Yvette Guigueno, a fundraiser, has no use for one of the cornerstones of her profession. She has ignored it throughout her 16-year career, even as she worked at the types of old-guard nonprofits where tradition often dictates practice — a symphony, a university, and now the Pacific Opera Victoria, a cultural crown jewel in the Canadian city of Victoria.
This year, Guigueno, the opera’s director of development, is under pressure to backstop the organization’s pandemic-battered $5 million budget. Still, she won’t be turning to the fundraising model that’s a mainstay of textbooks, consultant playbooks, and the industry itself.
The donor pyramid, Guigueno says, simply doesn’t work.
“It’s one of those things that you study when getting your [fundraising certification], and it comes up from time to time. But I don’t think, based on the reality of what I’ve seen in my practice, that it’s helpful at all.”
Although the donor pyramid takes many forms, it typically is a visualization that sorts an organization’s supporters according to the value of their donations. Those who make small gifts fill a wide, sturdy base. The largest donors — typically smaller in number — are assigned to the peak. The fundraiser’s task: find ways to “upgrade” donors and push them heavenward.
The pyramid is about 50 years old. Robert and Joan Blum, a husband-and-wife team who started a San Francisco fundraising consultancy in the late 1960s, are said to have first used it. In the 1980s, Robert led the National Society of Fund Raising Executives (now the Association of Fundraising Professionals), and the idea spread as the field moved to professionalize. Even the typical development-shop structure — with departments focused on mass fundraising, midlevel giving, and major and legacy gifts — mirrors the theory of the pyramid.
Over roughly the past decade, however, fundraisers and experts have come to question whether the model has become, like the Great Pyramids themselves, a crumbling relic of a distant epoch. They worry that it may actually stunt giving. Indeed, some say charity’s reliance on it is at least partly to blame for the nation’s long, slow decline in giving.
Pyramids, says well-known philanthropy scholar Adrian Sargeant, “have had their day.” Asha Curran, who leads GivingTuesday, which has raised nearly $12 billion in 11 years, says she has “never given the pyramid more than three seconds’ thought.”
Online, dissidents say they want to turn the pyramid to rubble. That’s perhaps not advisable, as many experts still see value in it. Nor have alternative visuals captured the fundraising world’s imagination, though some have been proposed. (A vortex? An EKG?)
Still, the pyramid is due for a fresh assessment to consider how it took hold of the fundraising field, what it gets wrong, and how to do better.
3-Dimensional Enterprise
Claire Axelrad was new to fundraising when she joined the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1981. Eager to learn, she took a course at the Fund Raising School, founded a few years earlier by legendary fundraising guru Henry Rosso and his wife, Dottie. The nonprofit industry was exploding at the time, and the two wanted to formalize training for the largely make-it-up-as-you-go profession.
Hank Rosso saw the donor pyramid as a key management tool, a way to prove that “fundraising is not off to the side, not at the kids’ table,” says Bill Stanczykiewicz, director of the Fund Raising School, which today is part of the Lilly School of Family Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Axelrad, a lapsed lawyer who loved all things linear, thrilled at how the pyramid charted a clear, simple path for donors. “It was like, Wow, this is great,” she says. “There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.”
The pyramid influenced her fundraising for the next couple of decades. Her job, she decided, was not unlike that of a painter or photographer. She tried to create a picture of the organization so beautiful, so compelling, that people would be drawn to support it, grow invested, and climb the pyramid.
Then came the internet, and later social media. In the early 2010s, while Axelrad was leading development at what’s now the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, the organization landed 25,000 new donors through an online quiz. “It opened my eyes to what was possible,” she says.
As the food bank’s digital experiments grew, Axelrad came to see her previous efforts as two dimensional: She put out information, and people gave money. Good fundraising, she began to think, was more like a multimedia three-dimensional enterprise, with charities interacting with donors in all kinds of spaces — online, on social, one on one, at events — and finding ways beyond gifts to harness whatever energy and support they wanted to give.
By 2014, Axelrad, now a consultant and coach, denounced the pyramid she had once loved. Digital, she wrote in a Nonprofit Pro column, illustrated what was true all along: Donors don’t follow a linear path. And they don’t fit into tidy boxes.
