Aligning Our Consulting Practices with the Gift

Aug 01, 2025

The more I understand the logic of the gift—learning how to distinguish it from the commodity and the tax—the more I’ve asked myself whether I’m shooting myself in the foot. Am I undermining my own consulting opportunities, calling into question the very services I’m often hired to provide? Or am I simply challenging myself to deliver something more faithful, more aligned, and more honest?

Take the feasibility study, a staple of capital campaign planning. I’ve delivered on this service many times; yet, every time, I’ve been left with a sense that something wasn’t quite right. The process was sound. The report was thorough. The recommendations were well received. But, beneath the surface, something felt misaligned. We were claiming to listen but doing so behind closed doors. We were asking for generosity, but in a way that looked more like forecasting than invitation. We were facilitating discernment, but already knew the answer we hoped to hear.

This isn’t just about feasibility studies. It’s about the moral logic that guides how we listen, advise, and make decisions in the nonprofit sector. Consulting is often framed as values-driven and mission-aligned. Yet so many of its tools and techniques borrow uncritically from the logic of the market. We forecast, manage, and mitigate. We gather input, but often at a distance—outsourcing the conversation to protect the institution from discomfort.

I know I’m not the only one who has questioned how we offer these and similar services. I’ve wrestled with consulting colleagues many times over these kinds of questions. Many of us have asked whether our obligations are more than efficiency, predictability, and control. We’re asking—often implicitly—whether our services are truly aligned with the logic of the gift, or simply mimicking the logic we’ve borrowed from the marketplace.

The feasibility study is a telling case. Its name alone reveals its posture: feasibility—as if generosity is a question of operational capacity rather than relational readiness. The standard process involves anonymous interviews with major donors, analyzed by a third party, and compiled into a predictive report. It’s efficient, professional, data-informed, and almost entirely at odds with the ethic of the gift.

But does it have to be?

What follows is not a teardown of consulting or a rejection of structure. Instead, it’s a call to reimagine the consultant’s role through the lens of the gift—to ask what our practices would look like if we trusted relationship more than risk modeling; if we treated discernment as sacred; and if we showed up, not as experts, but as companions. This isn’t just about one service. It’s about recovering the soul of consulting in a sector that claims to be built on trust, generosity, and shared responsibility.

Two Moral Logics: Market vs. Gift

Every consulting practice operates within a logic. Not just a methodology or framework, but a deeper moral architecture—what Charles Taylor calls a “social imaginary”—that determines how we define value, relate to others, and imagine what is possible. For most of us working in the nonprofit sector, that logic has been borrowed thoughtlessly, not chosen deliberately. And most often, it’s the logic of the market.

In market logic, the consultant is a vendor. The institution is the client. The problem is defined in operational terms, and the solution is a deliverable. Value is measured in efficiency, scalability, and risk reduction. Listening becomes data collection. Relationships become pipelines. And the future is something to be predicted, controlled, or optimized.

In the logic of the gift, none of this holds. The consultant is not a vendor, but a companion. The institution is not a client, but a co-steward of something shared. The goal is not control, but discernment. The measure is not prediction, but presence. In gift logic, we act in relationship, not transaction. We ask not what will work, but what is right, needed, and worthy of trust.

This is not sentimentalism. The gift has its own rigor. But it is moral, not managerial. It demands fidelity, not performance. Where market logic isolates outcomes, gift logic restores context. It sees that generosity cannot be summoned through messaging alone—that it arises when people feel seen, respected, and invited into something real. If we believe the nonprofit sector is supposed to embody generosity, then the logic of the gift isn’t ancillary; it’s foundational. And it should shape how we consult, not just what we recommend.

The Purpose Beneath the Practice

When we inherit a model, we often inherit its assumptions. And, too often, consulting practices are built on assumptions that go unexamined: that institutional readiness can be measured by metrics, that financial capacity can be forecast, that dissent should be filtered for discretion, and that people give because the math works out.

But the deeper purpose of consulting—at least in the context of the gift—was never prediction. It was always discernment.

Discernment asks different questions: Are we asking for the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons? Have we built the relationships that would allow people to step forward freely? Are we listening with humility, or merely validating a course we’ve already chosen? These are not questions that lend themselves to dashboards. They require moral clarity, not just strategic alignment.

And that shifts the purpose of the consultant entirely. If the goal is no longer to control the outcome but to accompany a process of moral reflection, then our value isn’t in our deliverables—it’s in our posture. We’re not just helping institutions move forward. We’re helping them become trustworthy along the way.

Roles of the Gift-Aligned Consultant

If we take the ethic of the gift seriously—not as metaphor but as operating logic—then the role of the consultant changes entirely. We’re no longer delivering insight from a distance. We’re entering into relationship, into process, into uncertainty. We become not forecasters, but co-venturers. Not architects of control, but stewards of trust.

Here are five roles that begin to define what that looks like in practice.

