The Major Gift May Already Be Made

By Kristin Peck, Peck Advisory Group Photo Credit: K. Peck

Major-gift fundraising has traditionally been described as a sequence: identify, qualify, cultivate, solicit, steward. In fact, AFP Greater Kansas City organized much of its 2026 summer programming around precisely that progression—prospect identification and qualification, cultivation and solicitation, then stewardship. It is a sound framework.

But it rests on an assumption that is becoming less reliable: that the consequential financial decision happens somewhere near the solicitation.

Will I part with my money and give it to this organization?

For an increasing number of affluent donors, that decision has already been made.

The asset may have been transferred months or years ago into a donor-advised fund. It may sit inside a foundation, charitable trust or estate plan. The donor may already have relinquished legal ownership of the money while retaining advisory privileges over where charitable dollars go. In those cases, the nonprofit is not principally trying to create generosity. It is competing for deployment.

The money has moved before the fundraiser enters the room

Consider what happened in Kansas City last year. At the end of 2025, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation reported approximately $8.89 billion in charitable assets across 8,320 funds. During that single year, donors contributed more than $2.04 billion to charitable accounts and recommended more than $871 million in grants. Those contributions included not merely cash and publicly traded securities, but privately held business interests, private investments and cryptocurrency.

Obviously, the difference between contributions and grants is not a large bowl of unclaimed money into which local development directors may reach with a sufficiently charming case statement. Those assets have donors, purposes, investment strategies and histories attached to them. But the numbers reveal something important about the actual philanthropic market. Kansas City is sitting amid an enormous pool of capital that has already crossed the threshold into philanthropy.

Nationally, the same transformation is well underway. Donor-advised-fund assets exceeded $326 billion by the end of 2024, even before a surge of contributions in late 2025 as donors anticipated changes in federal tax law. Fidelity Charitable alone reported $18.3 billion in donor-recommended grants in 2025, up 23 percent from the previous year.

This changes the central major-gifts question. It is no longer simply, Why should this person give? Increasingly it is: Why should this person deploy philanthropic capital here, now, at this scale?

The numerator is growing while the denominator shrinks

The broader giving data makes the change even clearer.

Giving USA reported that Americans gave an estimated $617.2 billion in 2025, passing $600 billion for the first time. Individual giving reached $394.2 billion. Foundation giving reached $117.15 billion. Bequests surged 19.7 percent to $62.19 billion.

Splendid news, until one looks at the denominator. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that total fundraising dollars rose about 5 percent in 2025 even as the number of donors fell 3.6 percent. Much of the growth came from larger gifts. In the first quarter of 2026, dollars continued growing and the decline in donor numbers moderated, but retention actually weakened across small, midsize, major and supersize donor segments.

That leaves nonprofits operating in a philanthropic market that is simultaneously wealthier, narrower and more competitive. And there is plenty of wealth.

Four days ago, Forbes reported that the collective fortunes of the Forbes 400 had increased by approximately $1.4 trillion in twelve months, or 21 percent. Forbes estimates that the group has given at least $366 billion to charity over their lifetimes—but that giving has not kept pace with the extraordinary growth in their wealth. That should cure us of one persistent fundraising misconception: capacity and philanthropic intent are not synonyms.

Wealth screening can tell you who owns assets. It cannot tell you what they believe those assets are for.

The tax code moved the clock

The 2026 tax changes complicate the picture further. Beginning this year, taxpayers who itemize generally receive a charitable deduction only for contributions above 0.5 percent of adjusted gross income. Non-itemizers now have access to a deduction of up to $1,000 for individuals and $2,000 for married couples filing jointly for eligible cash gifts, while contributions to DAFs do not qualify for that particular deduction. Corporations also face a new charitable-deduction floor.

The predictable response among some affluent donors has been to bunch giving: make larger charitable contributions in selected years and use vehicles such as DAFs to distribute those charitable assets over time. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported a marked surge in contributions to DAFs at the end of 2025 as donors prepared for the new rules, followed by increased grantmaking in early 2026.

For major-gifts professionals, the practical implication is subtle but significant.

The tax year in which a donor funds philanthropy and the year in which your nonprofit receives the money may now be completely different.

That means December 31 is not always the persuasive deadline we imagine it to be. A donor whose money is already inside a DAF has already received the charitable deduction. Telling that person to make a grant before year-end for tax reasons is not urgency. It is evidence that we have not understood the account. The urgency instead has to come from the work. What can happen now that could not happen later? What population can be reached? What capacity can be built? What opportunity will disappear? What additional capital can this gift unlock? A calendar is not a case for support.

Major donors are increasingly underwriting institutions, not merely programs

The 2025 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy offers another useful clue. Eighty-one percent of affluent households gave to charity in 2024, with average contributions exceeding $33,000. Personal values were the strongest reported driver of giving, and nearly four in five affluent donors supported organizations in their own communities. Giving vehicles are becoming more common: 24 percent of affluent households already had one, while nearly half of households worth $5 million to $20 million either had one or expected to establish one within three years.

