When Fundraising Lost the Plot
I just spent twenty-four hours watching a gaggle of direct response professionals have an existential crisis over a critique that, admittedly, wasn’t even all that original.
It wasn’t new. The critique basically pulled together what scholars have been saying for years about decisions our sector made decades ago—what’s shown up in the New York Times, in white papers, in books from major publishers. But bringing the critique closer to home clearly struck a nerve.
I’ve written plenty of critiques about the state of fundraising—about how we’ve turned generosity into a managed pipeline, how we’ve confused optimization for ethics, and how we’ve let the market and bureaucracy hijack the gift. But this not-so-original critique of direct mail set off something different. What followed wasn’t just disagreement. It was grief, defensiveness, denial, projection. And, underneath all of it, fear — fear that, if the tactics no longer work, maybe the identity built around them doesn’t either.
And that fear is not unfounded. Because, when fundraising begins to unravel, it’s not just strategy that comes into question; it’s ethics. It’s the deeper foundation. It’s the story we tell ourselves about what we’re doing and why it matters. And, right now, I’m not sure we have one.
So here’s where I think we are.
I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the signs: the defensiveness, the rationalizations, the insistence that nothing’s wrong despite all the evidence to the contrary. Study after study, headline after headline, tells us that fewer than half of Americans give now. Yet we’re still pretending this decline has nothing to do with our own choices. I’ve watched colleagues cling desperately to systems that no longer work while for-profit companies roll out new tools that don’t actually correct course; they just double down on the assumptions that got us here. I’ve watched fundraisers leave their roles burned out and disillusioned only to return as consultants selling back the same frameworks that didn’t serve them in the first place. The system is exhausted. But we keep pretending it’s fine.
At the core of that exhaustion is a betrayal not just of strategy, but of the gift itself. The gift is one of the only human exchanges that isn’t coercive or competitive. Yet we’ve distorted it to fit the demands of a system that exploits relationship, commodifies cause, and turns generosity into a data point to be mined and resold. What was once sacred has become speculative inventory for analytics firms. Somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether we were protecting the gift and started asking whether we were hitting benchmarks.
And I still can’t quite name where we lost our way the most. Was it when we filled inboxes and mailboxes with indistinguishable appeals, all engineered for conversion? Was it when we started assigning scores to donors like credit checks — as if that’s how generosity naturally moves through a society? Or was it when we normalized hoarding billions in endowments, justified by a fear that spending too much might mean losing control of the narrative around social change? Honestly, it’s probably all of it. The fact that we’ve made peace with any of this is proof enough of how far we’ve drifted.
There have been moments—undeniable ones—when I knew we’d gone too far. I remember the Olive Cooke tragedy, and how it exposed the predatory underbelly of our profession. I remember when a wealthy donor felt so entitled that he sexually harassed my colleague—treating the relationship as nothing more than a transaction he believed he controlled. I remember the early days of the pandemic, when nonprofits doing the most essential work were the first to lay off staff—revealing just how fragile and hollow our funding structures really are. And I remember, more recently, watching the president of one of the largest foundations on the planet publicly applaud himself for raising their payout rate from five to six percent—as if one extra percent, while billions remain untouched, should earn a standing ovation.
These aren’t footnotes. These are red flags.
Yet the question we rarely ask is: who actually benefits from the system we’ve created? It’s not the communities we serve. It’s not our staff. It’s the profit-making firms that sell us the illusion of predictability, efficiency, and control—as if those are the moral ends of fundraising and what generosity needs. They profit from our anxiety. They package our fears as solutions. And we let them because we’ve stopped believing there’s another way.
What gets lost in that arrangement is relationship—the real kind: the kind that happens when two people sit down without an agenda and actually listen; the kind that allows for surprise, for spontaneity, for care. We’ve engineered that out of the process. In its place, we’ve installed systems built to manage outcomes, not cultivate connection. And we wonder why people don’t trust us. We wonder why donors disappear.
Our language gives it away. We don’t talk about gifts anymore. We talk about transactions, targets, segments, upgrades. We don’t describe our donors as citizens or co-participants in a shared civic life. We treat them like consumers. And then we complain about low retention. But what exactly are we asking them to return to?
Because we lack ethical mooring, we borrow. From the market, we borrow the logic of data. From the bureaucracy, we borrow the logic of rules. But data tells us what’s measurable, not what’s meaningful. Rules tell us what’s allowed, not what’s right. Neither framework is equipped to govern generosity. And, when we lean on them too heavily, we forget how to discern. We forget how to trust.
And, if you listen carefully to those who’ve been in this field longer than I have, you’ll hear something telling. You’ll hear weariness, but also nostalgia — a longing for a time when the work felt more grounded, more relational, less extractive. I don’t blame them for holding on to that memory. But memory alone won’t help us now. We have to name what’s changed. We have to name what we’ve lost.
I still believe there’s hope. I see it in the $25 monthly donor to the local food bank. I see it in people like Ruth Gottesman who gave $1 billion to make medical school tuition-free at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. That gift didn’t just move money. It moved through relationship: from her late husband, to her, to the university, to its students. It reflected care, history, trust. There were no naming rights or self-congratulation. It was just a gift, moving freely. That’s the kind of generosity we still long for. It’s still possible.
We can course correct. We can salvage much of what we know, but only if we’re willing to anchor our practice in the logic of the gift—not the market, not the bureaucracy. The gift is wild. It doesn’t obey funnels or flows. But it does respond to relationship. We can still use mail; email; and, yes, even metrics. But we have to approach them more humbly, less extractive, more authentically.
That kind of fundraising would ask something of us. It would demand real relationships—not on our terms, and not through roles that cast the donor as either a consumer or a subject. One is transactional; the other, paternalistic. But both are extractive. Both deny the mutuality the gift requires. A practice rooted in the gift would insist on shared terms—reciprocal, relational, capable of making citizens out of all of us. It would mean letting the gift move when and where it wants—not when the system permits it. And what we’d receive in return wouldn’t be a cleaner dashboard. It would be something far more valuable: an authentic community, lived and enjoyed, that emerges from the gift itself.
-
, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting 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.
Upcoming Events
Free Webinars
Responsive Fundraising’s First Sensemaking Framework. TBD.
Speaking Engagements
Bridge of Hope National Conference, Lancaster, PA, Thursday, October 2.