A gift officer makes the call she has been preparing for weeks. The ask is fifty thousand dollars toward a scholarship. The prospect has the capacity and the history. Before she finishes, he stops her. He saw the news last month. The university landed a fifty-million-dollar gift to name a school. So what is his fifty thousand going to do?
Patrick Auerbach has watched that exact moment play out. He spent twenty-three years at USC in alumni relations and advancement, and now runs advancement for the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles. On Speaking Engagement this week, he named the dynamic plainly: a university’s brand recognition helps it and hurts it at the same time. The eight-figure headline gift that signals strength to the board is the same headline that shrinks the annual-fund ask down to a rounding error in the donor’s mind.
The prospect is not doing bad math. He is responding to something the math can’t explain. The institution no longer reads to him as a cause. It reads as a financial behemoth that happens to be calling for money.
That gap is showing up in the giving. Ryan Catherwood pointed to the most recent national alumni survey, where donors under forty-five increasingly direct their giving toward cause-built organizations rather than the schools they attended.
The affection remains. What has changed is the perceived mechanism of impact. Auerbach’s read is direct: institutions have to reposition themselves as a cause, because right now they are not viewed that way.
The word he keeps returning to is worth diving in to. Affinity. In his higher-ed years, affinity meant identity: your school, your community, the part of campus that claimed you. In his work now, affinity is cause-based. People come to the foundation because they care about veterans, or youth literacy, or fire relief, and they bring a commitment rooted in values that long predates any institution. He draws a hard line between that and affiliation, which is circumstantial. You are affiliated because you sat in the same meeting, or because a contract put you in the same room. Affiliation is a fact. Affinity is a pull.
Higher ed has spent years collecting affiliations and recording them as affinity. Every event check-in, every reunion RSVP enters the system as a sign of connection. Some of it is. Much of it is proximity. Institutions are very good at generating touchpoints and far less good at converting them into the conviction that actually moves a gift.
The donor on that call still feels the place. He still cares about students. What stalls him is the third thing, the sense that his gift will actually do something, because the institution has trained him to measure it against an endowment instead of against an outcome.
Auerbach’s own answer points the way out, and it has less to do with messaging than with where the focus lands. Institutions, he said, have to retell the story so the donor understands what a fifty-thousand-dollar gift will specifically do. Not what it adds to. What it changes. The repositioning runs from magnitude to mechanism: from the size of the institution to the size of the change one gift sets in motion.
I have raised money at both ends of this. At the institutional level, the question of what a gift would actually do came up constantly, and answering it took real work. At the small and mid-size community nonprofits I have worked with since, where a few thousand dollars visibly keeps a program running, it almost never comes up. The small organization never has to argue for mechanism. The donor is already there. .
That is the asymmetry Auerbach lives on the other side of now. The foundation he works for sent more than two hundred million dollars into the community last year, and ninety-seven percent of it never touched the foundation’s own operations. The organization is almost entirely a conduit. People do not give to it to make it bigger. They give through it to make something specific happen, and the foundation’s whole job is keeping that specific thing in view.
A university cannot be a pure conduit. It spends on itself, and it should. But the donor under forty-five is asking the conduit question anyway: what does my money actually move, and can you show me that before you show me the building it will be named on?
A seven-billion-dollar institution has to make itself small enough to be given to. That is probably where this kind of repositioning starts.
Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.
Key Themes & Topics
Affinity is fundamentally different from affiliation. Affiliation is circumstantial, while affinity is rooted in values, identity, and emotional connection.
Younger donors increasingly prioritize giving to causes and impact-driven organizations rather than institutions they perceive as large financial entities.
Advancement storytelling often focuses too heavily on institutional prestige, scale, and administrative priorities instead of clearly showing human impact and societal value.
Institutions struggle to position themselves as “causes” because donors increasingly measure gifts against institutional wealth rather than against the specific change their philanthropy can create.
Effective engagement strategies require organizations to align individual passions, identities, and values with a larger institutional mission without reducing people to demographic categories or transactional data points.
Questions to Consider
Why are younger donors increasingly drawn toward cause-based organizations instead of colleges and universities?
Does our institution currently feel like a “cause” worth supporting?
How often do we center the actual people and communities affected by philanthropy?
What is the difference between affiliation and affinity in our engagement strategy?
Are our affinity groups functioning as meaningful communities or simply organizational categories?
How can institutions align identity-based engagement with broader institutional mission and belonging?
Are we making assumptions about people’s identities and interests instead of listening first?
What can higher education learn from organizations built around causes and community impact?
What role do values play in our institution’s engagement work?
How can institutions better position themselves as vehicles for social impact and public good?
