Donors don’t care about philanthropy. They care about doing good.
Every strategic plan in this sector says it wants to build a “culture of philanthropy.” Almost none of them can say what that means. Ask five development directors and you’ll get five different answers, each vaguer than the last: buy-in, board engagement, a mindset, a shared value. The term has survived for decades not because it describes something real, but because it sounds like it should. A board can vote to prioritize a culture of philanthropy in an afternoon. Building a real relationship with one donor takes years. A vote doesn’t do any of that work for you.
Ask what people actually mean by it, and the answer is always some version of the same idea: everyone on staff believing in the mission enough to treat fundraising as everyone’s job, and donors feeling bound to that belief the way staff do. It’s a fine idea for a staff meeting. Donors do feel connected to a mission — plenty of them, deeply. They just don’t get there through a vague, fancy phrase. They get there by seeing what their gift did. That’s the real problem underneath the vagueness: the phrase describes a feeling an organization wants credit for, without doing the work that actually produces it.
Here’s the argument: there is no culture of philanthropy. There are only two real cultures an organization can run on with its donors — entitlement or engagement — and every organization already is one or the other, whether anyone there has ever named it. Naming which one actually describes your organization is uncomfortable. Not naming it is what “culture of philanthropy” is for.
Consultants like it because it dignifies the work; it turns asking people for money into stewardship of a “culture.” Boards like it because they can nod along to something abstract instead of naming which of the two cultures they’re actually running. Executive directors like it because it sounds like leadership rather than a line item. Nobody who has ever actually written a check has used the phrase.
You’ll even find it in job postings: “proven track record of building a culture of philanthropy,” listed as a qualification, right below the revenue target. But a job posting for a real skill says exactly what the person will do: write grants, manage a portfolio, run events. This one doesn’t say anything, because there isn’t anything specific to say.
A board’s vote works the same way. It can vote to build a culture of philanthropy this year, and nothing has to change on Monday. No one can point to what the vote required, because the vote never required anything.
That’s the gap entitlement lives in. When nothing is required, nothing is usually what happens. No follow-up. No report. No relationship built on purpose. That’s entitlement, playing out exactly as it always does: the assumption that people will keep giving simply because the organization exists and the cause is good. It isn’t a value anyone would write down, and no one would defend it in a board meeting, but it shows up anyway — in the annual appeal that never mentions what last year’s gift did, in the major donor who calls to ask how a program went and gets a form letter back, in gratitude treated as a nice extra instead of the job itself. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts a number on what that costs: overall donor retention under half every year, first-time donor retention nearer one in five.
Entitlement isn’t the only option, and it isn’t inevitable. The other real culture is engagement: a donor who can see plainly what her gift did, gets asked what she thinks and sees that answer actually used, and recognizes herself as part of the plan instead of a source of funding for it. That means writing down what she cares about somewhere it will actually get used — that’s what a CRM is for. It means a report that names the specific thing her gift paid for, not a generic thank-you that could have gone to anyone. And it isn’t only the fundraiser’s culture to carry. The case manager, the program coordinator, whoever answers the phone — any of them can tell a donor exactly where her gift went and what it did, because that’s simply what’s true, and everyone there knows it.
Picture two donors who each give the same amount this year, to two different organizations. The first hears nothing until the next appeal, which opens by thanking her for her continued generosity and asks for more. She’s left to assume the money landed somewhere useful, because no one ever told her otherwise — and assumption is a thin thing to build a second gift on. The second gets a short note a few months later, naming the specific thing her gift paid for, and a simple question about what she’d like to hear about next. Nothing about the second organization required a bigger budget or a fancier system. It required someone deciding that telling her was part of the job, not an extra.
A board that says “we need a stronger culture of philanthropy” isn’t making a diagnosis. It’s doing the very thing entitlement does: assuming a vague intention will produce a result that only specific, repeated action can. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the same assumption, aimed inward instead of outward.
That gap only looks complicated from a distance. Researchers can’t agree on the mechanism — whether a thank-you call itself moves the needle — but that disagreement is a distraction from the one thing not in dispute. For twenty years, fundraisers have cited Penelope Burk’s finding that a thank-you call within 48 hours produced a measurably larger next gift. In 2023, researchers Anya Samek and Chuck Longfield ran a peer-reviewed study of half a million donors, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and found no such effect from the call itself. But both lines of research agree on the actual cause of attrition, and it has nothing to do with phone calls. In Burk’s own survey of why donors stop giving, the single biggest reason wasn’t over-solicitation or a bad economy. It was donors not knowing whether the gift they already made had accomplished anything. Strip the phone call out, and that’s entitlement again, showing up in the data: give, and hear nothing.
Reverse that, and you get engagement: not any one tactic, but the discipline of telling a donor, in whatever form actually fits, what her gift did, and asking what she wants to see next. Organizations that treat that as optional are running an entitlement culture, whether or not anyone there would use the word. Organizations that treat it as the job keep donors the first group loses.
Staff who weren’t hired to be fundraisers don’t need training for this. A case manager doesn’t need a script to tell a donor that a family found housing, or that the pantry stayed open three extra days because of a specific gift — she already knows it, because she watched it happen. A front-desk volunteer mentioning that the waiting room was full all week is doing more for engagement than most strategic plans manage to describe. None of it is a special skill. It’s the truth of the work, said out loud to the person who paid for it.
A real culture of engagement doesn’t ask those staff to become someone else. It only asks them to say what’s already true, and asks the organization to make sure that truth gets back to the donor who funded it.
That’s the whole choice: entitlement or engagement, decided or not, gift by gift. “Culture of philanthropy” never named a third option. It was always just the sound of nobody deciding.