There is also a striking relationship between involvement and generosity. Affluent people who volunteered gave, on average, roughly two and a half times as much as those who did not. So yes, relationships remain essential.

But “relationships” is sometimes used in fundraising as though it were a pleasantly scented substitute for strategy.

A sophisticated major donor is not simply evaluating whether the executive director is likable or whether lunch went well. As gift size grows, the donor is increasingly making judgments about the institution itself: leadership, governance, financial discipline, evidence, execution, adaptability and whether the organization can responsibly absorb substantially more capital. The question becomes less Do I like these people? and more What will be different because I entrusted this organization with significant resources?

That is where development becomes inseparable from organizational strategy.

A fundraiser who can tell a beautiful story but cannot explain what an additional $1 million would actually change has not yet constructed a $1 million case for support.

Likewise, the answer cannot simply be a longer version of the annual-fund brochure. Transformational philanthropy requires the organization to think at transformational scale.

Kansas City is already providing conspicuous examples of capital moving that way. The Sunderland Foundation, with more than $1 billion in assets, announced plans this year to distribute a significant portion of those assets by 2030. The Mallouk Family Foundation committed $30 million toward accessible parks across the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, major civic institutions are advancing projects at entirely different orders of magnitude, including the Kansas City Symphony's planned $70 million South Plaza venue.

Whatever one thinks about any particular project, these are not decisions produced by adding a stronger adjective to the year-end appeal. They are decisions about what should exist.

Kansas City still does philanthropy in rooms

There is a distinctly Kansas City layer to all of this. Read The Independent for a few months and the architecture of local philanthropy becomes visible: benefactor receptions, board leaders, fundraising events, civic volunteers, committee chairs and the same human beings appearing across multiple institutions. Its 2026 coverage includes everything from the Jewish Federation's Major Benefactors and Lion of Judah reception to profiles of emerging philanthropic leaders serving simultaneously on boards, development committees and community organizations. That social fabric matters.

Kansas City still does a great deal of philanthropy in rooms. People know one another. Board service matters. Introductions matter. Reputations travel. The person seated beside you at one organization's dinner may chair another organization's foundation committee six months later. In a market like this, social capital is not ornamental to fundraising. It is part of the infrastructure. But there is a trap here, too. Access is not the same thing as readiness.

A board member can get an organization into the room. A gala can deepen affinity. A volunteer experience can create firsthand connection. The Independent's charitable calendar alone demonstrates how much civic life continues to revolve around these encounters. But the room is where due diligence begins, not where it ends.

And this is why stewardship deserves a more serious definition than the one it sometimes receives. Stewardship is not thank-you stationery with better cardstock. It is the continuing demonstration that an institution does what it said it would do, learns when conditions change, communicates intelligently and treats a donor's trust as something more consequential than an entry in a CRM. That matters particularly when the next gift may be dramatically larger than the last one.

The ask has been demoted

None of this makes solicitation less important. Someone eventually has to ask. But I think we have spent too many years treating the ask as the dramatic climax of major-gift fundraising. The contemporary philanthropic market suggests something else.

The ask is being demoted from plot to punctuation.

The difficult work occurs before it: understanding what a donor values; recognizing whether the relevant resource is income, appreciated assets, a DAF, an estate or something more complex; understanding the people and advisers involved in the decision; identifying an opportunity commensurate with the donor's ambition; and making certain the organization can actually execute what it proposes.

That does not mean fundraisers should become amateur financial planners. Please don't. No one needs a development officer freelancing as a tax attorney over lunch. It does mean fundraisers need enough financial and philanthropic fluency to recognize when the conversation has moved beyond cash—and enough judgment to bring the donor's professional advisers and the nonprofit's own experts into the discussion when appropriate.

AFP itself is emphasizing the growing importance of DAF fluency in 2026, noting both their explosive growth and the practical difficulty many nonprofits still have identifying, processing and stewarding DAF donors effectively. The Chronicle has likewise urged nonprofits to become more capable of receiving gifts of complex assets rather than limiting major-gift conversations to cash donors already understand how to transfer.

The organizations that understand this will begin to view major-gift fundraising less as a succession of persuasive encounters and more as capital translation.

The donor brings values, resources, history, relationships and an idea—sometimes still an indistinct one—of what their philanthropy ought to accomplish. The institution brings mission, expertise, infrastructure, community knowledge and opportunities for change.

The fundraiser's real work is making those two things legible to one another.

That is particularly important now because the much-discussed Great Wealth Transfer is beginning to appear in actual giving data rather than conference-session titles. Bequest giving reached $62.19 billion in 2025, increasing nearly 20 percent; it was the third year out of four in which bequests rose by roughly 20 percent or more in current dollars. The nonprofits positioned to benefit will not merely be those with the best prospect lists. They will be the ones donors can understand, trust and imagine at scale. The major gift may already be made. The capital may already be charitable. The question for the nonprofit is whether it can make a credible argument that here, now, this institution can turn that capital into something worth doing.

And yes, eventually somebody still has to ask.

But if everything before that sentence has been done well, the sentence itself should not be expected to perform miracles.