Stop Being a Donor.

The Muslim nonprofit sector will change when we change how we give. That starts with all of us during these last ten nights of Ramadan.

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Every Ramadan we all get inundated with fundraising appeals. Emails, SMS messages, mailers, and those very personal and intimate what’s app forwards. Dig a water well here. Sponsor an orphan there. Support your bothers and sisters in…(pick a country). Urgent Masjid construction. School projects etc. What do we do? We open our wallets and we give generously. We feel good about it, and then... we go back to our lives. The organizations (more than one as we like to spread the love) get the money, we get the automated thank you and receipt in our inbox, and the deed is done. Alhamdulillah, right?

Well. Not quite.

Most of us have been trained (conditioned) to be donors, and donors, bless our generous hearts, are essentially ATM machines with a conscience. Organizations (I’m talking predominantly about humanitarian and poverty eradication organizations here, but not exclusively) put in the emotional appeal, they get out the cash, and the relationship ends there. We have all done it. We see an emotional appeal on TV, a reel on IG, or we hear an emotional appeal at a Gala, and all of a sudden we’re reaching for our Apple Pay. We don’t know much about the cause, even less about the charity, but it’s the right thing to do. Right?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, donors don’t make impact, philanthropists do. Before I start receiving reminders in the comments section on sincerity and intention, let me be clear. I am in no way questioning the sincerity of donors or doubting their intention. On the contrary, it’s this very sincerity and love of others that makes us prime targets for emotional appeals. The point of this article is to have us all think about a simple question, are we just giving money or are we shaping outcomes with our giving?

A donation is a moment. It happens, it’s recorded, and it ends. A donation responds to a feeling, satisfies an obligation, and moves on. Thousands of donations add up to a significant sum of money, but money, on its own, is just that. It’s money. Money doesn’t think or ask questions. It doesn’t hold anyone accountable or push for better. Good philanthropists do.

Impact is what happens when giving is connected to intention, intention is connected to understanding, and understanding is connected to a real relationship with the work being done. Impact is longitudinal, it plays out over months and years, not in the emotional arc of a two-minute video. It requires someone, somewhere, to care enough to stay engaged beyond the transaction. That someone is the philanthropist. That could be you. The difference between a sector that merely receives money and a sector that genuinely transforms lives is almost entirely determined by the quality of the people funding it (us).

So when we wonder why certain issues in our communities seem stuck, why the same crises get the same emergency appeals year after year, part of the answer, uncomfortable as it is, lives in the mirror. Not because we’re not generous (the data shows we’re very generous!), but because we’re suboptimal funders. We’ve been conditioned to give like donors, when the moment needs philanthropists.

So what’s the difference?

A donor responds to urgency. A philanthropist responds to vision.

A donor gives when they feel something. A philanthropist gives because they think something. They’ve sat with a problem, understood its roots, and decided to be part of the solution in a sustained, intentional way.

A donor asks “how much should I give?” A philanthropist asks “where can my giving do the most good, and how do I know?”

A donor is a customer making a transaction. A philanthropist is a partner making an investment.

And before you dismiss my argument and think “okay, that’s for wealthy folks who give substantial sums,” let me be clear. Philanthropy is not about the size of your cheque. It’s about the quality of your intention and the depth of your engagement. You can be a philanthropist with £50 a month. You can be a donor with £50,000. I’ve seen both, and I promise you the £50 philanthropist creates more lasting impact.

Why does this matter right now?

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough about how nonprofits work: organizations go where the signal is. All of them, the good ones, the great ones, even the ones you deeply admire, are watching how their supporters behave, because they have to. They have programs to fund, staff to pay, and communities depending on them. So when they see that a thirty-second emotional video on YouTube drives ten times more donations than a detailed impact report, they learn something. They learn what you respond to. And they invest accordingly.

This is not cynicism. This is just how incentive systems work.

If we, collectively, as a giving community, keep responding to urgency over strategy, to emotion over evidence, to the loudest appeal over the most accountable organization, then that is exactly the kind of sector we will continue to fund into existence. The sector, in many ways, is a mirror. It reflects our giving behavior back at us.

This means we have far more power to shape Muslim organizations than we think!

If we start asking better questions, organizations will prepare better answers. If we start rewarding transparency, transparency becomes a competitive advantage. If we start funding long-term, structural work, more organizations will do long-term, structural work. If we show up as partners rather than passive customers, the sector will build cultures that treat us like partners.

As givers we are not just a funding source. We are a signal, and right now, collectively, we might be sending the wrong one.

What does becoming a philanthropist look like?

It starts with a question you’ve probably never asked: what do I actually care about?

Not what makes you cry in a thirty-second video. Not what your family has always given to. Not what your friends are posting about on the 27th night. What do you, with your particular experience, values, and understanding of the world, believe is worth investing in? Education? Mental health in Muslim communities? Leadership development for the next generation? Refugees? Local poverty? Environmental sustainability? Animal rights? Pick something, because when we try to fix everything, we fix nothing, and instead we end up as passive recipients of whoever has the best Ramadan marketing budget.

