Fundraising Can Be Organizing — If We Let It

Picture this: A volunteer invites a dozen friends and neighbors into their living room to build support for a project she’s passionate about. The snacks are simple, the pitch is short. Everyone gives something, but that’s not the most important part. By the end of the night, one person has offered to host the next gathering, two more have joined the group’s welcome team, and another has agreed to help with data.

This is one possible version of how fundraising can double as organizing: not just raising money, but also expanding networks, leadership, and base. What makes it powerful is that it isn’t tied to any single legal or financial system. 

This is especially critical and urgent now, as the nonprofit infrastructure that has sustained much of the progressive movement for the last 30 years is coming under fire. Right-wing think tanks and state governments have been taking aim at nonprofits for years; under Trump 2.0, the federal government has ramped up the assault. Donors are facing intimidation campaigns. And the broader hostility to tax-deductible giving threatens to constrict the already narrow channels through which many groups operate.

These attacks on our fundraising are part of a coordinated assault on our ability to organize, which comes as we’re facing overlapping crises: authoritarian threats to democracy, a climate emergency, deepening wealth inequality, and escalating wars and threats of war. These challenges demand more than short-term fixes. They require movements that are resilient, renewable, and rooted in people. Donor organizing matters now because it offers exactly that: practices that grow money and leaders, that expand networks while deepening commitment, and that can move with us across whatever legal or political containers we’re forced into next.

Donor Organizing Defined

Even before these attacks, professionalization had narrowed our imagination. Fundraising became siloed, managed by staff professionals, and increasingly dependent on institutional philanthropy. This dependence often came with strings attached, as philanthropic funders could influence organizational priorities or limit the kinds of work they were able to pursue. Many organizations never developed individual fundraising programs, or limited them to major gifts, since grassroots and small-dollar efforts were seen as too resource-intensive compared to chasing large checks.

In that shift, volunteers were often sidelined. At best, they were asked to only help with logistics like stuffing envelopes, running check-in tables, or forwarding staff-written appeals. At worst, they were treated as passive recipients of fundraising asks, not as people who could organize others and bring in resources themselves.

So it’s no surprise that when most people think of fundraising, they imagine a transaction: one person makes an ask, another person writes a check. That’s individual fundraising—and it has its place. When organizations need to raise a large amount of money in a very short time, individual fundraising is essential. It’s direct, efficient, and can meet urgent needs.

Donor organizing is the process of organizing donors as a base through a leadership ladder: moving from donor to fundraiser to coach to team leader.

Like individual fundraising, donor organizing starts with listening. The difference is what comes next. Instead of stopping at the gift, donor organizing uses giving as a first step into collective action. The conversation connects someone’s concerns and hopes to movement solutions, and then opens a pathway for them to take deeper steps into leadership.

In practice, donor organizing does three things at once:

1. Raises resources to grow and sustain a movement (not just an individual organization).
2. Supports collaborative learning, where people deepen their understanding together—not through one-way webinars, but through shared conversations, peer circles, and opportunities to connect their own values to movement goals.
3. Builds leadership, by inviting people to move further along a ladder of engagement.

Examples of those deeper steps include, but aren’t limited to:

• Hosting a small fundraising gathering with friends and family.
• Joining with peers to pool donations and arrive at shared priorities through a giving circle.
• Stepping into a volunteer role like a welcome team or security shift.
• Coordinating outreach to prospective donors in their networks.
• Coaching or mentoring someone newer to the work.

This is what makes donor organizing not just a tactic but a movement practice. It’s how fundraising becomes organizing, growing both money and people power.

Old Models, New Terrain

These efforts weren’t charity; they were organizing.

None of this is new. Abolitionists ran fundraising bazaars. The Civil Rights Movement passed the bucket at mass meetings where people gave what they could. The Black Panthers sold their newspaper and the Little Red Book both to raise money and to educate prospective members. Labor unions have long sustained themselves through dues.

These efforts weren’t charity; they were organizing. They were ways of building movements, where raising money went hand in hand with deepening commitment, growing membership, and cultivating leadership. And unlike a dollar that’s gone once it’s spent, when someone is trained to fundraise they can do it again year after year, train others to do the same, and often step into other forms of leadership and commitment in the organization and the broader movement.

Today, the terrain is different, but the principles remain the same. We see them echoed in:

• House party networks that cascade and produce new hosts at scale.
• Giving circles and donor cohorts that create ongoing spaces for collective strategy.
• Membership models that bring directly impacted people and allies together in building the movements they want to see.
• Distributed peer-to-peer fundraising teams, often campaign-style, that replicate the practice across networks and keep expanding who participates.

What unites these models is not the tactic itself but the approach: fundraising as a practice of organizing, one that expands participation and strengthens the movement at the same time as it brings in resources.

Block and Build

Fundraising practices need to do two things at once: block attacks on our existing infrastructure and build the next layer of movement capacity.