“It doesn’t work,” she declared.
Billions That Changed the Market
In the years before and after Axelrad’s declaration, digital fundraising blossomed from online quizzes to billion-dollar ventures that challenge the pyramid’s underlying assumptions. GoFundMe, the crowdfunding giant that got its start in 2010, put nonprofits on the sideline as people raised donations ($25 billion and counting) through networks of family, friends, and strangers often connected simply by social media and a shared purpose.
GivingTuesday also defies the pyramid. Launched in 2012, it became a global phenomenon fueled by the “new power” ideas of founder Henry Timms, now head of New York City’s Lincoln Center. His proposition: Through technology, nonprofits can quickly and easily empower people to build communities of supporters through their personal networks and means. Organizations facilitate this activity but don’t control it or insist on brand discipline. Supporters, not fundraisers, create beautiful pictures of an organization however they see fit.
Such successes and the advance of technology spurred fundraising leaders to create digital departments within the development office. Social-media and tech marketing pros arrived who puzzled over the donor pyramid and asked: Why do we think this works?
Ashley Budd, director of advancement and alumni marketing operations at Cornell, first encountered the pyramid at a conference shortly after she came to the university in 2013. A 28-year-old social-media strategist at the time, she had worked in higher education but had no fundraising experience.
Budd chuckles as she remembers that conference. Very little of the instruction, she says, proved helpful. At the time, her job was to encourage giving by annual-fund donors — typically inhabitants of the pyramid base. But she didn’t see the model’s application. It was too rigid, too hierarchical, she concluded as she and her colleagues built the university’s first giving days, crowdfunding projects, and other new efforts that invited donors to engage with the university — and each other — in various ways.
Traditional annual-fund communications earnestly try to make donors aware of all that the university does, Budd says. They are awareness campaigns based on the notion that donors will move up the pyramid as they become more educated as to just how wonderful the institution is.
The approach strikes her as odd. Major-gift officers would never think about making a big ask before establishing a relationship, Budd says. Why treat annual-fund givers differently?
Budd and her colleagues nurture connections with small-gift donors through email, social media, and events that they hope offer value more than a hard-sell of Cornell. A digital interaction with the university might include a primer on the Oppenheimer film from a Cornell physicist. A good recipe. Insights into the news. Advice from a financial adviser who’s an alum.
Before each communication to supporters, Budd says, her group considers: “What are they going to be doing when these emails hit their inbox? And how can we insert Cornell into their life in a way that is relevant and helpful?”
Fuel for the Giving Crisis
Some critics of the donor pyramid boil over with frustration. From the beginning, they say, the model shaped fundraising in harmful ways and contributed to a crisis that has been building over more than a decade.
Data from all quarters points to a collapse in giving by average Americans since before the Great Recession. Whereas two-thirds of households once donated to 501(c)(3) organizations, that share is now less than half. In other words, the base of the pyramid for charity writ large has narrowed considerably.
Allegiance to the pyramid is responsible for at least some of this, critics say. Their argument: Thanks to the model’s sole focus on gifts, charities put the financial exchange at the center of fundraising. Relationships take on a transactional feel and slight the many ways that generosity inspires people to contribute — as volunteers, as advocates, as ambassadors and influencers with friends, colleagues, and their social-media networks.
“The fundamental flaw in the donor pyramid is that it’s about money,” says Jen Love, a partner with the Agents of Good fundraising consultancy. ”It’s based on the gifts as opposed to the humans.” The animal shelter focused on gifts, for instance, fails to look for the curiosities, passions, interests, and values that drive generosity.
“‘Where does someone fit on the donor pyramid?’ — that’s a stupid question,” Love argues. “‘Why does this person care about cats?’ — that’s the right question.”
A pyramid focus can lead to talk about donors solely in terms of their cash value, notes Abigail Oduol, a senior development officer in planned gifts at Earthjustice. For instance, a major-gifts officer who discovers a drop in donors’ wealth capacity might seek to “bump them down,” Oduol notes. “And the way we talk about donors internally has a massive influence on the way we talk about them externally.”
