Over the years, working across organisations in higher education, conservation, health and medical research, I’ve been struck by how differently donors are motivated, and how often those motivations remain unspoken or unknown, even late in a relationship.
As fundraisers, we are good at telling the stories of our organisation, but not always so confident in asking our donors about their own stories and what it is they are seeking to achieve through their philanthropy.
There is a moment in some of these conversations that repays close attention. It often comes in a pause after a question you didn’t plan to ask, or in a story a donor tells that seems to drift from the subject. But something shifts – the conversation stops being about what your organisation needs and starts being about what the donor cares about most deeply.
That moment, I’ve come to believe, is where significant gifts are actually made. Not in the proposal or the ask, but in an earlier recognition of what this gift means to the person making it.
On the surface, two donors might look identical – similar wealth, affinity, engagement with your leadership. But their motivations can be worlds apart. One is driven by a desire to see an idea realised that has occupied them for years. Another wants to honour a loss, or an important person in their life. Others are responding to a sense of obligation to a place or institution that shaped them, or to a wish to build something that will outlast them.
These are genuinely different motivations, not variations on the same theme. Donors will sometimes be moved by more than one, but each calls for a quality of conversation that goes beyond the surface of the relationship. This is true across major giving, but the stakes of understanding it are highest at principal gift level, where the relationship is longer and the consequences of not understanding a donor’s true intentions more costly.
The mistake I see most often is not a failure of relationship but a failure of curiosity. Fundraisers who are skilled at building trust sometimes stop short of the deeper question – not what does this donor care about, but why do they care about it, and what does this gift need to mean for them to feel it was the right decision?
The framing of the opportunity, the language of the proposal, the role you invite senior leaders to play, the pace at which you move – all of it should follow from a genuine understanding of the donor’s intentions.
In the UK and Australia, there is an added layer of cultural nuance worth naming. Donors in both contexts are often less inclined to articulate their motivations explicitly. There can be a reticence about being seen to give for personal reasons, or a discomfort with language that feels too overtly emotional. This doesn’t mean the intentions aren’t there. It means they surface differently, in what donors return to repeatedly, in the questions they ask, in the stories they choose to tell.
The fundraiser’s job at this level is not just about asking the right questions but it’s about listening with the right quality of attention.It requires slowing down, sitting with ambiguity, and resisting the pull to move prematurely toward the proposal. One of the most common traps is sending a proposal before this deeper understanding is genuinely in place. The document becomes a substitute for the conversation rather than an expression of it. And the donor, however politely, often senses the difference.
There is a practical implication here for how we prepare for these conversations. We spend considerable time preparing what we want to say, refining the case, briefing the chief executive, anticipating objections. Less time is spent preparing what we want to understand. What has this donor’s relationship with our organisation really been about, beneath the surface of their giving history? What do we know about what matters to them beyond philanthropy? What might this gift represent in the context of their life, not just ours?
That shift in preparation – from presenting to listening – is one of the clearest markers of maturity I encounter in organisations that are genuinely ready for this work.
The case for support matters enormously. But the most powerful proposal is one shaped around the donor’s intention, not the institution’s needs. Getting there requires a quality of curiosity that goes deeper than many fundraising conversations ever reach, and it begins, almost always, with the willingness to ask a question and then wait, genuinely and patiently, to hear what the answer reveals.
I love helping fundraisers and for-purpose leaders think about how to deepen their most significant donor relationships. If you’d like to explore this further, please get in touch at jane@philanthropytogether.co.uk
