“What impact would you like to make with your giving?” is a fashionable question for gift officers to ask donors. Supposedly, questions focused on “impact,” will help the donor think about increasing their giving so that the impact also will increase.
But I remain unconvinced that this is a helpful line of questioning.
First, many donors simply haven’t given that question enough thought to respond with any kind of helpful clarity.
Second, and more importantly, focusing the donor on “impact,” suggests that the most important outcome of giving is what happens once the gift is utilized and not when the gift is given.
Instead of encouraging people to “maximize their philanthropic impact,” or to “focus on the effectiveness of their giving,” we should be helping people understand more clearly that the act of giving is profoundly good. Perhaps we should be gently teaching people that the giving behavior changes the giver in deeply personal ways and, therefore, changes our world, even if only by one giver at a time.
Many donors who decide to give will tell you they are doing so because they want to help a cause they believe in. That’s about as specific as many donors will get when it comes to questions of “impact.”
Instead of leading these donors to specify the desired impacts of their giving in an attempt to increase their giving, maybe we should start asking a very different, but simple question:
What gift amount would make you feel really good?