1. Discernment Partner

This is the foundation. Before anything else, the gift-centered consultant helps the institution see more clearly: What truth are we avoiding? What tension are we managing instead of naming? Where are we asking for generosity without offering relationship in return? This is not market research; it’s moral accompaniment.

2. Accompanier

Discernment is not a one-time event. It’s a process—and often a painful one. Institutions that are ready to ask real questions often find themselves in vulnerable territory wrestling with trust gaps, leadership dynamics, and unspoken history. The gift-centered consultant doesn’t fix this. They walk with it. They stay present. They hold the space without rushing resolution.

3. Interpreter of Meaning

Much of what passes for resistance in a feasibility study is actually misalignment between story and structure. People don’t say “no” because they lack generosity; they say no because something doesn’t feel right or real. The consultant’s role here is to translate surface-level feedback into deeper meaning: What’s being revealed about how this community sees itself? What story is missing? What does this moment mean?

4. Holder of Boundaries

Every system has temptations. In campaign planning, the temptation is to manipulate, to pressure, to orchestrate outcomes. The gift cannot survive those moves. A gift-centered consultant names when the lines are being crossed—when invitation becomes coercion, when listening becomes surveillance, when discernment becomes spin. This isn’t about scolding. It’s about protecting the space where trust can live.

5. Witness

Sometimes the most powerful thing a consultant can do is to remember. To notice the moment when clarity arrives. To say aloud what was lost, or chosen, or released. The gift is often subtle—someone showing up differently, someone softening, someone taking responsibility. The witness helps hold the institutional memory of those moments and, in doing so, helps the institution remember what it is becoming.

These roles aren’t transactional. They’re formative. They don’t scale easily. But they’re the only roles that make sense when the work is grounded in trust, not control—in relationship, not performance. And they’re the roles that begin to restore integrity to the work we claim to be doing.

What This Means for Feasibility Studies

Nowhere is the disconnect between market logic and gift logic more obvious than in the capital campaign feasibility study. By design, the study promises institutional safety. It offers an air of objectivity, a buffer between leadership and donors, and a roadmap of projected giving capacity. But, beneath the spreadsheets and executive summaries, the process often betrays the very relationships the institution hopes to cultivate.

The standard model typically involves a consultant conducting confidential interviews with a handful of major donors. Their feedback is anonymized, coded, and abstracted into a final report. The goal is to assess whether the campaign is “feasible”—meaning, in practice, whether the money is there and whether the case for support is strong enough to secure it. At its most transactional, the feasibility study becomes an actuarial exercise: What’s the risk? What’s the return? How should we sequence the asks?

But here’s the problem: the gift doesn’t emerge under audit. It emerges under conditions of trust, presence, and mutuality. And the conventional feasibility study short-circuits all three. It replaces relationship with reconnaissance. It asks people to speak freely, but ensures they won’t be accountable for what they say. It invites feedback, but too often only to justify a plan that’s already in motion.

A gift-centered feasibility study would look different from the start. It would begin not with a campaign case, but with a posture of discernment. It would treat potential donors not as data points, but as participants in shaping the institution’s future. If interviews are facilitated by a consultant, they wouldn’t be anonymous—they would be relational. The institution would be present in the process, listening not just for pledges, but for patterns of trust, for signals of readiness, for signs of fatigue or disconnection.

The purpose wouldn’t be to “test the case.” It would be to ask: Is this the right vision, for this community, at this time? What needs to be clarified? What needs to be repaired? What are we being invited to notice, to honor, to let go of before we ask others to give?

It might be slower. It might feel less controlled. But it would be honest. And, more than that, it would be aligned with the very thing we say we value: a culture of generosity rooted in trust.

The Gift in the Room

The ethic of the gift is demanding. It doesn’t just call on donors to be generous; it calls on institutions to be trustworthy. And it calls on consultants to decide what role we are really playing. Are we helping organizations extract resources, or are we helping them grow into their values?

That question doesn’t get answered in our pitch decks. It gets answered in how we listen. In what we protect. In how we show up when the conversation turns hard or honest. It gets answered in whether we’re willing to tell the truth even when the client isn’t ready to hear it. And it gets answered in whether we trust that discernment itself is valuable, even when the answer is “not yet.”

The feasibility study may be a small part of the larger consulting landscape, but it’s a revealing one. It asks us to name what we believe about generosity: Is it something we can predict, or something we must invite? Is it a transaction to be managed, or a relationship to be tended? If we say we believe in the gift, then our methods—especially the ones we sell—need to reflect that belief.

Because, in the end, generosity doesn’t respond to polish. It responds to presence. And someone has to help the institution remember what it feels like when trust is real; when discernment is mutual; and when the ask arises, not from strategy, but from shared responsibility.

That’s what we’re in the room to do: not to test for feasibility, but to bear witness to readiness.

Jason Lewis

, Founder, Responsive Fundraising