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This essay was originally published in the Giving Review.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s re-election, the political left started asking the question that always follows a major loss: What happened?
One of the more insightful answers came in the form of what’s known as “The Groups” critique — an internal reckoning that argued the progressive advocacy world had exploded in size and become too fragmented, too professionalized, and too disconnected from the people it claimed to represent. Without strong grassroots ways to stay connected to real people, a lot of groups started drifting off course. Some got too cautious and focused on being professional — more paperwork than people power. Others doubled down on being ideologically “pure” but didn’t have the organizing strength to build anything lasting. None of this came out of nowhere.
Ironically, some folks admired this evolution. In a 2022 book, conservative fundraiser Richard Viguerie applauded progressives for building a sprawling ecosystem of single-issue organizations, claiming they had a 10-to-1 advantage over conservatives. He urged the right to catch up. But what he saw as a strength is now being reexamined on the left as a liability: a system built for message delivery, not membership — for fundraising, not organizing. What once looked like innovation now feels like infrastructure tailor-made for the neoliberal era: optimized for acquisition and built to manage risk.
And tucked into the fine print of this critique? Direct mail.
Across the political spectrum, organizations — left, right, and everywhere in between — began embracing this approach. Over time, organizations started looking more like mailing lists than communities. Participation was reduced to a check in the mail. This wasn’t a master plan; but it wasn’t a fluke either. Like grant making, direct mail became one of neoliberalism’s handiest tools: It outsourced the state’s responsibilities and reframed collective struggle as private transaction. It let us feel involved without letting us in.
To be clear, direct mail wasn’t born out of malice. It was a clever solution to a real problem: How do you raise money at scale? In its early days, it felt like a democratizing force — a way to reach ordinary people, invite them into causes, and build broad-based support. But over time, what started as a savvy way to raise money turned into something far more powerful.
Direct Mail as Ideology
Direct mail didn’t just fund organizations; it reshaped them. It reframed how causes got packaged, who counted as a participant, and how change was measured. It didn’t kill the civic imagination; it domesticated it. It turned the unruly energy of real engagement into something polished, efficient, and easy to scale. It raised serious money. But it did so by shrinking our sense of what participation should mean.
By “civic imagination,” I mean more than just voting or giving. I mean the capacity to see yourself as part of a larger “we” — to believe that your voice, time, presence, and labor matter in the making of a more just society. That sense of shared authorship was once cultivated in union halls, church basements, block clubs, and neighborhood meetings. It was messy. It was slow. But it created relationships that money couldn’t buy. Direct mail offered an easier alternative and, in doing so, gradually replaced that participatory spirit with a transactional one.
Today, direct mail still gets treated like a neutral fundraising tactic. But it’s better understood as a product of the neoliberal turn. It helped usher in a model of civic life that prized control over trust, efficiency over relationship, and consumption over solidarity. It trained people to see themselves not as actors in change but as consumers of it. That shift — quiet, cultural, and deeply embedded — still shapes how the nonprofit world works.
And it’s not going away until we stop seeing direct mail as just a tool and start seeing it for what it is: an ideology. One built in a time of political retreat, designed to manage volatility, suppress risk, and keep real participation safely out of reach.
Direct mail didn’t just show up; it arrived at exactly the right moment for the world it helped build. In the years after the civil rights movement, mass participation had become a real threat to the postwar order. Elites stopped trying to suppress civic engagement directly and started looking for ways to contain it. At the same time, advocacy groups were professionalizing — trading in grassroots coalitions for national offices and local chapters for donor files. And just as that shift was underway, new tech offered the perfect tool: the digital mailing list. Backed by Zip-code targeting and advances in data processing, direct mail promised efficiency, reach, and control. It wasn’t just communication. It was infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the government was stepping back from things it used to take responsibility for — like education, housing, and social services. As public funding dried up, nonprofits were expected to fill the gap. What used to be something we handled together through taxes became something charities were supposed to fix on their own. Nonprofits, stuck with more needs and less support, leaned hard on fundraising just to stay afloat. And direct mail became the thing holding up the illusion that this new setup — where private giving replaced public funding — was actually working.
Instead of building relationships, organizations collected addresses. Instead of organizing members, they segmented audiences. The mailing list replaced the meeting hall. Participation became a product: a compelling story, a crisp ask, a promised outcome. What it delivered, more often than not, was a passive supporter expected to back someone else’s agenda. It didn’t just reshape how nonprofits raised money. It rewrote what participation even meant. Over time, the logic of the mailing list became the logic of the movement.
Nonprofits as Consultancies
The point wasn’t to organize people — it was to acquire them. And, just as movements were becoming more data-driven and donor-centric, private foundations were stepping into their modern role: gatekeepers of what counts as legitimate change.
