In Praise of the Donor -- Donor Motivation, Donor Retention, and Three Development Practices to Adopt
By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPAAuthor, The Nonprofit Fundraising Solution | Former Faculty, NYU Heyman Center for Philanthropy, School of Professional Studies
Executive Summary
Giving is an act of kindness — and understanding what that means at the deepest level will change how your development team treats donors. This post traces the original meanings of charity, kindness, and philanthropy, draws on a 12th-century philosopher's framework for understanding why some giving is more noble than others, and arrives at three specific practices your development program can adopt today.
Oseola McCarty was born in 1908 in Shubuta, Mississippi. She quit school in the sixth grade to care for her ailing aunt and never went back. She took in other people's laundry and ironing for seventy years, depositing coins from her work since the age of eight. By the time arthritis forced her to retire at 86, she had saved $280,000. In 1995 she donated $150,000 of it to the University of Southern Mississippi. She told the Los Angeles Times two years later why: "They used to not let colored people go out there, but now they do, and I think they should have it. I just want the scholarship to go to some child who needs it. I'm too old to get an education, but they can." She walked onto that campus for the first time in August 1995 — having lived just blocks from it her entire adult life, having once been legally barred from it — and received a standing ovation from over 1,000 people. She said afterward: "I don't regret one penny I gave. I just wish I had more to give." She died in 1999 at age 91, having received the Presidential Citizens Medal — the nation's second highest civilian award. The scholarship endowment she began has now reached $1 million.
You will benefit to consider what Ms. McCarty was actually doing when she wrote that check, as you read my thoughts. I end with three practices your development team can adopt as a result.
What Charity, Kindness, and Philanthropy Actually Mean
Giving is, at its root, an act of kindness. That observation sounds simple until you recover what the words actually meant before the sector wore them smooth with repetition.
Charity comes from the Latin caritas — dearness, costliness, esteem, affection. The Vulgate — the 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible produced by St. Jerome, still used by the Catholic Church — used caritas to translate the Greek agape, the highest form of love, the love of humanity. St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian whom the Catholic Church recognizes as a Doctor of the Church — meaning a teacher of singular authority and importance — called charity the most excellent of the virtues. Long before charity meant a donation, it meant something held dear.
Kindness comes from the Old English kyndnes, rooted in the idea of shared origin — the feeling that naturally arises between people of the same family or community. Its earliest sense was the warmth one feels for one's own relatives. What we now call kindness is that warmth extended deliberately to strangers — a reaching outward from the intimate circle of those we love toward people we have never met and may never meet.
Philanthropy comes from the Greek philanthropia — a combining of philos (loving) and anthropos (humankind). The 1762 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française defined a philanthropist as "an individual who, by a natural disposition and kindness, is prone to love every human being." Not a wealthy person with a foundation. Anyone prone to love every human being.
When Oseola McCarty gave $150,000 to students she would never know — students at an institution that had once barred her — she was not being generous in the casual sense the word has acquired. She was holding something dear. She was extending family warmth to strangers. She was expressing what the ancient Greeks considered the defining quality of a fully developed person. The sector uses these words every day. It less often considers what they mean about the people they describe. Those etymologies also point toward a question the sector almost never asks about its donors: why do they do it at all?
Rambam's Ladder — What a 12th-Century Philosopher Knew About Donor Motivation
Julie Salamon — bestselling author and former New York Times culture writer, based in New York City — opened her 2003 book Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give (Workman Publishing) with a sentence that has stayed with me: "We spend a lot of time thinking about why people are bad. Just as perplexing, maybe more perplexing, is why they are good."
That question — why people are good — is one the nonprofit sector almost never asks about its donors. We ask how much they can give, how recently they gave, whether they have lapsed. The inner life of the donor, the motivation and meaning they attach to the act, rarely enters the conversation. Salamon's book offers a framework for exactly that, drawn from one of the most rigorous moral thinkers in history.
Rabbi Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides, 1138–1204, known to Hebrew scholars as Rambam — was a physician, philosopher, and one of the most important figures in Jewish intellectual history. In his Mishneh Torah, he outlined eight levels of tzedakah, the Hebrew word for charity, whose root tzedek means justice or righteousness rather than generosity. The distinction matters: tzedakah is not optional. It is an obligation of justice owed to the community. By this framing, donors are not being unusually good. They are fulfilling a duty most people avoid.
