Major Giving Must Be Central

For decades, the nonprofit sector has relied on a fundraising model built for a different era—one defined by broad participation, institutional trust, and relatively low-cost donor acquisition. That model fueled extraordinary growth. It also shaped how organizations think about donors, success, and scale.

Today, the conditions that sustained it are changing.

Fewer households are giving. Donor retention has fallen to historic lows. The cost of acquiring new donors continues to rise, even as their long-term value declines. At the same time, giving is becoming increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of donors whose expectations are fundamentally different—more relational, more selective, and more oriented toward partnership than participation.

Most nonprofit leaders sense this shift. In a recent national study conducted by my firm, 94 percent of respondents said they believe their organization needs to make a fundamental change in fundraising strategy. Yet fewer than half report making meaningful progress toward that change.

This gap is not primarily a failure of effort or awareness. It is a failure of the operating model.

The dominant approach to fundraising still treats major giving as a specialized function—important, but separate—while the rest of the organization operates through mass, transactional systems optimized for volume. That structure no longer reflects the realities of today’s philanthropic landscape.

What is required now is not incremental improvement, but a fundamental redesign: a shift from treating major giving as a department to embracing it as the operating system for all fundraising.

The shift begins with understanding that this is not a tactic. It’s not a program. It’s a core operating system update that fundamentally reorients how your organization approaches fundraising. And when practiced with discipline and intentionality, it changes everything.

The following excerpt from A Better Way to Fundraise: Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor explores why this shift has become necessary—and what it means in practice.—Derrick Bakker

* * *

For decades, most organizations treated major giving as a specialty function: important but separate from the broader fundraising operation. A dedicated team manages a portfolio of top donors while the rest of the organization focuses on mass fundraising. Major gift officers work hard. They produce results. But they tend to be disconnected from how everyone else fundraises.

This structure made sense when the donor pyramid was broad at the base and narrow at the top. Major giving could be treated as a niche discipline—something you did for the top one percent.

That logic no longer holds. Here’s why.

Major Donors Are Driving an Increasingly Disproportionate Share of Impact

As we discussed in Chapter Two, upper-income households now represent a growing majority of charitable giving, a shift that reflects structural changes in the economy. Major donors aren’t just important—they are foundational to organizational sustainability. As reported earlier, middle-income donors typically accounted for approximately two-thirds of most organizations’ giving from individual donors, with major donors contributing the remaining one-third. Today, we are seeing that ratio flip: across the organizations our firm works with, we are now seeing the top 2-5% of donors contributing 50-70% of the total.

This shift is not temporary. It reflects structural changes in the economy that show no signs of reversing.

Organizations that fail to adapt to this reality will find themselves increasingly dependent on a shrinking base of habitual givers while watching their most promising prospects, those with both capacity and inclination, give elsewhere.

Younger Generations Give Like Major Donors—Even When They’re Not Wealthy Yet

In Chapter Two, we also touched on how relationship-based fundraising aligns naturally with how younger generations already give. We noted that while Millennials and Gen Z give less frequently and less predictably than previous generations, the way they give closely mirrors how major donors have always given. They are selective rather than habitual. They give in response to clear impact, authentic connection, and compelling purpose. They expect transparency, two-way communication, and a sense of partnership—not one-way solicitation.

In other words, younger donors don’t behave like traditional mass-market donors. They behave like major donors.

Organizations that try to engage younger audiences through transactional, broadcast-oriented fundraising will struggle to earn their trust.

That's not a prediction about the future – that’s a fact playing out in real time today.

According to aggregated data compiled by GitNux—an independent market research company—for most Millennials, their first gift is also their last: only about one-third give again; Gen Z donors churn at a staggering 60 percent rate. Research on Generational Giving by Qgiv, a fundraising software company that conducts annual donor surveys, points to the top reasons: lack of confidence in how donations are used, not feeling connected to the organization, and insufficient follow-up after donations are made.

These aren’t minor preferences—they’re deal-breakers.

In 2021, Fidelity Charitable conducted an influential Future of Philanthropy study, which revealed that two-thirds of Millennials track results for most or all the nonprofits they support, compared to just one in three Baby Boomers. Further, the study also pointed out that before making a gift, a majority of Gen Z donors conduct research—reviewing impact reports, media coverage, and social media—to ensure their donations will be put to good use. They expect transparency, and clear evidence of impact.

When organizations fail to deliver on these basics, younger donors simply walk away.

The Changing Nature of Partnership

Something fundamental is shifting in how people—particularly younger people—give today, and it’s rewriting the playbook for donor acquisition and cultivation.

A comprehensive 2019 Blackbaud study on generational giving patterns revealed a striking evolution. The Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers largely operated on trust alone—they gave because they believed in the mission and trusted organizations to use their gifts wisely.