Then, and this is where you need to do your homework and lean in, learn about it. Read about the issue. Listen to people working in that space. Understand what the evidence says about what works. Follow organizations on social media for a few months before you give to them. Review their 990 (if applicable), audited accounts (not always available for small organizations), and annual reports. Of course these are rarely page-turners, but they exist for a reason and that reason is you.

Ask real questions. Not just “how many people did you help?” but “how do you know you helped them? What changed in their lives? Will they need help next year? What didn’t work last year, and what did you learn from it? How are the communities you serve involved in designing your programs?” Any organization doing serious work will welcome those questions, because good questions from engaged philanthropist are genuinely useful to them. It signals that you’re paying attention. And organizations that know someone is paying attention tend to perform better. That’s just human nature.

Build a relationship with the organization. Follow up with them and engage. If you give regularly, ask for updates instead of a generic monthly or quaterly newsletter. Attend an event. Join a volunteer program. If, after doing all of this, you find that an organization’s work isn’t landing the way you hoped, don’t just quietly disappear. That’s what a donor would do. The philanthropist move is to have a conversation, share your perspective, and then make a thoughtful decision about where your giving goes next. Your Zakat and Sadaqah are not loyalty programs. They are investments in outcomes, and you are allowed, I would argue obliged, to be thoughtful about where they go.

You don’t need millions. You need a mindset.

The principles of philanthropy; intentionality, relationships, accountability, long-term thinking, apply at every level of giving.

If you give $25 a month and you give it to one organization you’ve researched, whose work you understand, whose team you’ve engaged with, and whose progress you follow, you are more of a philanthropist than someone who writes a $25,000 cheque because a random video made them feel something at 11pm on their phone.

The Muslim tradition of giving is extraordinarily rich.

The waqf endowment model built hospitals, universities, and water systems across the Muslim world for centuries. Interest-free loans called Qard hasan, helped preserve dignity. The concept of sadaqah jariyah, ongoing benefit that outlives the giver, helped people invest in projects that would outlive them. These are sophisticated philanthropic frameworks that our tradition developed long before the modern nonprofit sector existed.

We have the theology. We have the resources. We’ve lost the culture.

Somewhere along the way, we deviated from what Islamic giving was always meant to be, a deeply considered, spiritually intentional act that required our brain, our soul, and our genuine understanding of where and why and how. Zakat wasn't designed to be settled in forty-five seconds between scrolling Instagram and making tea. Sadaqah wasn't meant to be a reflex. We have a rich historical tradition of strategic philanthropy across the Muslim world. That culture didn't disappear because we stopped caring. It disappeared because we no longer have to think. Modern giving asks almost nothing of us intellectually or spiritually. It only asks for our thumbs. When something requires no real thought and no real soul, it produces no real transformation in either the world or in ourselves.

The digitalization of fundraising has been genuinely transformative for our sector. Peer-to-peer platforms, electronic giving tools, digital wallets, one-click Zakat calculators, text-to-donate campaigns, all of it democratized giving in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago, mobilizing communities overnight and raising millions for causes that would never have had access to traditional philanthropic infrastructure. That is real, and it matters.

This same digital infrastructure however, almost by design, has optimized giving for speed and convenience rather than depth and relationship. The entire experience, across every platform and every app, is built around frictionless transactions. We see a campaign, we feel something, we tap our Google Pay and in forty-five seconds we have the receipt in our inbox.

None of these seamless beautifully designed digital experiences ever pause to ask us what we actually believe about the problem, whether this campaign is part of a longer strategy, or what success looks like in five years. They aren’t designed to. They are designed to convert, and they do it brilliantly. The result, over time, is that we've been trained, by technology that was genuinely trying to help, to experience giving as a series of individual emotional moments rather than a continuous, evolving relationship, building an entire giving identity on the dopamine hit of a confirmation email rather than the slower, deeper satisfaction of genuine partnership.

So here’s what I’m asking.

This Ramadan and beyond, before you open your wallet, open your mind. Sit with the question of what you actually want to change in the world. Research one or two organizations working on that thing. Ask them genuine questions. Make a giving plan, even a simple one, that you’ll carry for these last ten nights and beyond.

Vote with your giving. Fund the work that resonates with your values, not just your emotions in a given moment. Support organizations doing long-term, structural work, even when it’s less visible than an emergency appeal. Reward the ones that communicate honestly with you, including about their challenges and failures and build relationships, not just a collection of receipts.

The Muslim nonprofit sector has extraordinary potential. There are organizations doing genuinely important, life-changing work right now, often with lean teams, tight budgets, and enormous ambition. They don’t need us to be passive customers. They need us to be engaged, thoughtful, and demanding partners who push them to be even better.

And the beautiful thing is, when we show up like that, everybody wins. The organizations get better. The communities they serve get more, and us, the funders, we get what deep down we’ve always wanted from our giving: the sense that it matters and makes an impact.

The difference between a donor and a philanthropist isn’t your bank balance. It’s your belief that your giving is powerful enough to deserve a strategy.

If we want better charities, we need better philanthropy.