2 of 3 | Are We Showing Up in Gift Mode?
This is Part Two of a three-part series exploring what it really means to reclaim the ethic of the gift in today’s fundraising landscape. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.
In the first essay, we asked whether we were truly showing up in gift mode—whether our posture and expectations matched the story we claimed to inhabit. But every story rests on structure. Beneath the narrative lies a mode—a framework of human interaction that shapes the relationship at its core. And the unsettling truth is this: many of us were trained to tell stories without ever being taught to see the structure underneath.
Whether we arrived by way of institutional philanthropy or nonprofit fundraising, most of us were trained in tactics, not in modes. We learned how to introduce opportunities, close gifts, test messages, and follow up with professionalism. But few of us were ever asked the deeper questions: Does this interaction align with the structure of a gift? What does it mean to receive a gift on its own terms—not according to the logic of the market or the state, but in accordance with the ethic the gift itself implies?
The closer we look, the clearer the answers become: our training prioritized efficiency, predictability, and control. These are the values of the market. And when those fell short, we defaulted to the values of the state—compliance, oversight, and standardization. But the gift doesn’t promise what these systems attempt to guarantee. It resists both the market’s precision and the state’s enforcement. And because of that resistance, the gift—despite being central to our language—was treated as morally vague and structurally optional. What our training gave us was a system map. What it failed to offer was a moral framework for how generosity actually works.
What’s tragic about the moment we find ourselves in is that neither dominant logic—the market nor the state—is measuring up. And some of us know this. Across the sector, leaders are searching—sometimes frantically—for new practices, new language, and new forms of relationship that match the realities we’re facing. But the search doesn’t have to be so difficult. As Charles Eisenstein writes in Sacred Economics, we’re trying to “relearn gift culture” as a way of recovering a deeper way of relating—one rooted in trust, gratitude, and interdependence rather than scarcity and control. What we’re not always ready to admit is that our sector, our institutions, and our professional expertise were built on the latter. Which raises a difficult and unsettling question: Why?
Polanyi: Forms of Integration
The question of why begins with understanding how gift relationships actually work—and how they differ from other ways of organizing economic life. Rather than rationalizing our reliance on the logics of Walmart and Washington, we have to commit ourselves to understanding the mode that is actually suited for social change. That means naming the mode that is rightfully ours. And while it might sound abstract, it’s not. In fact, it may be the most practical distinction we were never taught in Fundraising 101.
Most of us can recall what our early training emphasized: the donor pyramid, the cultivation cycle, the case for support. We were taught how to move people through systems. But we weren’t taught how to recognize—or distinguish between—modes of exchange, let alone how to inhabit the one we so often invoke in our job titles. The word “gift” was everywhere. A moral and ethical understanding of what that truly means? Not so much.
This wasn’t just an oversight—it was a kind of workaround. By avoiding the question of modes, we shielded ourselves from confronting the moral unevenness within our systems. Some exchanges carry depth, memory, and mutual obligation. Others are thin, transactional, or purely symbolic. But because our language and metrics weren’t built to register those differences, we defaulted to treating them as equivalent. The result? A workaround that let us operate in borrowed logics while still claiming the language of the gift—without having to confront what that gift might actually require of us.
Moral philosopher and economic historian Karl Polanyi, writing in the 1940s, didn’t take shortcuts. He offered a framework that resists simplification—and helps us recover what our sector has often glossed over. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi argued that human societies organize economic life through three primary forms of integration: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange. These aren’t just technical arrangements. They reflect fundamentally different ways of understanding our obligations to one another. Reciprocity is the ethic of mutual responsibility—what we give based on relationship. Redistribution is the logic of the state—resources flowing through centralized authority. Exchange is the mechanism of the market—transactional and self-regulating. Polanyi wasn’t writing about nonprofits, but his framework maps directly onto the arrangements we know well: gift logic, tax logic, and market logic. The problem is, we like to blur the lines. And worse—we pretend we’re not.
Davis: The Lexicon of Exchange
In her book The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, historian Natalie Zemon Davis makes Polanyi’s forms of integration more intuitive and accessible by grounding them in the rhythms of everyday life. She identifies three corresponding modes of exchange that structured daily interactions: the gift, the sale, and coercion. Each, she explains, carried its own lexicon, rhythm, and emotional grammar. Gifts weren’t just economic gestures—they were cultural performances, acts laced with memory, meaning, and an expectation of future reciprocation. Sales were bounded exchanges—a sack of grain for a few coins. Coercion could be formal (like a tax) or informal (like deference to a landlord), but its defining feature was asymmetry: power over choice.
Each of these modes establishes the boundaries of a different social imaginary. Each one affords a different story about who we are to one another. Gift mode says, We are in this together. Sales mode says, We each got what we wanted. Coercive mode says, You owe me. These aren’t just different tools for organizing transactions—they are different ways of being with others. Each mode embeds a distinct moral vision, shaping what we expect, how we relate, and what kind of world we believe we’re building together.
