Make it Transformational: A Blog for Champion Discipleship

Yes, donors grow tired--but not of giving. Giving builds people up. It turns on our passion juices and makes us better people. Giving produces joy and a deep sense of meaning and satisfaction. But, if giving is so good for us what makes donors stop giving?

Rebecca Ruby notes that people stop giving because they are not fatigued but they are tired of being poorly treated by the nonprofit. Instead of treating them as a donor who  matters, nonprofits treat them as ATMs and flood them with a deluge of appeal letters and requests. They receive an impersonal note and a request for more money, negating the joy of giving and creating one time givers, not recurring givers. Likewise, the 2008 Bank of America Study of High Net-Worth Philanthropy notes the main reason people stop giving is that they don’t feel connected to the ministry. It’s not a donor issue, it is a ministry connection issue that slows or stops donors.

These donors who disconnect are not suffering from donor fatigue. They suffer from Philentropy.

What is Philentropy? Philos is love, and entropy is the law that all things decay, move from order to disorder, or breakdown and decline.

Philentropy is when love for giving suffers because of disorder, decay and systems breaking down instead of producing donors who are connected to the cause.

Nonprofits incorrectly believe that their fundraising systems and moves plans for each donor are all they need for success, but especially in this down economy, we are seeing disconnected and poorly connected donors disappear. The nonprofits never helped these donors connect with the cause. Now philentropy coupled with a down economy is ravaging the nonprofit bottom line.

As nonprofits, we unwittingly foster philentropy in how we interact with donors. How do we do this? 

• We treat giving as a transaction rather than a heart issue.
• We struggle to connect with donors through moves as traditional moves don’t connect people deeper into the cause.
• Our newsletters usually talk about our ministry, not the donor’s ministry. This classic “them and us” language causes “them” to feel disconnected.
• Our newsletter is inwardly focused on our programs, our office supply needs, or other trivial issues rather than vision or cause related stories that feed a donor’s hunger to have meaning and connection.
• We use guilt motivation and persuasion to try to touch people at the heart level, but these results in donors who may give once but end up feeling mistreated rather than connected.
• We don’t let donors get their hands dirty. Giving is so much more than cutting a check. You want the hand that writes the check to join the cause, or you are only chasing money.

As nonprofits, we have to fight against philentropy.