The Real Price of a Broken Promise

Every gift comes with an expectation.

A donor gives because they believe in the work, but they also give with the expectation that their money will be used the way they were told it would be used.

That seems obvious.

And yet, donor intent can become surprisingly complicated, particularly when leadership changes, organizations evolve, programs end, priorities shift, or decades pass between the original gift and the people now responsible for stewarding it.

At its core, donor intent is about something much bigger than compliance.

It is about trust.

When a donor restricts a gift to a particular program, establishes a named fund, or places specific conditions on how those dollars can be invested or spent, the organization is accepting more than the gift. It is accepting responsibility for honoring the donor's wishes.

And that responsibility doesn't necessarily disappear when the donor does.

Donor intent has a long tail. A gift made today may still be shaping decisions 20, 30, or 50 years from now. The people making those decisions may never have met the donor. They may not know the conversations that led to the gift or understand why a particular restriction mattered so much at the time.

But the commitment remains.

That is why clear gift agreements matter. It is also why boards and future leaders need to understand the commitments an organization has made and why those commitments exist.

There is another reason this matters.

When donors believe their wishes have not been honored, the damage can extend well beyond a single gift.

Research on donor behavior has found a striking difference in how donors respond when their gifts are used as intended versus when they are redirected. In one study, only 12 percent of donors switched charities when their gift was used as intended. When the gift was redirected, 62 percent did.

That is not simply a fundraising problem.

It is a trust problem.

Philanthropy depends on a fairly extraordinary exchange. A donor transfers assets to an organization because they trust that organization to turn those resources into something meaningful. In many cases, the donor will never see exactly how every dollar is spent. The entire relationship depends on confidence that the organization will do what it said it would do.

Once that confidence is broken, it can be very difficult to rebuild.

Historically, enforcing donor intent has not always been straightforward, particularly long after a gift has been made. That has led to increased attention to donor intent protections in some states. Kansas, for example, enacted legislation providing donors with a legal avenue to seek enforcement when restrictions contained in certain written endowment agreements are not followed.

But I don't think legislation should be what makes donor intent important to us.

We should not need a law to make us honor a promise.

The better question is what happens inside the organization long before a disagreement ever reaches that point.

Are gift agreements clear enough that future leaders will understand what was intended? Does the board know what restrictions the organization has accepted? Are those commitments being tracked? And when circumstances change, is the organization addressing the issue openly rather than simply interpreting an old agreement in whatever way is most convenient today?

There will, of course, be situations where honoring the original purpose of a gift becomes difficult or even impossible. Programs close. Organizations merge. Community needs change. What made perfect sense 30 years ago may no longer make sense today.

That is precisely why these conversations matter.

The answer is not to redirect the money and hope no one notices. It is to address the situation transparently and determine the appropriate path forward, including involving the donor or their successors when possible and seeking appropriate legal guidance when necessary.

The Donor Bill of Rights states that donors are entitled to assurance that their gifts will be used for the purposes for which they were given.

That should not be viewed as an administrative obligation.

It is part of the relationship we enter into when we accept someone's gift.

We talk a great deal in fundraising about donor acquisition, retention, stewardship, and lifetime value. All of those things matter. But underneath every one of them is something much simpler.

Did we do what we said we would do?

Because ultimately, donor intent is not just about protecting a gift.

It is about protecting the trust that made the gift possible in the first place.