The Fundraising Effectiveness Project Doesn’t Study Grown-Up Giving
The numbers are in. The latest Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) report once again shows what most of us already suspect: donor counts are falling, retention rates are slipping, and the top slice of the donor base is doing more and more of the heavy lifting. The response is painfully familiar—more webinars, more worry, more pep talks about donor stewardship or improving the donor journey. But beneath all that noise is a deeper fear that sector leaders won’t say out loud: what if this isn’t just a downturn? What if the entire model of how we orchestrate and measure giving is no longer viable?
What the FEP reveals—without meaning to—is the growing instability of a fundraising system built on impulsive, consumer-like behavior. For decades, we’ve conditioned donors to respond to emotional storytelling, manufactured urgency, and instant gratification. And the FEP is designed to tell us how effectively that’s all working. It’s a running ledger of how many people responded to stimuli—not how many made thoughtful, intentional commitments rooted in trust. We used to panic once a year. Now it’s once a quarter. The pattern is so predictable, you’d think there was a conspiracy behind it.
The FEP tracks what’s easiest to count: how many donors gave, how much they gave, whether they came back, and what that means for the bottom line. Its data sources—pulled from the very CRM platforms whose backers support the project—offer a transactional snapshot of giving behavior across thousands of nonprofits. But that’s all it is: a snapshot of surface-level behavior. The FEP can tell you if someone gave again this year, but it can’t tell you why. It can’t tell you what kind of relationship existed between the donor and the organization. It can’t tell you whether that gift was thoughtful or impulsive, meaningful or performative. And, because it can’t see any of that, it assumes all giving is equal and all loss is bad.
But all giving isn’t equal. And not all donor loss is a sign of failure. If a nonprofit starts raising expectations—asking for multi-year commitments, prioritizing unrestricted gifts, inviting donors into deeper conversations—some donors will walk away. That’s not a crisis; that’s the price of building something better. But, because the FEP isn’t designed to track trust, patience, or intentionality, it can’t see the difference between healthy evolution and quiet collapse. It treats every donor departure as a warning sign, even when it might be evidence that the organization’s fundraising efforts are growing up.
Fundraising has always had a volume problem. When the numbers slip, the default response is to want more—more appeals, more campaigns, more automation, more touchpoints. The entire system is wired for more. But growing isn’t the same as growing up. In fact, it’s often the opposite. The kind of growth the sector actually needs—resilient, trust-based, sustainable—requires scaling down, not scaling up. It means replacing the dopamine of more conversions with the discipline of long-term relationship building. That’s not inefficiency; that’s maturity.
Growing up means shifting the definition of success. It means asking not just “Did they give?” but “What kind of decision did they make?” Was it a thoughtful act of alignment or a knee-jerk reaction to an urgent appeal? Did it deepen the relationship or just reset the transactional cycle? Serious fundraising isn’t built on volume alone. It’s built on the quality of expectations between the donor and the organization. The uncomfortable truth is that most fundraising cultures haven’t been designed to support that kind of depth. They’ve been built to reward speed, scale, and the appearance of generosity—because those are the only things we’ve known how to measure.
Warm glow—the emotional high of giving—has always been part of this story. It’s real, it’s human, and it’s especially powerful at the outset. But, over time, the sector made a strategic mistake: it stopped treating warm glow as a spark and started treating it as the whole fire. We trained donors to give in response to hype, countdowns, and crisis, real or perceived. We optimized for a feeling of generosity, not the substance of it. The result? A culture of giving that looks more like impulsive consumer behavior than serious civic commitment.
To be fair, warm glow isn’t the problem. The problem is that we’ve asked it to do too much. An emotional reaction—powerful though it may be—was never meant to carry the weight of long-term partnership. When we depend on it as our primary fuel, we get shallow relationships, embarrassing retention rates, and a constant need to recreate the same emotional drama. Donors get trained to seek out gratification, not responsibility. Fundraisers get trapped chasing sentiment instead of building trust. And when the feelings fade—as they always do—we scramble for the next story, the next match, the next artificial spark.
This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not just a fundraising problem—it’s a cultural one. Benjamin Barber warned years ago that modern consumer capitalism doesn’t engage us as mature citizens—it seeks to exploit our most impulsive, child-like behaviors. It trains adults to behave like consumers first and citizens second: chasing comfort, avoiding complexity, and expecting results without responsibility. Fundraising absorbed this logic wholesale. Donors were no longer seen as partners in change, but as targets to be nudged, scored, and converted. The job became triggering an impulsive reaction—not cultivating a meaningful relationship.
Guy Debord called it The Society of the Spectacle: a world where appearances replace reality, and performance stands in for substance. Fundraising didn’t just drift into spectacle—it sprinted. Urgency emails, feel-good campaigns, stylized impact reports—so much of what we now call “donor engagement” is theater. We perform care. We simulate trust. We sell solidarity as a brand. It looks like generosity; but it’s built for display, not durability. And the deeper cost of all this spectacle isn’t just donor fatigue. It’s the hollowing out of the very idea that the gift represents something more than a momentary emotional fix.
