Three hundred thousand years ago, our earliest ancestors gathered to honor their dead. We have the physical evidence — the ritual sites, the bone arrangements, the careful repetition that says we did this together, and we did it again. That, anthropologists tell us, is the first human algorithm.
we did this together, and we did it again.
I keep turning the phrase over.
A piece in The New York Times this week makes the case that ritual — collective, recurring, embodied, in person — is rushing back into American life as people reach the breaking point of digital saturation, polarization, and loneliness. They are gathering. Marking.
Synchronizing heartbeats. Building community in the doing.
This is not a soft story. It is a story about what humans actually need to survive each other and themselves. And it carries an indictment, quiet but sharp, of every product and platform that has tried to substitute for the thing.
Here is what I want my sector to hear.
Fundraising has its own ritual lineage. The annual gala. The site visit. The thank-you call placed by a board member at the end of a long Tuesday. The donor who, twenty years into the relationship, still comes to the same lunch in the same week of the same month because that is when we honor what we built together. These are not transactions. They never were. They are rites — recurring, embodied, shared — and they do exactly what the anthropologists describe. They calm. They synchronize. They bind.
Here is what I want my sector to admit.
We have been quietly optimizing them away.
We have been told, by very confident people with very fast tools, that the path forward in philanthropy is more automation, more personalization-at-scale, more AI-generated touchpoints, more frictionless giving, fewer humans in the loop. We have been told this is efficiency. We have been told donors prefer it. We have been told the gala is dead and the dinner is dead and the in-person ask is a relic of a slower era.
Meanwhile, the broader culture — the same humans we are trying to reach — is voting with its feet and its calendar and its phone-in-a-Faraday-bag, and walking out the door to find one another again.
We are at the exact wrong moment to trade the first human algorithm for the latest one.
What ritual does for a donor is what ritual has always done for a person. It locates them inside something larger and older and steadier than the news cycle. It says you belong here, and your belonging is not contingent on the next gift. It synchronizes the heartbeat of a community around something worth doing twice. Three times. Every year for thirty years.
That is not a quaint nonprofit habit. That is the technology we evolved to use.
So the question for every leader reading this is not how do we modernize the donor experience.
The question is older, and harder.
What do we do here that is worth doing again, and again, and again, in the same way, in the same room, with the same people, until it means something?
That is the work. It always was.