TL;DR
- Giving is in a structural shift. Donor behavior has fundamentally changed, and working harder inside the old model can’t fix it.
- Treating every donor like a major donor is a mindset. It means extending relational behaviors across the whole donor base instead of reserving them for the top slice.
- 94% of nonprofit leaders agree that fundraising has to change. Yet close to seven in ten say change isn’t happening at their organization.
- 7 behaviors make relational fundraising work, starting with listening to individual donors and making gratitude meaningful.
- AI’s job is scale, never the relationship itself. Use it to know your donors better, and keep humans in the connection.
The numbers on your dashboard might still look fine.
But the work feels harder than it used to.
Retention keeps sliding, more of your revenue rides on fewer donors, and the people you’re writing to feel further away every year. If you’ve sensed that something deeper is off, you’re reading the moment correctly.
That’s the subject of a recent episode of The Responsive Lab, where hosts Scott Holthaus and Carly Berna talked with Derric Bakker, CEO of DickersonBakker and author of A Better Way to Fundraise: Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor. With more than three decades in fundraising as a practitioner, consultant, and agency leader, he’s watched the sector’s old playbook stop producing, and he’s built a case for what should replace it. The conversation covered why fundraising feels broken, what relational fundraising looks like in practice, and where AI fits without wrecking the human connection.
Why Fundraising Feels Harder Than It Used To
Nonprofit leaders are good at managing ebbs and flows. The sector has trained generations of fundraisers to gut it through downturns: work harder, do more, wait for the cycle to turn.
This time the cycle isn’t turning, because it isn’t a cycle. The data points to a structural, fundamental shift in how giving works in this country, the kind you can’t out-wait or out-hustle.
Two trends define it. First, giving keeps concentrating at the top, with major donors now accounting for the largest share of revenue in aggregate. Second, and this is the part most organizations miss, younger donors increasingly behave like major donors themselves. They’re selective, thoughtful, impact-driven, and relationship-oriented. Broadcast-style fundraising and transactional direct mail simply don’t move them.
Meanwhile, first-time donor retention has dropped below 20 percent and keeps drifting down. Nobody knows where the floor is. What’s certain is that 18 percent can’t become the new ceiling.
What “Treat Every Donor Like a Major Donor” Actually Means
The book’s prologue opens in O’Hare Airport in 2017. Flying an unfamiliar airline, no status, no priority line, no club to retreat to, just a line that stretched a mile. Standing in it, a question landed: why can’t airlines treat every customer like a valued customer? Followed immediately by a harder one: don’t we do the exact same thing in fundraising?
A narrow slice of the donor base gets the relational experience. A dedicated officer who knows them by name. The platinum line. The access. Everyone else gets treated transactionally, because that’s all the organization can afford.
Treating every donor like a major donor doesn’t mean coffee with all 10,000 people on your file. It means recognizing that the behaviors that make major giving effective were never niche behaviors. Every donor wants to be listened to, thanked sincerely, and engaged on their own terms. Cost was the only reason we rationed that treatment, and the rationing is exactly what today’s donors are walking away from. The argument at the heart of the book: the principles of major giving should become the operating system of fundraising, with relational treatment extended across the whole donor base.
There’s a historical irony here. Fundraising borrowed its dominant playbook from consumer marketing decades ago, on the logic that what sold soap could sell causes. It worked, for a while. Then consumer marketing moved on to mass personalization and relationship building (think of carmakers gathering their owners at conferences), while fundraising stayed locked in the direct-response paradigm. The ground shifted, and the sector didn’t shift with it.
The Paradox Keeping Change From Happening
Here’s the strange part. The sector already agrees.
In a DickersonBakker market survey of hundreds of nonprofit and fundraising leaders, 94 percent agreed that fundraising needs significant change, and roughly 85 percent agreed the shift should be toward relationship-based approaches. In a sector as diverse as this one, that level of consensus is remarkable. Change should be easy.
It isn’t. Close to seven in ten of those same leaders said change is not happening at their organization. Three culprits surfaced:
- No consensus on how. Everyone agrees on the destination; few agree on the route.
- A leadership gap. Frontline fundraisers feel the urgency. At the CEO level, roughly half as many do.
- No margin. The standing mandate is to raise more with less. That puts fundraisers on a hamster wheel, running too fast to try anything new, and burning out as they run.
Raising more while cutting cost is the nonprofit version of selling every product below cost and making it up in volume. The math has one ending.
The 7 Behaviors of Relational Fundraising
A Better Way to Fundraise organizes the shift into seven behaviors:
- Listen first. Pay attention to what individual donors want and care about. The data exists; most organizations never use it at the individual level.
- Personalize every touchpoint. Personalized donor communication at every level of the file, from the living room to the inbox.
- Express genuine gratitude. Meaningful thanks, never a checkbox.
- Earn their next gift. Loyalty is earned one gift at a time.
- Invite relationship. Give donors a way in beyond the transaction.
- Respect their rhythm. Donors have their own interests, giving patterns, and preferred pace.