But Millennials and Gen Z have fundamentally changed the equation. They want to “kick the tires” before they give. They want hands-on experience with the work. They want to feel heard and valued for more than just their financial capacity.

For many younger donors, volunteering isn’t a secondary form of engagement—it’s the primary pathway to giving.

This isn’t a preference to be dismissed. It’s a fundamental shift that renders traditional acquisition tactics largely ineffective with younger donors.

You can send all the direct mail you want. You can run sophisticated digital campaigns. You can craft compelling broadcast appeals. But if your model assumes people will give before they’re personally engaged, you’ll be invisible to Millennials and Gen Z.

The sequence has fundamentally reversed. The old pattern: give first, then get involved. The new pattern: get involved first, then give. Organizations that don’t adapt to this shift will find their donor bases aging out without replacement.

The implications are profound. As older generations age out of the donor file, they will not be replaced one-to-one by younger donors who give the same way. The future donor base will be smaller, more selective, more demanding, and far more relationship oriented.

This is not a crisis. It’s a clarifying reality. The future belongs to organizations that excel at relationship-based fundraising. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the only approach aligned with how the next generation of donors actually behaves.

There is a Better Way

At DickersonBakker, we call this approach a Better Way. What does a Better Way look like in practice?

It begins with strategic clarity—a comprehensive fundraising strategy that prioritizes relationships over transactions.

Organizations stop chasing the illusion of endless acquisition and start building systems designed for depth—understanding that sustainable growth comes not from adding more donors, but from keeping and elevating the ones you have. They shift focus from donor file size to donor retention. They move from celebrating gross revenue growth to pursuing net revenue maximization.

This requires a significant shift in organizational discipline.

For decades, nonprofit orthodoxy has insisted that healthy organizations must always be acquiring new donors—that without constant infusions of fresh names, the file will inevitably decline.

There’s truth to that logic in a mass-participation model. But when acquisition costs per donor are exceeding triple digits and first-year retention rates are dropping below 20 percent, the math breaks down entirely.

You cannot acquire your way to sustainability when you’re losing donors faster than you can replace them.

There’s an old business joke about an entrepreneur who says, “I know I’m losing money on every sale, but I'm making it up in volume!” The humor comes from recognizing the absurdity. The tragedy comes from living it.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the logic many nonprofits are following: spending more each year to acquire donors who won’t return, all while celebrating growth in donor file size. There’s only one way that story ends.

Organizations practicing a Better Way don’t abandon acquisition. But they recognize that sustainable growth comes from keeping donors, not just finding them.

They invest in the behaviors that build loyalty: consistent stewardship, meaningful communication, and invitations into partnership.

The data points in one clear direction: the future belongs to organizations that excel at major giving.

But if this is true, and the evidence is overwhelming, why aren’t more organizations already structured to do it well?

The answer begins with understanding what we mean when we say, “treat every donor like a major donor.”

Because that phrase can sound aspirational, even unrealistic. And if you hear it as “give every $50 donor the same personal attention you give a million-dollar prospect,” then yes, it’s absurd. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Let's start with what this is not.

It’s not about replicating one-to-one relationships at impossible scale. It’s not about assigning every donor a personal major gift officer or scheduling coffee meetings with thousands of people. It’s not about abandoning the tools and channels that reach broad audiences – direct mail, email, digital engagement. Those remain essential. It’s also not about pretending that a $100 donor and a $100,000 donor should receive identical treatment. Resources matter. Capacity matters. We live in the real world.

Then what are we talking about?

In essence, we’re talking about extending the behaviors—the core disciplines and instincts that major gift officers use with their top donors – to how you engage every donor, at every level of giving.

Think about how the best major gift officers approach their work. They don’t treat donors as transactions to be completed. They build relationships. They listen before they ask. They personalize every interaction. They steward carefully. They think long-term. They protect trust absolutely.

These aren’t behaviors that only work with wealthy donors. They’re behaviors that work with all donors. They’re simply what it looks like to treat people with dignity, respect, and genuine care.

The reason we haven’t practiced these behaviors at scale isn’t because donors at lower giving levels don’t want or deserve them. It’s because—until recently – the infrastructure didn't exist to make it economically feasible.

That constraint is dissolving.

I’ve been involved in fundraising for more than thirty-five years. I’ve watched technology advance throughout my career. But the pace of change over the past five years has exceeded everything that came before, and it’s accelerating.

What seemed impossible five years ago is commonplace today. What seems impossible today will likely be standard practice five years from now.

Technology, systems, and new thinking about organizational design are making it possible to practice relationship-based fundraising at scale in ways that weren’t possible even five years ago.

But before we talk about how to scale these behaviors—which we’ll explore in the next chapter—we need to understand what they are.