Block

Many groups are setting up 501(c)(4)s or PACs to protect themselves from legal attacks and ensure resources flow into critical fights. While these moves are critical, they’re not enough. Creating new legal vessels helps us survive assaults on the 501(c)(3) system, but doesn’t automatically expand our base, grow leadership, or change how money moves into movements. Our current funding is heavily reliant on foundations and wealthy individuals who predominantly support 501(c)(3) organizations, so simply changing our legal structure without developing new fundraising practices and building a broader base of supporters could leave us without the resources we need to build and sustain our movements.

Build

Creating new legal structures helps us withstand immediate attacks, but on its own it doesn’t expand our base or grow leadership. Donor organizing does both. Training someone to fundraise is an investment that multiplies: they can raise again year after year, mentor others, and often step into broader leadership roles. That’s the difference between simply surviving the current wave of attacks and building the long-term capacity our movements need.

What It Will Take

If donor organizing is going to move from the margins to the center, it will require shifts in how we think, act, and structure ourselves—not just at the individual level, but across organizations and movements. Four interconnected shifts stand out:

Organizational culture shifts

Fundraising must be collectivized. Everyone in a movement ecosystem—staff, board, volunteers, donors, and other constituents—should both give and fundraise, even if it’s just $1 or asking one friend. This normalizes fundraising as part of collective responsibility and leadership, not something outsourced to a few staffed specialists.

Leadership shifts

Volunteer fundraisers should be seen as leaders throughout an organization, not siloed within a “development” box. That means providing clear pathways (donor → fundraiser → coach → team leader) and recognizing that those who fundraise are also building base, shaping political homes, and developing others’ leadership capacity.

Capacity shifts

Growing capacity shouldn’t fall only on staff. The staff role is to start small (even with just three volunteer fundraisers) and give them the tools, coaching, and encouragement to move forward. From there, volunteers can lead the way through peer coaching, giving circles, distributed fundraising teams, and campaign-style efforts that replicate and expand across networks. Each trained fundraiser becomes a multiplier who can raise again, mentor others, and create new teams.

Narrative shifts

Too often, our asks are siloed: we ask people for their time or for their money, but rarely both. This separation keeps fundraising apart from volunteering and leadership development. When we bring these asks together, giving becomes one step on a broader leadership ladder: an entry point into deeper movement building rather than a parallel track.

Taken together, these shifts point to a culture where donor organizing is not an afterthought but a foundation—where people at every level skill up, practice together, and encourage others to do the same. That’s how we build the resilient structures our movements will need to win.

Examples Emerging Now

These shifts aren’t abstract — they’re already taking root in groups experimenting with donor organizing today:

• The self-organized Grassroots Fundraising Network has become a collaborative hub where volunteers fundraising for campaigns, political organizations, and civic groups focused on voter participation come together to share strategies and learn from one another. Many volunteer fundraisers are doing this work for the first time and without colleagues around them. The network offers them three things: chances to learn from movement leaders who share expertise, skill-building trainings, and peer reflections that help participants see the commonalities in their experiences. This space breaks down silos, reduces burnout, and grows collective confidence in the practice of donor organizing.
• HouseUS is investing in training tenant leaders to apply their tenant organizing skills to donor organizing through membership models and grassroots fundraising tactics. The training builds on what tenant leaders already do well—mapping relationships, moving people into action, and sustaining participation—and applies those same skills to bringing in resources. By structuring membership around both primary constituencies (directly impacted tenants) and secondary constituencies (allies and supporters), tenant organizers are modeling how fundraising itself can extend tenant leadership and strengthen organizing for the long term.
• Movement Voter Project’s house party volunteer program is showing how fundraising can be collectivized. The organization was initially built with funding from major and middle-class donors, but many volunteers wanted to participate by canvassing. That created a challenge: canvassing out of district required time and travel, and left little room for deeper leadership development. The house party program solved that by tapping into volunteers’ existing skills and networks at home, giving them a way to directly support grassroots groups while also creating ongoing leadership pathways that one-off canvassing shifts rarely make possible.
• TrustBrigade is a volunteer-powered deep canvassing operation built by veteran organizers that is resourcing its work entirely through distributed peer-to-peer fundraising. The challenge they face is how to scale a volunteer-led effort to fight division, fear, and misinformation without relying on traditional top-down funding streams. Their approach puts volunteers at the center of resourcing the campaign: each person raises directly from their networks, multiplying reach and ownership. This model ensures that fundraising is not just about sustaining the project, but about distributing leadership and building the same kind of relational power that their canvassing depends on.

Each of these examples illustrates what it looks like when fundraising and organizing aren’t siloed. They show how donor organizing can grow resources, develop leadership, and strengthen political homes all at once.

Concrete Organizing Comes From a Clear Ask

Let’s return to that living room we imagined at the beginning. The snacks are still on the table, the folding chairs pulled close together. What looked like a small fundraiser is actually something bigger: people giving what they can, stepping into new roles, and inviting others to join them. It’s a moment of community, of leadership, of movement building.

How do you get this type of donor organizing started in the first place? It starts with you.

Too often, we get stuck in “grant-proposal mode”: polishing language, passing slide drafts around for edits, or recreating toolkits in silos. Organizing doesn’t happen that way. It happens through live conversations that you experiment with, iterate on, and improve based on what you learn.

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Featured image by Kimmie Dearest