Flourishing, by design: why good fundraising should be good for your donors too
Authored by Sam Thomas
Ask most charities what a successful supporter journey looks like, and you'll get an answer about numbers: retention rate, average gift, lifetime value. All useful. All slightly missing the point.
Here's a question worth sitting with:
“what does giving to you actually feel like, for the person doing it?”
It's not a rhetorical question. There's a growing body of research suggesting charitable giving can genuinely benefit the giver — not just in the fuzzy “warm glow” sense everyone's heard of, but in more concrete ways: a sense of choice (I chose to do this, nobody pressured me), a sense of having made a difference (my support actually did something), and a sense of connection (I'm part of something, not a line on a spreadsheet). When those three things are present, people don't just give — they stay, and they come back.
Most fundraising strategy doesn't ask this question, because it's solving a different problem: how do we hit this quarter's income target. That's a legitimate problem. But solved on its own, it tends to produce supporter journeys that ask more than they thank, treat every donor the same regardless of what they've told you about themselves, and measure success purely by what the organisation got, not what the supporter experienced.
It's the first thing I check when I start working with a charity, before we get anywhere near tactics.
The alternative isn't complicated, but it does mean asking a different first question. Instead of “how do we get this gift,” start with “what would make this a good experience for the person giving it” — then check whether the strategy you're already running actually does that.
A few practical starting points
Look at your last three donor communications. How many were pure thank-yous or updates, with no ask attached at all? If the answer is zero, that's worth fixing before anything else — donors who only hear from you when you want something notice.
Check whether your ask gives people a genuine sense of choice, not just a suggested amount. A pre-ticked box and a single “recommended” figure isn't choice — it's a default dressed up as one.
Ask whether your impact reporting tells donors what their specific support did, or only what the organisation did in general. “Because of your gift, X happened” lands very differently to “this year we did X.”
None of this is about being nicer for the sake of it. It's a fairly direct, evidence-backed argument: strategy built around what's genuinely good for your supporters is also the strategy most likely to be good for your income, because it's the one people actually stick around for.
That's the thinking behind Verdantly's approach — flourishing, by design, not as a slogan, but as the actual starting point for the strategy work. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your organisation, I'd love to hear from you.