Mauss: The Total Social Fact
If Polanyi and Davis help us grasp the various modes that structure our economic behavior, Marcel Mauss helps us understand why gift mode stands apart. In his 1925 essay The Gift, Mauss describes gift exchange as a “total social fact.” That phrase matters. He’s telling us that a gift isn’t just an economic gesture—it’s political, spiritual, emotional, legal, and moral all at once. The act of giving, receiving, and reciprocating doesn’t just facilitate exchange; it weaves together the very fabric of social life. A gift carries relationship. It carries memory. It carries obligation. When we treat it as anything less—when we reduce it to a transaction or a symbolic gesture—we don’t just misunderstand it. We distort it.
That distortion happens all the time in fundraising. We use the word gift to describe virtually any inflow of money—regardless of context, intent, or relational dynamic. But if we take Mauss seriously, we have to stop flattening the term. Not everything deserves to be called a gift. Like taxes or commodities, gifts belong to their own moral and ethical structure. They carry weight. They carry memory. And they place demands—on both sides.
For Mauss, a gift is only complete when all three parts are present: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. If any one of these is missing, it ceases to function as a true gift. And this is where the nonprofit sector, for all its language of generosity, often betrays the spirit of the gift. We expect donors to give. We make it easy to receive. But the third obligation—the duty to reciprocate, to engage, to be changed in return—is rarely taken seriously. In fact, many organizations have built entire models around minimizing that burden, reducing stewardship to little more than customer service.
Mauss would say that’s not just a betrayal—it’s unethical. To receive a gift without signaling its meaning, without affirming the relationship, without any willingness to give in return, is to rupture the social bond the gift was meant to create. And that rupture doesn’t go unnoticed. It’s what so many donors quietly sense: that their giving lives in a kind of limbo—not quite sales mode, but not truly gift mode either. They don’t expect a product. They don’t need a reward. But they do expect the relationship to be real—to be in sync with the meaning their gift was meant to carry.
To show up in gift mode, then, we have to restore the full architecture of the gift. That doesn’t mean manufacturing reciprocity or making promises we can’t keep. It means recognizing that when someone gives in good faith, they aren’t simply moving money—they’re making meaning. And if we fail to meet them in that meaning, we risk severing the tie that made it a gift in the first place.
But even with this moral and ethical structure in mind, one more variable complicates everything: money itself.
Zelizer: Earmarking Special Monies
If you’ve spent any time in professional fundraising or institutional philanthropy, you’ve likely encountered some version of the phrase “a gift is a gift.” It’s a close cousin of another assumption we’ve largely absorbed without question: a dollar is a dollar. Both expressions rely on the same flattening logic. They suggest that gifts—and money itself—are fungible, interchangeable, and value-neutral. But sociologist Viviana Zelizer spent decades proving otherwise. Money is not neutral. People don’t treat it as uniform. They mark it, distinguish it, and allocate it according to social and moral meaning.
In The Social Meaning of Money, sociologist Viviana Zelizer refers to this behavior as earmarking and calls these distinctions special monies. Think of the wedding fund that shouldn’t be touched for groceries, or the ten-dollar bill a grandparent gives with the instruction to “buy something just for you.” These aren’t just financial categories—they’re forms of relational accounting. What might otherwise appear indistinguishable takes on different meaning depending on the relationship, the context, and the intention behind it. In Zelizer’s framing, money isn’t neutral—it’s socially constructed and morally encoded.
The reality that human beings learn to earmark special monies almost as soon as they grasp what a dollar is should reshape how we understand donor behavior. Donors don’t relate to all gifts—or all dollars—the same way. Even when the amounts are identical, some gifts are marked with memory, commitment, or emotional weight. Others are set aside for causes that carry symbolic meaning. These distinctions rarely show up in a spreadsheet, but they shape the relationship all the same. Zelizer reminds us that meaning shows up in how money moves.
Most of us weren’t taught to see it that way. In fundraising, we learned to track revenue, not relationship. In philanthropy, we were trained to manage systems, not to notice the emotional meaning behind how people give. Either way, the texture of the gift was overlooked. Was the money freely given or subtly pressured? Was it shared between people or handled like a transaction? Was it tied to a story—or stripped of context? Money isn’t the enemy of the gift. But it can become one when we ignore these distinctions. When we do, we’re not just misreading our donors—we’re misreading the gift itself.
A Different Kind of Obligation
Once we recognize that gift mode is more than a posture—that it’s a distinct structure with its own logic—we face a deeper obligation. This isn’t just a strategic preference or a branding decision. It’s a moral stance. Each mode of exchange carries not only a social grammar, but an ethical framework: a set of expectations about what we owe each other and why.
Sales mode assumes we’re bargaining to arrive at mutual benefit. Coercive mode rests on hierarchy and the authority of enforcement. Gift mode demands something more elusive: a willingness to be in relationship, to receive as well as give, and to remain open to transformation. To invoke the gift without honoring that structure is not just a category error—it’s a form of betrayal.
If we continue to speak the language of the gift while structuring our systems around the values of the market and the state, we aren’t simply confused—we’re distorting the relationship itself. And sometimes, that distortion has been deliberate. It’s worth asking: in the evolution of our expertise, how often have we softened the demands of the gift precisely because they disrupt the logics we’re more comfortable with? Donors, whether they can name it or not, feel that dissonance. They recognize when the gift has been reduced to a commodity or a tax—when they are cast not as participants in a shared story, but as consumers or subjects. So if we’re going to claim the gift as our foundation, we have to ask: What does it truly require of us? And what does it mean when we fail to meet those terms?
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingThis is the second 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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