Welcome to this four-part blog series exploring how fundraisers can create more meaningful, sustainable relationships with donors.
We would like to first acknowledge and express our deep gratitude for Anne and Tony. Their big-hearted kindness has made this research possible. So, I would like to honor their love in humanity by sharing with you a greeting from Anne:
“Honesty is more costly than gold. Love is more costly than money. I wish you the most beautiful journey of philanthropy where the love of humanity makes our hearts the safest and happiest place to home this world.”
I hope you all have as beautiful an experience of philanthropy as I have had through this research.
We are also ever grateful to the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy, who generously funded a video series on our book, Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving.
Like many effective nonprofits, at the Institute, we would like to define when we can cease to exist. And for us, it is when each act of giving is so deeply meaningful that it propels the next, making giving sustainable throughout a person's life.
If that's the kind of philanthropy you would like to create in this world, then this blog series is for you.
The research underpinning our work in meaningful philanthropy involved interviews with 48 high- and ultra-high-net-worth individuals across five continents and 10 time zones. The findings provide a roadmap showing where philanthropists begin, how they choose their direction, and what sustains their giving.
This first blog in this series focuses on the difference between impact and meaning.
Impact is the external effect of a gift, for example, reducing childhood malnutrition, rescuing an animal, or funding cancer treatment.
Meaning is how a person makes sense of that impact in their own lives: what the gift says about their identity, values, relationships, and purpose. Meaning is not experienced only at the end of a project; it can emerge throughout the journey of giving.
Over this blog series, we hope to show you how to move beyond fostering surface-level giving by moving the conversation from impact created from others to meaning generated for oneself.
This requires understanding donor psychological well-being and identities, listening to how they describe themselves and recognizing the values they express through philanthropy. This learning then can be translated into a road map towards a language of meaning you can use in your donor communications.
Here are two key learnings from the first of our four-part learning journey:
Meaning as an Element of Well-Being
Meaning is the result of making sense of something, what it signifies to an individual. Meaningfulness is the degree of significance it holds for that person.
A statistic such as “160 million children are stunted because they lack adequate nutrition during the first 1,000 days of life” describes impact. Meaning emerges when a donor connects that fact to their own experience, perhaps thinking, “My parents had enough food at home, so I was not stunted.” The donor is then interpreting the issue through personal history, values, and identity.
Different organizations can communicate the same distinction:
An opera house might describe its impact as making great opera possible. A donor’s meaning might be, “I love opera like a sunflower loves the sun.”
A children’s hospital may ask supporters to make an impact and help beat childhood cancer. For a bereaved parent, giving may provide a meaningful way to remain connected to a child who died from cancer and to continue putting that child first. For example. ‘Giving to this organization is the only way possible for me to feel complete, as a mother, after I lost my 5-year-old to cancer.’
A faith-based rescue organization may describe its impact as saving lives, souls, and changing futures. Its meaning may lie in transforming personal helplessness into action after witnessing genocide. “When the founder witnessed the results of the genocide in South Sudan firsthand and knew at that moment that “doing nothing” was not an option. His helplessness turned into action.”
An animal-welfare charity may ask supporters to provide relief and care. The associated meaning might be, “Love found will never end.”
These examples show that a gift can produce external change while also helping donors live out their own values, relationships, and sense of purpose.
In part one of this four-part learning journey, reviewers will learn how to recognise the difference between impact and meaningful philanthropy and how to recognise them in their own organizations.
You can sign up to this learning journey and access the full content here. It includes around four hours of learning: 155 minutes of video lectures and 85 minutes of self-guided exercises.
Prof. Jen Shang