The pyramid also implies a hierarchy, critics contend. Big gifts are the most valued, so big donors get the most attention. Charities obviously need money to carry out their mission, and cultivation of the wealthy offers the biggest return on investment.
But people who make small gifts have become an afterthought, says Curran of GivingTuesday. It’s no wonder rates of giving are declining. “The focus on those larger and larger gifts is actually putting us in a place of peril as a sector.”
Scatterplot Portraits of Affinity
To be fair to Robert and Joan Blum, their model has perhaps been misinterpreted. It’s best used for planning and diagnosing a fundraising program’s weaknesses, says Michael Worth, a professor of nonprofit management at George Washington University and author of the textbook Fundraising: Principles and Practice. For instance, a pyramid that’s broad at the top and narrow at the bottom is a sign that a charity had better shore up its base of small-gift supporters.
Fundraising, however, is too messy to assume that all donors march directly up the slope, Worth adds. The pyramid is “relevant as a planning tool, but I don’t think it’s ever been relevant as a theory of donor behavior.”
Of course, at least some donors behave just as the pyramid predicts: They make a first gift then climb, climb, climb. Research indicates that the top 10 donors to an organization typically make their biggest gift seven to 12 years after their first contribution, says Chris O’Connor, chief development officer at Mass General Brigham. “So I haven’t thrown out the notion that you can’t march up the pyramid any longer. It’s just getting harder.”
Whether fundraisers want to tweak how they use the pyramid or abandon it altogether, they seem to be in agreement on this: Giving will grow if nonprofits value donors based on more than the number of zeros in a gift.
When the Blums created the pyramid, money was perhaps the best proxy for a donor’s affinity to an organization, commitment, and propensity to give. Digital advancements, however, mean nonprofits now can build scatterplot portraits of donors through email open rates, engagement on social media, responses to surveys, and more.
Even RSVPs are a valuable datapoint, says Love of Agents of Good. “Anybody who takes the time to say, ‘Thank you for inviting me to the garden party, but I can’t make it’ is somebody who cares about you way more than somebody who ignored your email in the first place.”
Nonprofits are starting to incorporate such information into donor profiles and decisions about whom to upgrade. Hospitals and medical centers — home to some of the most skilled big-gift hunters — are turning to data and A.I. vendors to determine a patient’s level of gratitude for their care, says Mass General’s O’Connor. “Organizations are now trying to measure gratitude before net worth and giving capacity. That’s a massive change in perspective, at least in health care.”
Charities also are embracing engagement with donors that, like the recipes and career advice that Ashley Budd’s team dispenses at Cornell, aims to build connections with donors. Technology can be used to create meaningful two-way interactions with donors at the pyramid’s base — interactions that lead to relationships and then gifts.
Brad Quiring, manager of donor engagement at Canada’s Mennonite Central Committee, an international relief group, used to have a sticky note on his computer that read, “Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat” — a mantra for his communications, all centered on a gift. Now his brief includes “Listen” and “Engage,” and his communications have broadened to include surveys and informal outreach.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the organization asked supporters to sign a digital card for its partners in the country. “We got 60 pages within a day — 60 pages of people writing messages like, ‘We’re praying for you.’ ‘We’re thinking about you.’ ‘Stay strong,’” Quiring says.
“We actually think that great generosity like that is just as valuable as the dollars that we raise,” he adds.
Collapsed Giving Circles
Back at the Pacific Opera, Yvette Guigueno is flattening the hierarchy of a pyramid that she never embraced. The organization collapsed its 16 giving circles into three and no longer links benefits — invitations to special events, a set of gift cards, etc. — to gift amounts. “We don’t promise anything at any level anymore.”
For events once reserved for top donors, the opera now invites all donors if the venue is big enough. For smaller occasions, it makes a point to include supporters whose contributions come in some form other than cash — volunteers, staff, longtime ticket subscribers.
Expected blowback from these changes never arrived. “I got one complaint,” she says. And the organization recently received two six-figure gifts from individuals who previously had never donated more than a few hundred dollars.
Those gifts would certainly move the two donors up the pyramid if Pacific Opera had one. But for Guigueno, they’re evidence, if not proof, that it pays to engage and value donors who make gifts of all sizes.
