its origin reveals: a habit of importing meaning rather than cultivating it — of looking outward for structure and validation instead of inward toward the purpose already embedded in our work.

That’s why this matters. Not because any idea is irredeemable; but because if we want a sector grounded in the ethic of the gift—relationship over transaction, responsibility over return—we need a theory, ethic, and practice born from within.

We can’t keep importing our purpose. We have to learn how to articulate it for ourselves.

- , Founder, Responsive Fundraising

In parts two and three, we’ll trace how this habit of uncritical borrowing took root long before donor centrism and how it continues to shape our professional imagination today.

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