Every new crisis becomes the same old fundraising play. The language changes—“democracy is on the line,” “the planet is burning,” “rights are under attack”—but the tactics don’t. The call is always urgent, the solution is always money, and the donor is always cast as the hero in a drama written overnight. Even when the threat is real—and often it is—the response is performative. We recycle the same warm-glow tactics, the same countdowns, the same spectacle of crisis. And we wonder why donors burn out, tune out, or give less. It’s not that the crises aren’t convincing. It’s that the delivery no longer is.
The problem isn’t just emotional fatigue. It’s strategic incoherence. If every crisis is treated like a flash campaign, and every donor interaction is optimized for speed, we never invite people into anything deeper. The ask is always urgent, but never transformative. It keeps the giving shallow and the expectations low. And because it works—at least in the short term—we keep doing it. But long-term generosity can’t be built on panic and impulse. It requires space for deliberate decisions, shared responsibility, and mutual investment. That means changing the relationship. And changing the relationship means being willing to stop playing the same tired emotional script—even when the stakes are high.
If you raise your expectations, some donors will walk away. That’s not a failure—it’s a sign you’re growing up. Real generosity, the kind that sustains institutions and drives real change, asks more of people: more trust, more patience, more commitment, more willingness to give without needing a constant emotional payoff. And not everyone wants that. When an organization starts asking for unrestricted gifts, multi-year commitments, or honest engagement with complex missions, some donors will opt out. That’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s something to expect.
The sector teaches us to see donor attrition as a problem. But what if it’s a sign of strategic health? If you’re building a fundraising culture aimed at mature giving, you will shed impulsive, consumer-like behavior by design. And that means shedding some of the donors who depend on it. You’re not losing everyone—you’re losing the people who were never going to meet you in a deeper relationship. Let them go. Create space for the ones who will. We can’t keep measuring success by how many people we retain in a system that never asked them to grow.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project doesn’t study grown-up giving. It can’t. Its data model tracks giving as a behavioral pattern: number of gifts, frequency, recapture rates, average gift size. It pulls readily available data from donor databases and maps that information into dashboards. But those dashboards don’t tell us what kind of giving is taking place. They don’t tell us whether a donor gave out of trust or guilt, intention or impulse. They don’t distinguish between a thoughtful, unrestricted commitment and a panic-driven $50 gift in response to a countdown clock. It’s all just activity. And when activity declines, the system reads that as a problem—even when it might be the clearest evidence of progress.
That’s the trap. If a nonprofit starts to grow up—raising expectations, deepening conversations, slowing the churn—it will almost certainly see a dip in the very metrics the FEP is built to report. Fewer donors. Fewer gifts. Longer timelines. Shallower dashboards. From the FEP’s vantage point, that looks like failure. But from the inside, it may be the first real sign of progress.
This is why leadership matters. Nonprofit leaders can’t keep outsourcing the soul of their fundraising efforts to interpretations of data easily exported from their CRM. There’s a richer, more meaningful story to be understood—if we know what we’re looking for and take the time to find it. Leaders have to define what kind of giving they want to cultivate—and then live with the consequences. Grown-up giving doesn’t come from better tactics. It comes from better leadership. Leadership that’s willing to raise expectations, sit with discomfort, and build relationships that don’t need to be constantly re-performed. The future won’t be built by people trying to scale trust. It will be built by people willing to earn it.
And here’s the irony. If we actually started doing the work—maturing our fundraising cultures, raising expectations, deepening trust—how would the Fundraising Effectiveness Project even know? The early signs of real progress would register as decline. Because we’ve outsourced our understanding of generosity to a system that was never designed to recognize maturity. It can’t see trust. It can’t measure commitment. It can only count the churn. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project isn’t broken—it’s just not built to study the kind of giving we need. That part is up to us.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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Hey Jason, this is a really thoughtful critique, and as Chair of FEP, I felt compelled to respond.
I know we’ve had our tiffs in the past, but I’ve always appreciated the expansiveness and intention behind your work. While we may sit in different parts of the sector, I recognize that we often see different applications of resource allocation, and sometimes there’s real harm in how those decisions land. That’s part of what we’re trying to confront.
You’re right that FEP has historically been shaped by data providers like me. But that’s changing. The new governance model is putting power back in the hands of practitioners, not platforms. And while Lisa Greer isn’t a formal ambassador, we are also trying to listen deeply to philanthropists like her and to the 96.9% of donors who give under $5,000 each year through initiatives like the GivingPulse Survey from GivingTuesday Data Commons.
Where I diverge a bit from your framing is in how it can, maybe unintentionally, strip away the agency that everyday givers bring to the table. Generosity is a choice, not just a response. What we’re trying to do is understand that agency at scale, while fully acknowledging the limitations of the current format.
It reminds me of how we’ve approached big, messy problems in the past. The CCC didn’t just plant trees. It helped rebuild a sense of purpose through coordinated, community-driven investment. That spirit is what we’re trying to channel now. No better example than the dinner I facilitated last night, where folks across the generosity spectrum questioned the very language we’ve relied on for years. Jim Langley and others have long challenged us to rethink those assumptions, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
It may not move as fast as some would like, but there’s real change underway. And if there’s ever room to reconnect, I’d welcome the conversation.
Appreciate you putting this out there.
– Tim Sarrantonio