Direct mail shaped how organizations talked to donors. Foundations decided which organizations were worth listening to. And they didn’t just bring cash. They brought a checklist. They funded the groups that looked most like them: strategic, professional, low-risk. Logic models? Check. Slide decks? Check. Predictable outcomes? Even better. Organizing? Too messy. Lived experience? Too emotional. Foundations didn’t ban movements. They just stopped funding them.
Instead, they did what powerful institutions do: They moved the goalposts. Policy briefs got funded. Protests didn’t. Niche campaigns got green lights. Broad coalitions got ignored. A generation of nonprofits grew up acting more like consultancies — fluent in metrics, armed with forecasts, and trained to raise money without resistance. And direct mail? It fit that world perfectly. It didn’t eliminate the base; it contained it. It raised money without raising expectations.
Over time, a new consensus emerged: This is what responsible change looks like — neat, contained, professional. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was neoliberalism in motion — and class solidarity by design. Foundations set the boundaries. Direct mail enforced them. One system reshaped how people gave. The other decided what that giving could support. And neither stopped to ask what we were giving up in the process.
The Five-Point Formula
Direct mail wasn’t just a way to raise money; it became a model that organizations started copying. Even 50 years later, you can still see its fingerprints everywhere. It changed how organizations talk to supporters, how they describe their missions, and how they think about public involvement. It didn’t just bring in donations; it changed how people relate to power. That way of thinking still shows up in fundraising plans, strategy meetings, and donor software. It’s easy to overlook, but it’s always there: a mindset that treats supporters like consumers and turns collective action into targeted marketing. The tools have changed, but the approach hasn’t.
Donor as consumer
Direct mail recast the donor as a consumer. The nonprofit became the seller, the cause a product. The offer was simple: Pose a problem; package a solution; sell it for $20, $50, or $100. No meetings, no deliberation, no shared labor. Just pay and move on.
Over time, that became the expectation. Not because donors demanded it, but because that’s the only version of engagement they were offered.
This is the quiet decline that scholars like Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol have documented. Americans didn’t stop caring — they stopped gathering. Fundraising became retail. Engagement became content delivery. Donors were trained to listen, agree, and pay. Nothing more. They were talked at, not brought in. And what emerged wasn’t just a slicker fundraising machine; it was a civic imagination on autopilot: compliant, convenient, and increasingly dependent on distant experts to do the work.
Advocacy by proxy
Direct mail didn’t just turn giving into consumption. It turned advocacy into delegation. The message was clear: We’ll fight for you. The donor’s job wasn’t to participate but to fund the professionals. It looked like collective action, but it quietly confirmed that the real work belonged to someone else.
And it worked — at least for a while. It funded lawsuits, protests, and campaigns. But it hollowed out the base of movement-building. Donors stopped seeing themselves as part of the struggle. They became clients of advocacy machines, underwriting work they no longer imagined themselves doing. Their passion didn’t vanish; it just got channeled into a monthly charge.
That shift eventually hardened into structure: You give, they act. You trust, they manage. The base wasn’t eliminated. It was replaced by a brand.
Single-issue fragmentation
Direct mail didn’t just segment lists. It segmented the work. The narrower the issue, the easier it was to monetize. One problem. One solution. One donation. And, for a while, it made sense — smaller asks felt more accessible. But, over time, the structure simplified not just the messaging, but the vision.
The result? A sector reorganized around niches instead of movements. Coalitions got messy. Systems analysis got sidelined. Structural injustice was broken into clickable pieces.
What followed was a buffet of siloed campaigns — professionally branded, strategically detached, increasingly disconnected from each other. Message clarity replaced political coherence. And with it, organizations lost their ability to form durable alliances. The infrastructure built to simplify the ask also simplified the imagination. What began as strategic segmentation became full-on disintegration.
Us vs. them
Direct mail runs on outrage. It drops donors into a moral conflict and tells them which side they’re on. Every issue becomes a battle. Every appeal is a dispatch from the front. But this framing rarely punches up. It punches sideways.
The real power — foundations, funders, the rules of the system—goes unnamed. Instead, the target becomes another citizen, another party, another activist “doing it wrong.” Donors are trained to fight each other, not the forces above them. The result is polarization that masquerades as action. It’s the bait-and-switch: rage without analysis. And, while people burn out, the system remains untouched.
It’s not that anger is wrong. But direct mail taught us to perform it, not channel it. To treat it as a product, not a pathway.
A false economy
Direct mail created a system that looked like it worked — because it brought in money. But, underneath, it was fragile. It only worked if you kept adding new people, constantly cranking out content, and tweaking every message to get results. Like any system built for speed and efficiency, it eventually hit a wall. But instead of changing direction, most groups just pushed harder — more names, more noise, and less trust.
And here’s the twist: The biggest winners weren’t the causes or the communities. They were the vendors: software companies, marketing firms, writers, and data services. These folks didn’t just make money off the system; they helped shape it. They ran the conferences, wrote the playbooks, and told everyone what “good fundraising” should look like.
