1 of 3 | Are We Showing Up in Gift Mode?
This is the first in a three-part series on reclaiming the ethic of the gift in contemporary fundraising. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next installment.
In the summer of 2018, about six months after I began promoting my first book, I said to a friend, “Well, I can’t promote a book forever.” “Why not launch a podcast?” they suggested. A few weeks later, I was in the main lodge at Camp Tuckahoe—my sons off earning merit badges—recording what would become The Fundraising Talent Podcast. The goal was simple: an unrehearsed, unstructured conversation where guests didn’t reveal what they wanted to talk about until they arrived. That struck me as the best way to have an honest conversation with colleagues navigating one of the sector’s most in-demand—yet least understood—roles.
Those five years didn’t make for light conversation. The pandemic upended routines. Reckonings around race and equity raised hard questions. Institutions pulled back or scrambled. Fundraisers were expected to keep performing in a system that no longer made much sense, and maybe never did. I listened as people gave voice to their doubts, frustrations, and the constant tug-of-war between mission and method.
We talked a lot about “boards and bosses”: what they didn’t understand, what they expected, how they managed to both overreach and under-resource at the same time. What I had assumed might be a professional community navigating its messy adolescence began to feel more like a chronicle of our collective adventures through the Land of Unreasonable Expectations. “Fundraising is so transactional” became one of the most common refrains. Some guests defended the idea of centering the donor; others wanted the focus elsewhere. Above all, most conversations circled the same underlying tension: were donors meeting our expectations? Were they responding fast enough, giving generously enough, showing loyalty, opening doors, coming through?
Over time, I began to notice not just what we talked about; but also what we didn’t. Across a library of 360 conversations, one topic remained curiously absent: the nature of the gift itself.
We used the word constantly—gift capacity, major gift, gift officer—but rarely asked whether a gift implied a distinct kind of relationship, one rooted in a different ethic than the transactional or institutional models we were trained to follow. We didn’t stop to ask whether our frustrations—fatigue, disconnection, donor churn—had less to do with messaging and segmentation and more to do with having forgotten what a gift really is. We didn’t wonder if a more faithful understanding of the gift might have offered what so many promising initiatives were trying to invent from scratch: a way to restore mutuality, renew trust, and make generosity feel like something other than an invoice.
While most of my podcast guests may not have been ready to talk about the nature and ethic of the gift then, I’ve since heard from readers who are eager to have that conversation now. They’ve expressed curiosity, intrigue, and a quiet disbelief that something so central to our work has gone so thoroughly unexamined. Many of you have asked some version of the same question: How is it that we’ve collectively overlooked the very idea at the heart of philanthropy?
Expectations of How Our Donors Show Up
If the word gift has gone largely unexamined in our sector, the word donor has evolved under a flood of assumptions. We don’t just expect donors to give; we expect them to behave — to be loyal, responsive, generous, and timely; to give from the heart but also read our impact report; to trust us with their money and stay reachable but not intrusive; to feel urgency, share our moral clarity, and stick with us no matter what.
These expectations aren’t new. But, in recent years, they’ve burgeoned into codified strategies aimed largely at correcting behavior that fundraisers and the institutions behind them have found frustrating. Every week there’s another article in one of our trade publications touting the promises of effective altruism, trust-based philanthropy, or community-centric fundraising. Some emphasize efficiency, evidence, and measurable return. Others insist on proximity, shared power, and shifting control. Still others focus on racial equity, moral repair, or narrative change. They are different in emphasis but united in message: if only donors would show up differently, more good could be done.
And it’s not just our donors we’re trying to fix. Many of the platforms, consultants, and tools we rely on—our third parties—show up in this space with their own posture, too. They arrive offering systems, templates, and dashboards meant to optimize behavior, track loyalty, and streamline cultivation. But rarely do they ask what kind of relationship we’re trying to build. Rarely do they begin with the gift. These vendors often sell us a more efficient way to manage what is rather than helping us imagine what could be. And, in doing so, they reinforce the very dynamics we’re trying to undo: ones built around extraction, segmentation, and control. We end up paying for tools that train us to relate to our donors not as fellow citizens, but as warm leads.
Let’s be clear: it’s not wrong to ask donors to evolve and behave differently. But each of these corrective measures assumes there’s no precedent for the kind of relationship we want to arrive at — as if the dynamics of generosity, the ethics of care, and the practices of mutuality have never existed at scale. We forget that, for most of human history, giving has been how people made meaning, built community, and met needs; not just how they funded programs. So we invent new frameworks to teach donors how to be “better” when we might be better off reclaiming a story they already know.
