Purpose Blog

New federal tax rules are giving more Americans a potential tax benefit for supporting the causes they care about. Here's what they mean for online donations and monthly giving.

A donor taps “Give.” The payment clears, and a receipt lands in the inbox within seconds. Then a quiet question follows: what happens now?

A few weeks ago, a reader named Gary shared a story with me that I haven't stopped thinking about. Walking through cities with his young children, he would pass someone panhandling, move on, then quietly send one of his kids back with a dollar and a kind word.

Across this series, I've written often about what's broken in digital giving. This week, I want to flip the lens: what are the nonprofits with healthy online donation balances actually doing right? The 2025 data points to a clear playbook.

I have spent a decade of my life inside philanthropy. A decade watching extraordinary generosity flow toward extraordinary causes. And yet one number has never stopped unsettling me: roughly 91% of all charitable donations concentrate in organizations based in North America and Europe.

Beneath every donor's preferences, habits, and history, there is something older and quieter. A core. A version of the self that does not change with trends, life stages, or financial circumstances. It is the part of a person that knows, almost wordlessly, what they were put here to care about.

There is a moment in the life of a committed donor that almost no one talks about. It is the moment they stop being themselves, at least in the way they used to define themselves and begin to merge with the cause they support. This is identity ceding.

Every act of giving is, at its core, an act of self-expression. The donor is not just transferring money to a cause. They are answering a quieter question: who am I, and how does this gift reflect that?.

There is no single road to meaningful philanthropy. There are many, and most donors never realize they are walking one.

There is a quiet but profound difference between people who give and people who belong to what they give to.

For years, crypto philanthropy was dismissed as a novelty, a niche behavior confined to early adopters and Bitcoin maximalists. In 2025, that view became untenable.

The previous posts in this series have explored digital giving from the donor's perspective, their psychology, their financial timing, their generational habits. But there is another side to this story. And it is struggling.

For analog generations, the philanthropy journey begins with an institution. A church, a university, a hospital. The donor trusts the organization first, then writes a check. The relationship is vertical, built on loyalty, sustained through direct mail, and measured in annual giving cycles. Boomers still account for the highest average household donations and remain the most frequent online givers, averaging 8.6 digital gifts per year according to the Giving by Generation report from Giving USA Foundation . But their digital behavior is an adaptation, not an instinct.

A person makes their first digital donation. They feel something, a spark of purpose, a moment of alignment between who they are and how they spend. The transaction clears. A confirmation email arrives. And then: silence...

You check your bank balance every day. You review transactions, track spending, monitor investments. Your financial app knows when you get paid, when your rent hits, when your portfolio moves. It understands your money better than you do.

What if technology could understand not just what you give to, but when you are most likely to give, and why?.

In the PURPOSE Post TEN we explored where America's $592.5 billion in charitable dollars go by cause. Now the question sharpens: where do those dollars come from and who is behind them?.

What the Distribution of U.S. Giving Reveals About the Future of Digital Philanthropy.

Most Americans give reactively. A campaign lands in their inbox, an impulse strikes, a year-end deadline looms and they donate. But giving without a strategy is like investing without a portfolio. You might do some good, but you are almost certainly leaving value on the table for yourself and for the causes you care about.

Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant Meaningful Philanthropy (2024) draws on interviews with 48 high and ultra-high net worth philanthropists to establish a critical distinction: the meaning donors experience through giving is fundamentally different from the impact their giving produces. Through the lens of philanthropic psychology, the authors show that sustained generosity is not driven by outcome metrics but by psychological ownership, identity transformation, and the discovery of what they call the "essential self."

Over the next ten years, $22 trillion will transfer from Baby Boomers to Gen X and Millennials, the largest decade of wealth movement in history. Gen X alone will inherit $1.4 trillion annually (Cerulli Associates, 2025).

Donor Advised Funds have become the fastest-growing vehicle in American philanthropy. In fiscal year 2024, total DAF assets reached $326 billion—a 30% jump from the prior year (DAF Research Collaborative , December 2025).

That's generosity—but it's also unpredictability.

That gap defines the crisis in digital philanthropy.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act rewrote the rules for charitable deductions. If you're a donor—or advise them—here's what you need to know.

Digital giving infrastructure was built to serve organizations, not the people who give.

95% of philanthropic foundations are based in these two regions. 97% of global foundation assets sit here too.

There's something fundamentally broken in how we give digitally.