In the end, they created a false sense of success and called it sustainable. And that locked in a system where organizations became dependent, power stayed concentrated, and real change stayed just out of reach. Groups that used to build movements now chase numbers. Leaders who used to build relationships now build pipelines. Growth became the goal, and connection became an afterthought.
Why the System Still Works (Sort of)
If this model is so flawed — if it lowers expectations, breaks things into silos, and turns people into passive supporters—why is it still everywhere?
Because, in the short run, it still kind of works. Direct mail — and all its digital descendants — still raise money. It produces clean-looking reports, creates the illusion of momentum, and gives fundraisers something to do while deeper organizing struggles to get traction. The logic didn’t go away; it just got copied. Email, social media, and donor databases carried the same formula forward. It looks like people power. It feels familiar. But underneath, it’s still built on the same old assumptions: that experts should call the shots, that efficiency matters more than real connection, and that the public’s role is to give — not to decide.
In a system like that, the real questions never even get asked. Fundraisers are told — directly and indirectly—that their everyday donors aren’t enough, that their tools aren’t sophisticated enough, that their work doesn’t count unless it sounds strategic. So they’re pushed to upgrade: fancier tech, bigger gifts, slicker messaging. What started as a fundraising tactic slowly turns into a worldview — one based on not having enough, not being enough, and quietly giving up control.
This is what neoliberalism looks like on the ground: Everyday generosity funneled into polite revenue streams, while the real decisions — about direction, priorities, and power — stay in the hands of the few. We’ve built a nonprofit culture where the people closest to the problem are expected to raise money, but not lead — where groups are told to look community-driven but hand off the power somewhere else. The system doesn’t just allow dependence; it teaches it. And the longer we wait for permission to lead, the less likely we are to try.
A Different Way Forward
I see colleagues asking how to counter the chaos now overtaking Washington. But the first step isn’t to start building; it’s to deconstruct — to reckon with the infrastructure they’ve inherited. Because, if direct mail was designed to scale outrage and suppress participation, then any serious push back must reverse that logic. It has to raise expectations instead of lowering them, build trust instead of extracting loyalty, and bring people back into the work — not as passive consumers, but as active members.
Raising more money isn’t the problem. And I’m not the first to say this. Plenty of people before me have pointed out that the real challenge is bringing back a way of working that’s slower, messier, and way more powerful: membership—not the kind that comes with perks or tote bags but the kind that builds real belonging. Real membership is not based on slicing people into audience segments but is grounded in shared purpose and shared risk. It’s what movements used to understand before the obsession with scale, control, and top-down expertise pushed it out of the way.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s strategy. Membership builds power by setting a higher baseline for what’s possible. It doesn’t promise the biggest donations; it promises that people matter because they show up — especially the ones who’ve spent years being told their gift isn’t big enough to count. The truth is, we’ve built systems that quietly push those people out — out of leadership, out of ownership, out of the decisions that actually shape the work. Reclaiming membership means undoing that exclusion and showing that when you trust the base, it can lead.
That work starts with three clear shifts: Reclaim membership, raise expectations, and rebuild the network that connects local efforts across places. Each one is a way of saying no to dependency. Each one puts people — not platforms or funders — back at the center of the work. It means cutting the cord on arms-length fundraising — letting go of the idea that better tech can replace real relationships. It means asking people to lead, not just give — setting the tone that showing up matters more than being perfect. And it means finally letting go of the hope that Big Philanthropy is going to swoop in and save us. The answer to this broken system isn’t another upgrade.
It’s solidarity. And solidarity doesn’t come in a reply envelope.
Direct mail was never just a way to raise money. It was a system — a kind of social architecture — built to keep the energy, ideas, and leadership of everyday people at a safe distance. It made it easy to accept donations without giving up control. It created the feeling of solidarity without the hard work of building it. It looked like engagement, but it didn’t actually share power.
And for a while, it worked. It brought in billions. It built big, professional advocacy groups. It gave the impression of a healthy civic life — without the mess and risk of real participation.
But the world that made that model possible is falling apart. The era of centralized control, expert-driven planning, and efficiency-at-all-costs is cracking. And the old systems built on those values — including direct mail — are breaking down with it.
We’ve spent decades teaching everyday donors to stay out of the important conversations; to give when asked; to trust someone richer, more polished, and more “in the know” to make the big decisions. And now we’re left with a culture of disconnection and confusion. We act surprised when people pull back, when communities stop engaging, when democracy starts to shake. But maybe the real surprise is that we thought this setup could last.
Now, in a time of rising authoritarianism, economic uncertainty, and collapsing trust in institutions, organizations have a choice to make. They have to decide how they want to show up — and who they’re really here for. If they keep concentrating power in the hands of the biggest donors and most “credible” players, the system might stagger forward a little longer. But it’s already coming apart. The gap is growing. The base is slipping away. And people can feel it.
The question now isn’t if this model will collapse. It’s who will be ready — and bold enough — to build what comes next.
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