Skills Fundraisers Need for What Comes Next: 1) Curiosity.

Not to be liturgically pedantic or potentially pretentious (but definitely alliterative) - the oft-cited 12 Days of Christmas actually start today, December 25.

They start on Christmas Day and run through the Feast of the Epiphany in early January. For those in the Western tradition. In the Eastern and Orthodox traditions, Epiphany is later in the month. But then so is Christmas.

I digress. Of course.

This isn't a theology lesson, and no one is here to quiz you on feast days. What matters here isn't the religious calendar, but the idea underneath it.

The last week of the year is an odd, in-between space where time moves differently, It's a liminal time. A threshold. A pause between chapters.

It's a time when we start looking to the new year while closing out the old, and we try to predict what will come.

And every year around this time, the fundraising world fills up with predictions:

• What donors will do

• Which trends will matter most

• How people respond to the economy

• What tools will change everything and what things are now obsolete.

Some of these predictions will be useful. Some will be right, others will be wrong. We'll likely forget most of them by March.

Prediction is fragile and certainly conditions right now are not cooperating with what we want predictions to be.

So instead of offering forecasts about what might be, I'd like to offer something more durable.

For the next 12 Days (because the "12 Days of Christmas" lends itself nicely to the creation of an orderly, engaging list), I'm sharing twelve skills fundraisers will need in the new year to come - not because they'll control the future, but because they'll help you navigate it.

These aren't trends to chase or resolutions to perform. They’re skills that can be practiced, strengthened, and refined over time. Skills that give you agency when leadership shifts, budgets tighten, donor behavior changes, or the ground moves under your feet.

And the first of those skills — the one everything else depends on — is:

Curiosity.

Curiosity is not a vibe

In fundraising, curiosity often gets framed as a personality trait. Something you either “have” or don’t. A nice-to-have quality. A polite encouragement to ask donors questions and seem interested.

That’s not what I mean here.

Curiosity, in this context, is not about being clever, endlessly inquisitive, or perpetually fascinated. It’s not about asking questions for the sake of asking them. And it’s definitely not about performative curiosity — the kind where you ask a question but already know the answer you want.

Curiosity is a professional discipline.

It’s the practice of slowing down just enough to ask better questions before reaching for solutions.

Questions like:

• What’s actually happening here?

• What problem are we really trying to solve?

• Where is the pressure coming from?

• What assumptions are we carrying that might no longer be true?

Those questions don’t slow good fundraising down.They prevent it from speeding confidently in the wrong direction.

Fundraising is a system (even when we pretend it isn’t)

One of the quiet habits we’ve developed in fundraising is treating problems as isolated events.

Response rates drop, so we rewrite the subject line.Revenue dips, so we add a campaign.Retention falters, so we launch a tactic.

Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t — or it works briefly and creates new problems downstream.

That’s because fundraising is not a collection of tactics. It’s a system.

Strategy, systems, story, data, leadership, staffing, timing, donor experience — all of these influence one another constantly, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Curiosity is how you begin to understand that system.

It’s how you stop treating symptoms in isolation and start noticing patterns.It’s how you distinguish between noise and signal.It’s how you avoid mistaking activity for progress.

Without curiosity, we default to reaction.With it, we gain orientation.

And orientation is what allows intelligent action to follow.

Curiosity protects us from false certainty

There’s a particular kind of confidence that shows up in fundraising under pressure. It sounds decisive. It feels productive. It often arrives with a PowerPoint.

It’s also frequently wrong.

Curiosity interrupts false certainty — not by undermining confidence, but by earning it.

A curious fundraiser doesn’t rush to explain away disappointing results. They ask what might be contributing to them. They don’t immediately blame donors, platforms, or “the economy.” They look for feedback loops, internal constraints, and structural misalignments.

They’re willing to sit with uncertainty long enough to understand it.

That doesn’t make them passive.It makes them precise.

Curiosity about systems is really curiosity about people

Here’s where curiosity gets deeper — and more human.

At its core, fundraising isn’t about money, metrics, or mechanisms. It’s about people. Messy, contradictory, meaning-seeking people.

People who want to be generous and are tired.People who care and are overwhelmed.People who say one thing and do another — sometimes in the same week.

Curiosity is how we resist the temptation to flatten that complexity.

It’s a way of saying:Humans are interesting.Generosity is interesting.Behavior has reasons, even when it’s inconvenient.

Curiosity invites us to ask:

• What does generosity mean to this person?

• What fears, hopes, or identities might be shaping their response?

• What story are they telling themselves about their role in the world?

That kind of curiosity isn’t transactional. It’s respectful.It’s rooted in a quiet affection for humanity — not naïve optimism, but genuine interest.

And without that interest, fundraising becomes brittle very quickly.

Curiosity keeps us human, too

There’s another reason curiosity matters, especially now.

Fundraising has a way of training people out of curiosity. Constant urgency, endless optimization, public metrics, and perpetual comparison make it safer to stop asking questions and start following scripts.

Curiosity pushes back.

It gives us permission to wonder instead of assume.To learn instead of perform.To notice instead of rush.

It reminds us that donors are not data points, organizations are not machines, and fundraisers are not interchangeable units of productivity.

Curiosity re-humanizes the work — for the people we serve and for the people doing it.

This series is not about certainty

Let me be clear about what this series is not.

It’s not a prediction about where fundraising is headed.

It’s not a promise that these skills will eliminate difficulty.

And it’s not an argument that uncertainty can be solved with the right framework.

What it is is an invitation to pay better attention — to the systems we’re part of, the people we’re working with, and the stories we’re telling ourselves about what’s possible.

Curiosity doesn’t promise certainty. It offers understanding.

And understanding is what allows us to move through change with intention rather than fear.

The beginning, not the conclusion

The Twelve days of Christmas don’t culminate in accumulation. They culminate in recognition — the moment of epiphany, when meaning becomes clear in hindsight.

That idea isn’t religious. It’s human.

This series begins the same way: not with answers, but with attention.

Not with certainty, but with curiosity.

Tomorrow, we’ll keep going. Curious about what the next skill is?