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From “Giving To” to “Giving Through”: The Great Philanthropic Shift
In 2007, after listening to a lot of donors and conducting a lot of research, I advised, “Don’t just ask you donors to give to your organization, show them how they can give through it to achieve a significant, sustainable societal impact.”
In hundreds of presentations, workshops, speeches and blogs, I repeated the point. I thought it was that important. I’d further emphasize the point by saying, “If you take away just one thing from this conference…”
It caught on because it crystalized what many in frontline fundraising positions were seeing – “Show me the impact.” . It became shortened to just “give through.”
While the concept is much more widely grasped, the implementation of it is very uneven. Many organizations default to strategic pillars or broad organizing themes, accepting the short-term tradeoff of “some money now” at the expense of sub-optimizing giving potential and donor loss.
The great challenge is to convert those themes into:
Inspiring
Implementable
Investable
Increments
We will qualify for fewer and fewer contributions until we better demonstrate how we intend to contribute to community, country, cause or human condition.
The chart below is designed to help organizations understand what the transition entails.
Jim Langley is the president of Langley Innovations. Langley Innovations provides a range of services to its clients to help them understand the cultural underpinnings of philanthropy and the psychology of donors and, with that knowledge, to develop the most effective strategies and tactics to build broader and more lasting communities of support. Jim has authored numerous books including his most recent book, The Future of Fundraising: Adapting to New Philanthropic Realities, published by Academic Impressions in 2020.
Related Resources:
- Webinar: 4-Step Process for “Reimagining Fundraising Operations”
- Fundraising Success: Leveraging Your Value Propositions
- Fundraising Impact Questions that Define Victory for Donors
- How to help your donors score a victory and make an impact
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Feeling like your job is getting harder because donor expectations have changed and competition for the charitable dollar is growing?
Finding that the old orthodoxies and conventions espoused by so-called experts in online echo-chambers and at conferences don’t work anymore?
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Then this book is for you.
Engagement Fundraising was developed from the perspective of a donor who discovered firsthand that the impersonal, spray-and-pray approaches of his beloved charity were not only offensive but also wasteful and ineffective. So he took action. And now, you can too.
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