Is It About Us or Them?

I have to be candid. I have been ambivalent toward “Giving Tuesday” since its inception. I’m not against it. I’m not even saying I haven’t given. But I have focused so much of my career, practitioner and consulting, on the idea of major gifts, principal gifts, and planned gifts. That large ROI that efficiency seeks.

However, in the last year or two, I’ve paid more attention to the end result. “Giving Tuesday” this year was an unmitigated success. According to several reports, nearly $2.5 billion was given, basically, and a single day. While many nonprofit leaders were concerned because of economics and the pandemic, the numbers were staggeringly up from previous years.

Early on in my career, my first mentor taught me a very simple concept… that the true value of a gift is only known in the heart of the donor. How is that relevant to “Giving Tuesday?”

I have spent so much of my career dealing with very large gift opportunities. And while there is no debating the influence that these larger gifts can have on a nonprofit’s ability to help the community, it fails in that lesson from my mentor.

It’s extremely likely, if not almost a certainty, that someone gave a $10 gift that was a large percentage of their take-home pay. They chose a nonprofit that they believe in, it’s mission and outcomes, and made a conscious choice to spend that money “philanthropically” rather than on gas or groceries. It was important to them. I’ve been a part of million-dollar gifts that made a huge impact but maybe didn’t have the same impact on the donor as the $10 gift.

“Giving Tuesday” is a platform for people to give from their heart. Those small dollar donors who value the nonprofit so much that they give more than they probably should. My mentor was right. “Giving Tuesday” is a good reminder of that it’s the heart that counts. And people’s desire to want to help others, in the inner recesses of their emotions, doesn’t “count” the number of commas in the dollar figure they choose to give.