- Never betray trust.
Two of these deserve a closer look, because they’re where most organizations leak the most value.
Earning the next gift starts with retiring an old assumption. “Every donor is a lapsed donor until you earn their next gift,” said Derric Bakker, CEO of DickersonBakker. Two or three generations of donors who valued institutional loyalty spoiled the sector. Today’s donors are loyal to impact, and they’ll move their money to wherever they feel it makes the biggest difference.
Gratitude is where the rot is most visible. Most organizations treat thank-yous as a footnote to giving: a rote letter, weeks late, or for online gifts, often nothing real at all. An emailed thank-you gets buried two or three hundred messages deep within hours, and in a household, you don’t even know whose inbox it landed in. Gratitude belongs at the center of fundraising, and fixing it may be the single most effective lever for turning retention around.
Rhythm matters more than most segmentation schemes acknowledge. A major gift officer’s portfolio always contains a donor who says “don’t call unless it’s important” sitting next to one who wants to talk every week and attend every event. Send everyone less mail because an aggregate survey said so, and you’ve orphaned the donor who wanted more.
Where AI Fits (and Where It Doesn’t)
The guardrail comes first: AI must never replace the human connection. Some things only people can do, and donors can tell the difference. One diocese recently rolled out a donor stewardship AI bot with a human name. Derric’s verdict on the podcast was blunt: a very bad idea. (It’s a conviction he shares with Nathan Chappell, who wrote the book’s foreword.)
Everything outside that direct connection is fair territory, and listening is where AI earns its keep.
Take surveys. Say you have 10,000 donors, you survey them, and 400 respond. The standard move is to crosstab those 400 responses, assume they represent everyone, and adjust your program in one-size-fits-all fashion. If 60 percent say you send too much mail, everybody gets less mail, including the donors who wanted more.
The relational move is different: take each individual response and put it in the CRM. Now you know Nora wants more engagement and Dan wants less, and every future touchpoint, mass or personal, can honor that. Layer in outside data, and AI in fundraising makes it possible to give a personalized, relationship-shaped experience to the entire file, the kind of treatment that used to be reserved for a handful of major donors. Most of the technology already exists, and what’s missing today will be at your fingertips within two or three years.
What You Can Do This Week
The first move is to stop. When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Step out of the urgency long enough to ask what you’ll do differently, because no amount of speed on the hamster wheel changes the direction.
Then borrow the late-career wisdom of football coach Lou Holtz, famous for the acronym WIN: What’s Important Now. Skip the dusty five-year strategic plan. Ask what you can change this week.
A few places to start, all drawn from the conversation:
- Audit your gratitude. Get in a room and trace what actually happens after a gift, especially an online gift. Is the thank-you meaningful, fast, and likely to be seen? Would a donor describe it as genuine?
- Pick one segment. Don’t attempt personalization across the whole file at once. Choose a donor segment and give it a genuinely individual experience.
- Question your inherited assumptions. Convene a group internally and ask why you do what you do. How much of your program is strategy, and how much is habit passed down from a different era?
A Window in the Wall
There’s a story in the book about a McDonald’s franchisee in 1970s Arizona whose business came largely from a nearby army base. When a new regulation barred service members from wearing uniforms in public, the stop-on-the-way-home dinner run died, and his sales dried up with it. So he cut a window in the wall of his restaurant and handed food through it. As the book tells it, that’s how the drive-through was born.
You can’t engineer a drive-through into every restaurant in the country overnight. But you can cut a window in your wall this month: one segment, one fixed thank-you process, one survey whose answers actually reach the CRM.
When you’re ready to run relational fundraising at scale, Virtuous Momentum puts agentic AI to work behind the scenes, handling donor planning, prospecting, and personalized outreach drafts, so your team can give major-donor treatment to every name on the file.
Get a demo of Momentum to see what treating every donor like a major donor looks like in practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “treat every donor like a major donor” mean?
It means extending the behaviors that make major giving effective, like individual listening, genuine gratitude, and respect for each donor’s rhythm, across the entire donor base. It’s a mindset shift, and modern technology makes it affordable at scale.
Why is donor retention falling?
Giving has structurally shifted. Today’s donors, especially younger ones, behave like major donors: selective, impact-driven, and relationship-oriented. Transactional, broadcast-style fundraising no longer earns their next gift, and first-time donor retention has fallen below 20 percent.
Should nonprofits use AI to talk to donors directly?
No. AI should never replace the human connection; donors can tell. Its highest value is behind the scenes: gathering, synthesizing, and applying individual donor information so human communication gets more personal.
What are the seven behaviors of relational fundraising?
Listen first, personalize every touchpoint, express genuine gratitude, earn their next gift, invite relationship, respect their rhythm, and never betray trust.
What’s the first step toward relational fundraising?
Stop and step out of the urgency, then start small. Audit how gratitude reaches your donors, pick one segment to personalize, and start moving individual donor preferences into your CRM instead of acting only on aggregates.
