The Curious Case of Consumer Confidence, Sportsball (and Sportspuck), and Fundraising Assumptions

Having just recently moved away from Las Vegas, I was, of course, paying attention to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I am not a sports person at all, but like everyone in the Vegas valley at the time, the Golden Knights grabbed our hearts and our attention when they came to town.

And then we had the Knicks and all that hullabaloo and FIFA fever started kicking up and I thought to myself "Now, how are they selling all of these tickets and merch and watch parties at bars and restaurants with the economy being so bad that people have stopped giving to charities?!?" I mean, that's what I hear all the time lately - "oh, it's the economy. That's why people aren't giving." But people were paying hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for playoff tickets and it seemed like the stadiums were all full. So were hotels, flights, restaurants . . .

And in just a few days we'll have a new edition of GivingUSA to pore over, trying to figure out what happened in 2025.

As happens every year, we'll immediately begin searching for explanations.

If giving increased, we'll want to know why.

If giving declined, we'll want to know why.

And before long, the conversation will almost certainly turn to the economy; it always does. Inflation, interest rates, stock market, politics, consumer confidence -- all up or down or flat or . . . who knows.

All of those things may be true. In fact, many of them are true. Economic conditions absolutely influence charitable giving. Donors cannot give money they do not have, and major economic disruptions have always affected philanthropy. (Usually as a lagging indicator, though - look back at reports during the Great Recession and the pandemic).

Lately, though, I've found myself wondering whether fundraisers sometimes move too quickly from "economic conditions matter" to "economic conditions explain giving."

I'm not entirely sure they do.

Or at least, I'm not sure they explain as much as we sometimes assume.

Part of what has me thinking about this is simply paying attention to what's happening around us.

A few weeks ago, basketball fans were paying astonishing amounts of money to attend the NBA Finals. Reports placed average resale prices for some New York Knicks home games above $5,000 per ticket, with premium seats selling for dramatically more. Some fans reportedly discovered it was cheaper to fly to San Antonio, book a hotel room, buy a game ticket, and make a weekend of it than it was to attend a home game at Madison Square Garden.

At roughly the same time, Stanley Cup Final tickets routinely exceeded $1,000 per seat on secondary markets. Arenas were full. Hotels were busy. Airplanes were carrying fans across the country.

Now we find ourselves in the middle of FIFA World Cup excitement. Here in the Seattle region, projections call for roughly 750,000 visitors associated with World Cup events and nearly $1 billion in economic activity. Those visitors aren't simply buying match tickets. They're purchasing airline tickets, hotel rooms, restaurant meals, transportation, souvenirs, experiences, and memories.

Meanwhile, summer vacation season has arrived right on schedule. Airports are crowded. Cruise ships are sailing. National parks are busy. Concerts continue to sell out. Families are heading to beaches, mountains, amusement parks, and destinations both near and far.

None of this proves that people are financially comfortable. That's not the point I'm making. Plenty of families are feeling squeezed. Plenty of donors are making difficult decisions.

What fascinates me is that even amid economic uncertainty, people continue to find ways to spend significant amounts of money on things that matter deeply to them.

That observation raises a question that I don't hear discussed very often in fundraising circles.

Are we sure charitable giving operates according to the same psychological rules as consumer spending?

Consumer confidence is one of the most widely cited economic indicators in America. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index attempts to measure how people feel about current and future economic conditions. Businesses use it. Economists use it. Investors use it. Fundraisers use it.

And for good reason. Consumer confidence can tell us a great deal about sentiment, caution, optimism, and purchasing behavior.

But charitable giving isn't purchasing behavior.

For years, our profession has borrowed heavily from the language of business, marketing, and consumer behavior. We talk about donor acquisition, retention, conversion, lifetime value, customer journeys, and customer experience. Some of that language has been useful. Some of it has improved fundraising substantially.

Yet I've never been entirely comfortable with the increasingly common assertion that donors are customers. (Or that fundraising is sales, but that's a whole other blog post).

The reason has nothing to do with stewardship. Donors deserve excellent service. They deserve responsiveness, gratitude, transparency, and respect. Organizations should absolutely strive to create exceptional donor experiences.

What gives me pause is the assumption that the motivation behind charitable giving is fundamentally similar to the motivation behind purchasing.

Customers acquire something.

Donors participate in something.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

This is where I find myself returning to the work of Richard Thaler and his concept of mental accounting. Thaler's research demonstrated that people do not treat every dollar as interchangeable. Instead, we create categories, both consciously and unconsciously, that shape how money is allocated and how decisions are made.

Most of us have experienced this ourselves. We maintain separate mental buckets for vacations, retirement, housing, entertainment, emergencies, hobbies, education, or family needs. The dollars may technically be identical, but psychologically they often are not.

I've begun wondering whether charitable giving occupies its own mental account for many donors.

If that's true, it changes the nature of the decision entirely.

A committed donor may not be deciding whether to support a nonprofit instead of attending a soccer match, taking a vacation, or buying concert tickets. Those decisions may live in entirely different categories.

Instead, the donor may be deciding which causes, organizations, and communities deserve a place within the portion of their life already reserved for generosity.

That possibility becomes even more interesting when viewed through the lens of philanthropic psychology.

Researchers such as Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang have spent years exploring the relationship between identity and giving. Their work suggests that generosity is often deeply connected to how people understand themselves and how they wish to live in the world. Giving is not merely a transfer of resources. It is frequently an expression of values, beliefs, commitments, relationships, and identity.

When someone supports a food bank, an arts organization, an animal shelter, a university, a church, or a conservation group, they are not simply solving a problem. They are often expressing something about who they are and what matters to them.

That perspective also aligns surprisingly well with Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their work suggests that human motivation is shaped by three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

As I think about philanthropy, I can see all three at work.

Giving allows people to exercise choice and agency. It allows them to feel that their actions matter and can create change. It connects them to communities, causes, and people beyond themselves.

In other words, giving may satisfy needs that have very little to do with consumption.

That's part of why I struggle when economic discussions about philanthropy focus exclusively on affordability.

Affordability matters. Capacity matters. Wealth matters.

But those things alone cannot explain why two households with similar incomes often give dramatically different amounts. They cannot explain why generosity sometimes increases during moments of crisis. They cannot explain why some donors maintain charitable commitments even when they are cutting back elsewhere.

Something else is happening: Identity matters. Belonging and purpose matter. Meaning certainly seems to matter. (Yes, I'm resisting the urge to quote Chumbawamba here, but if you know Tubthumping you're welcome for the ear worm).

As Giving USA is released this week, there will be no shortage of analysis. We will examine donor counts, giving totals, inflation-adjusted trends, and year-over-year changes. We should. Those numbers matter.

What I hope we don't do is immediately assume that charitable giving is simply another form of consumer spending and therefore fully explained by consumer indicators.

Consumer confidence tells us something important about how people feel.

The NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup playoffs, FIFA World Cup tourism, summer travel, concerts, and countless other examples remind us that people continue to devote significant resources to experiences, communities, and activities that feel meaningful to them.

The question that keeps lingering in my mind is whether philanthropy belongs in that same category.

Not the category of spending; the category of meaning.

Because if giving is primarily an expression of identity, belonging, and values rather than a purchasing decision, then perhaps the most important question for fundraisers isn't whether donors can afford to give.

Perhaps the more important question is whether we have created an invitation compelling enough, meaningful enough, and human enough that donors want to include us among the things that matter most.