What Your Donors Are Really Thinking (And Will Never Tell You)

Your donors aren’t thinking about you.

Not in the way you think they are, anyway. They’re thinking about the people begging for change downtown, or the encampments in the local park when they’re walking their dog, or the summer camp program their kids attend. Your latest newsletter, the one you laboured over last week, likely isn’t in their minds.

As charity leaders, this bias blindness means we’re solving the wrong problem. We keep trying to be impressive, when what donors actually need to feel is important. Larry Matthews of KMA Consultants, and a longtime friend of Blue Sea, has spent over 30 years advising more than 150 charities across Canada on this very disconnect.

“There’s an urgency on both sides that makes people miss each other,” Larry says. And donors don’t complain when they feel missed. They simply disappear.

Below, Larry breaks down the messaging trap most charities fall into, the real reasons donors give, and the three moments where you’re most likely to lose them (or win them back).

The “So What?” Gap

When a charity sits down to communicate with donors, they’re often thinking about their mission and values, their new programs, and why they need funding. 

When a donor opens that same message, they’re looking for something else entirely. Proof that their gift actually did something. A signal that you know who they are. Validation that they made the right decision to support your work. 

When Larry describes the mindset many nonprofit leaders default to, he calls it “worthy-cause thinking”, the idea trap that if a charity does good work, people should naturally support it. “That’s a non-starter,” he says. “You might be worthy, but so are 85,000 other charities.”

Today, “almost nobody supports the noble effort anymore,” he says. Donors aren’t looking for a cause to fund, they’re looking for a channel to funnel their own impact. The question that cuts through it is almost uncomfortably simple: So what?

“When I’m with new clients, I take them through an exercise where everything they say, literally everything, I just say ‘So what?’ and it keeps them going until they get there,” says Larry. The ones who get there stop leading with what their organization does and start showing what the donor makes possible. Not “How do we get people to give?” but “How does our charity help the donor accomplish their goals?”

The 8 Motivations of Why Donors Give 

The “So What?” exercise only works if you understand which motivation you’re actually speaking to. Larry has identified eight reasons people give. Spoiler: many charities typically only touch on one or two of them when communicating with their donors. 

1. Make a Difference
2. Help People
3. Duty and Responsibility
4. Give Back
5. Do Something Special
6. Trust in the Organization
7. Compelling Leadership
8. Respect for the Asker

Most of these motivations have nothing to do with your charity at all. Take Duty and Responsibility, for example. Larry notes that plenty of donors give to communicate family values— they take their kids to a fundraising walk not just to raise money, but to show them what it looks like to care about more than just themselves; to show up for their community. If your communications only speak to what your organization does, you’re missing everything else that brought them to the door.

Three Points of Jeopardy for Donor Loyalty 

Once your messaging reflects why donors are actually giving, the harder work begins: keeping them. Larry has found that donor attrition is rarely random. It happens at predictable moments, and most charities don’t see them coming until the donor is already gone. Here’s where you’re most likely to lose someone, and what to do instead.

1. The Moment After the First Gift: Many charities treat the first donation as the finish line: they send the donor a quick thank-you email before folding them into a generic communications stream. Almost immediately, the donor goes from feeling like they made a difference to feeling like just another name on a list. The second gift, Larry argues, is won or lost right here, not with another ask, but with something specific and personal that speaks to what they gave and why it mattered. That’s the difference between someone who gives once and someone who sees themselves in the work.
   
   
2. The Moment They’re Ready to Give More: When a donor has been giving consistently over three or four years (even irregularly) they’re telling you something, Larry explains. That’s the moment to invite them further in: a monthly gift, an upgraded ask, a more personal level of engagement. “Every charity of any size can have a major donor program, even if they only have ten major donors,” he says.
   
   
3.  The Moment a Loyal Donor Goes Quiet: If a loyal donor changes their giving pattern (maybe they stop altogether or scale back), reach out. Larry was a monthly supporter of a charity for 22 years. When he switched to annual giving, he called to explain. They updated the record. “That’s the last I ever heard from them,” he says. Something as simple as writing back to ask “Did you have any advice for us?” would have kept the door open.

The Bigger Picture

Donors aren’t evaluating your charity’s worthiness. They’re looking for a place to put something they already feel. A conviction. A hope. A sense of responsibility they’ve been carrying for years. Show them that through your work, they’re already living it out. That the world they want to build is already taking shape. Your job isn’t to impress them with what you do, but to prove to them who they already are.

Try It Yourself: Rewrite Your Donor Communications

Copy the prompt below into your favourite AI tool to put your existing donor communications to the test.