Charities Must Listen to Donors Who Decide to Quit Giving

To the Editor:

Charities need to pay closer attention to donors who stop giving, not simply because it makes good financial sense to do so but because it leads to greater organizational health.

My professional experience and research in this area lead me to expand upon two important points made in your article (“Returning to the Fold,” May 16), that charities need to better understand what motivates donors to stop giving and start earlier to win back lapsed donors. As fund raisers, we must learn to distinguish between donors who have faded away for any number of reasons and donors who mindfully stop giving. It doesn’t get us very far to think of the latter group as a subset of the former. Donors who withhold a contribution feel strongly motivated not to give and are quick to tell us so in communications they initiate through letters, e-mails, and phone calls. Meanwhile, donors whose contributions dry up over time lack the motivation to give; we try to restore their motivation by sending out marketing materials like those described in the article.

Donors who mindfully stop giving do not have idiosyncratic gripes nor are they responding to a perceived slight such as not receiving a thank-you note. Instead, they sense a profound dissonance between a charitable organization’s principles and practices. Because their grievances strike at the heart of what ethical leadership is about, they are far beyond the scope of what any nonprofit fund raiser can fix. As such, we find it easy to dismiss donors who choose not to give as the disaffected few when, in truth, our charitable organizations would be better served if we took a moment to listen to them. These activists are harbingers of change in the relationship between charities and donors; they provide early warning to charities straying from their mission; and, perhaps most important, they find other ways to give to the causes that matter to them.

The key to working with donors who mindfully stop giving is being responsive, not reactive. Our first impulse may be to trash an angry donor letter and hope it’s the last or, when there are many, to hunker down and ride out the turbulence. A far better strategy is to respond, resolve, and reevaluate. As uncomfortable as it may be for us, responding to angry donors gives them the simple dignity of being heard. As counterintuitive as it may seem, resolving tensions might require us to assist angry donors in finding other avenues to support a common cause. Finally, reevaluating the circumstances that led to an organizational rift with some donors may create new opportunities to strengthen bonds with all donors.

Using these proactive strategies effectively will require fund raisers to be trained in conflict resolution and mediation, a skill set not traditionally associated with nonprofit management. Such training becomes especially urgent when we take into account that organizational conflict, in its many forms, is often at the root of what alienates donors. In using these strategies we may not see a fast return to our organization’s financial bottom line, but we may forestall costly litigation or diffuse negative media attention, actions that in the big picture are of great value to the charities we serve.

Marjorie Hutter
Principal
CollegeConsumers
Amherst, Mass.