Visionary Voices is philanthropy.org’s editorial forum for serious ideas, hard-earned lessons, and informed perspectives shaping the future of philanthropy. It is a place for practitioners, leaders, and thinkers to examine what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Contributions explore strategy, governance, donor engagement, ethics, and the structural forces influencing philanthropy today. Articles are grounded in experience, analysis, and reflection—not promotion.
If you’ve developed insight through practice, research, or leadership, we welcome thoughtful submissions that advance credible dialogue and long-term thinking in the field.
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Many fundraising strategies that proved effective in 2025 were driven by anticipation. Donors accelerated gifts, advanced multi-year commitments, and responded to urgency-based messaging as tax
Donors are reading your Form 990, and most of them never call. What they want to know is whether your nonprofit is planning for the next 50 years. Major gifts matter, but planned giving belongs at the start of your fundraising strategy because it shows you are planning for the future. Here’s why wealthy donors, foundations and government funders all judge you the same way, and how to show them your future.
We spend enormous amounts of time talking about our missions and values, but we don’t always talk about the culture that determines whether those values actually come to life.
Whether you’re a community foundation sharing grant outcomes, a nonprofit reporting program results, or a university connecting scholarship donors to students, the moment your donor hears from or about the person their money reached is rarely given the strategic attention it deserves.
A widow lost her entire deduction because a museum left one sentence out of a thank-you letter. Your acknowledgment template may be doing the same thing right now, and nobody will ever tell you.
Most nonprofits have never read the document their biggest donors read first. Your Form 990 lists what you paid people, not what you accomplished, and major donors, foundations, and estate attorneys are reading it right now. You can’t change the filing. You can claim your nonprofit profile free, add your mission, your outcomes, and your legacy giving contact, and stop letting a tax form speak for you.
The Form 990 asks what an organization spent last year. It does not ask what its leaders did before they got here. Treasury is weighing new disclosure rules for nonprofit officers. They address the wrong half of the problem — and the public record still won’t show you the difference.
It might be tempting to universally disparage overhead costs for a global foundation, especially when the budget for a single overseas trip by a US-based philanthropic executive could easily exceed the annual salaries of the local populace. But understanding the decision to open a satellite office overseas is not, however, simply a question of overhead excess vs frugality.
A donor just printed an article listing eight hard questions to ask her favorite charity before naming it in her will. Yours may be on that list. In a few weeks she’s going to call, and one conversation will decide it. Most nonprofits fail this test and never learn they failed — because a bequest that quietly goes elsewhere sends no rejection letter.