Maimonides organized the eight levels from lowest to most noble:
Giving grudgingly, with unhappiness
Giving less than one should, but doing so cheerfully
Giving directly to a poor person after being asked
Giving directly to a poor person before being asked
The recipient knows the donor, but the donor does not know the recipient
The donor knows the recipient, but the recipient does not know the donor
Neither donor nor recipient knows the other — fully anonymous giving
The highest: helping a person become self-sufficient through a gift, a loan, a partnership, or employment — so they no longer need charity at all
What rises through those levels is not the amount given. It is the dignity preserved in the giving — and the degree to which the donor's ego is absent from the act. Oseola McCarty's scholarship sits near the top: she gave to students she would never know, to enable their self-sufficiency, from a life of labor she never publicized. She was not giving to be seen. She was giving because her own father could not read, and she understood from that particular ache what education costs when it is denied.
Salamon's book navigates three questions that every donor wrestles with privately — how much to give, whether to give anonymously, and how to know if gifts are being used wisely. Read those three questions from the organization's side and they become development practices — which is exactly where this framework leads.
Three Development Practices to Adopt
Treat the acknowledgment as a human act, not a compliance function.
The receipt satisfies a legal obligation. It does not honor what the donor did. A form letter arriving three weeks after a gift, addressed to "Dear Friend," with a typo in the donor's name, communicates that the organization did not notice. The genuine acknowledgment — a phone call, a handwritten note, a personal follow-up from someone who actually knows the donor — recognizes a person fulfilling an obligation of justice. Development teams that treat acknowledgment as a compliance function are missing the relationship the donor came for.
One addition to your acknowledgment letter will go far in learning more about your donors and deepening that relationship. Include this question: "We think we'd benefit from learning more about why you give to us. What inspired you to choose us? Would you email me your thoughts about that, or, if you're inclined, may we set a time for a call?" The answers will teach you more about donor motivation than any survey you will commission.
Make anonymous giving a first-class option.
Maimonides ranks anonymous giving as the second highest level of tzedakah. Many development programs make it functionally awkward — the donor provides their name for the receipt, appears on the donor list unless they actively opt out, and sees "Anonymous" on the annual report as an afterthought. A program that genuinely honors the philosophy of giving would make anonymous giving easy, clearly offered, and honored without follow-up pressure. When a donor chooses not to be named, they are practicing one of the highest forms of the act. The organization's response should reflect that.
Acknowledge the long-tenured small donor as deliberately as the major donor.
The donor who has given $25 a year for fifteen years is fulfilling an obligation of justice — regardless of the amount, regardless of whether they were cheerful about it. The annual report that lists names above $1,000 and ignores everyone below communicates a hierarchy that Maimonides' ladder does not support. A personal acknowledgment — not a form letter — for every donor whose consecutive years of giving reaches five, seven, or ten, regardless of gift size, is a practice worth building. Loyalty is the signal. It deserves recognition that reflects how much it is actually worth to the organization's revenue stability.
The University of Southern Mississippi named a residence hall after her. She received an honorary doctorate. Oprah Winfrey gave her a standing ovation on national television. She used some of her remaining savings to take her first trip to Niagara Falls. She said she had always wanted to see it.
She gave to a university that had once barred her, for students she would never know, from an account she had been filling since childhood. The sector calls what she did charity, kindness, and philanthropy. She called it doing something about it.
For a deeper look at how understanding donor motivation shapes major gift cultivation and stewardship, the Major Gifts white paper at laurencepagnoni.com goes into the full framework.
→ Read it at laurencepagnoni.com: Major Gifts: How to Identify, Cultivate, and Steward the Donors Who Matter Most
Has this framework changed how you think about your donors — or about your acknowledgment practices? Share your experience in the comments section of the website.
This post is offered freely for educational purposes. Please share it with development directors, executive directors, and board members who may find it useful — provided the author's byline remains intact: By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA. For more on nonprofit fundraising, governance, and strategy, visit laurencepagnoni.com.