And here’s the tension: we are asking our donors to show up in what we’ll refer to as gift mode—not as consumers or subjects, but as citizens. That need isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming more urgent as institutions falter, trust erodes, and public funding evaporates. What’s unfortunate is that, while some of us are desperately asking our donors to show up this way, we’re not meeting them with the same posture. And I would argue it’s that very disconnect—that decades-long asymmetry between how we ask donors to show up and how we show up ourselves—that’s quietly undermining our relationships and driving donors away.
The Postures We Choose
When we talk about how donors show up—and how we do in return—it’s tempting to focus on tactics: emails, appeals, newsletters, touchpoints. But posture isn’t a tactic. It’s not policy or personality. It’s a way of being. And many of us have been conditioned to approach fundraising from a posture shaped more by control than by community.
In How We Show Up, Mia Birdsong offers a sharp critique of the cultural habits that isolate us from one another. She argues that we’ve been trained to prize self-sufficiency, to avoid asking for help, and to measure our value by how much we can handle on our own. This posture of individualism—deeply ingrained and often rewarded—creates real barriers to connection. And, while it might look like confidence or professionalism, it’s often just fear dressed up as control.
We see this posture play out in fundraising all the time. It’s there in the way we manage donor relationships through process rather than presence and script gratitude instead of expressing it. We keep conversations polished but distant, careful but not real. We worry about being too informal, too emotional, too dependent. So we act like we’ve got it all under control even when we don’t. And then we wonder why the relationship doesn’t feel mutual, why the trust feels thin, why the joy of giving feels transactional instead of personal.
Birdsong helps us name the deeper root of this pattern: a scarcity mindset that undermines our ability to see ourselves as part of something shared. It disconnects us from our empathy and dulls our memory of what she describes as a more ancestral way of living—one rooted in interdependence and mutual care. That memory still surfaces even now. You can hear it in the quiet longing for relationships that feel more honest. You can sense it in the donor who doesn’t want another report but does want to feel seen. You can see it in yourself when you realize you’ve been holding everything too tightly for too long.
The alternative to rugged individualism isn’t fragility; it’s generous interdependence — the ability to give without controlling, to ask without shame, to build a relationship where both parties matter and each one can be changed by the other. But we can’t ask our donors to show up in that posture if we haven’t reclaimed it ourselves.
Are We Showing Up in the Same Story?
The most important question we’re not asking isn’t about strategy or segmentation or even stewardship. It’s about story. Are we showing up in the same one?
Every donor, fundraiser, and institution is shaped by the larger story they believe they’re in. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls these frameworks social imaginaries—the implicit, often unspoken assumptions about how the world works, what kind of people we are, and what is expected of us. These aren’t just ideas floating above us. They are lived narratives carried in our habits, reinforced by our systems, and made visible in our relationships. We rarely realize we’re living inside them until the story stops making sense.
Jon Alexander brings Taylor’s insight into sharp relief. He argues that modern life has been governed by two dominant stories: the Subject Story and the Consumer Story. The Subject Story says we are obedient followers, reliant on institutions and authorities to care for us. It casts power as something above us and citizenship as deference. The Consumer Story flips this, presenting us as self-interested individuals whose primary role is to choose what to buy, who to support, when to opt in or out. Power becomes transactional, and freedom is equated with choice. Both stories treat us as passive—either ruled or marketed to. Neither invites us into mutual responsibility or shared agency.
Yet so much of fundraising is still scripted by these two narratives. In one, we defer to donor authority—seeking validation from wealth, reputation, or legacy. In the other, we optimize for donor preferences—efficiency, convenience, return on investment. We toggle between flattery and frictionlessness. But, in both, we accept an asymmetry: the donor is the center, and we are petitioners, vendors, proxies. There is no shared project—only performance.
But there is another story—one that Alexander describes in Citizens. In this story, we are co-creators, not consumers or subjects. Our value lies not in what we control or accumulate, but in what we contribute to and sustain together. It’s a story of mutuality, of civic possibility, of belonging. A story of we rather than me. And it’s the only kind of story in which the gift makes sense—not distorted by the logic of the market or the authority of the state, but sustained as a shared gesture between people building something they both believe in.
If our donors are showing up in one story, and we in another, the disconnect is inevitable. Signals get crossed. Assumptions clash. The relationship feels strained, awkward, incomplete. Until we name the story we’re in—and the one we’re inviting others into—no amount of technique will fix what’s broken. Because generosity doesn’t live in tactics. It lives in meaning. And meaning lives in the story we agree to share.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingThis is the first in a three-part series on reclaiming the ethic of the gift in contemporary fundraising. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next installment.
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