Jason Lewis recently wrote a piece in The Giving Review, which offers a strongly critical analysis of how progressive non-profit organizations in the US have become over reliant on direct mail and the ways in which it shifted the relationship between advocacy organizations and their base. 

[D]irect 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.

Lewis makes a compelling case as to the negative impacts of direct mail success on non-profit organizing.

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.

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.

Much of this resonates for me. Organizing has been commodified and shifted downwards. The diction of membership based organizations was sanded down as groups treated the possession of an email address as equal to having a member with deep, sustained ties. And funders prioritised the groups that followed best practices, built big lists and focused on certain deliverables as opposed to organic power building. 

What I do not really buy is that this is a byproduct of an overreliance on direct mail as a fundraising tactic. While direct mail certainly presaged a professionalisation of nonprofit fundraising and while it offered models that would be copied in the digital age, at the end of the day it is simply a channel of giving. Most big progressive advocacy organizations do not have direct mail as their primary income channel. Even if it’s significant, it does not strike me as one that is determinative of organizational approaches in 2025.

I don’t agree with Lewis’s blaming direct mail fundraising for being a fundamental cause of where we are now nor the idea that organizations should walk away from this channel. But I do think he’s right that there are hallmarks of heavy direct mail fundraising reliance that lead organizations away from building real, deep memberships and a belief in people power. Organizing with people can be icky, because people are not spreadsheets. They have warts and hair, bumps and bruises. Lewis writes:

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.

The willingness to challenge our current assumptions of how organizations relate to people and how they ask for their time, energy, and, yes, money is going to be essential for navigating through and out of the Trump era. For some people, the only way they will be able to contribute to this work is through giving. For those people, it still behooves organizations to find them and reach them with opportunities to give. Giving itself is not bad, nor disempowering, nor even neoliberal. It’s what some people have to offer. 

But treating donors, especially small dollar donors, as something other than cash machines is essential. The act of giving needs to be put alongside digital and offline activism, community building and relationship development, training and volunteering. It’s one behavior out of many that organizations need to be successful. Regardless of channel of gift, if someone’s first engagement with an organization is to make a donation, it is on the organization to find other forms of meaningful participation for that new donor. A donation should be the start of a deep relationship, not the end of a shallow one.

Reevaluating non-profit best practices and mechanisms of funding is essential. Reimagining what it means to be a member of an organization has to be a part of that. I don’t think it’s a story of any one fundraising channel, but rather the overall posture organizations take to engaging their base and building multidimensional relationships with them. 

The organizations that spend the time investing in multidirectional, multichannel relationships with their supporters will be the ones that have the best chance to grow and build power with and through their base. When that is happening, people will donate with joy, and what channel they’re giving will be completely irrelevant.