By Sterrin Bird, Wingspan Philanthropy

“I came up in fundraising when relationship was the only tool anyone had. I’ve spent a long time wondering when we decided that was a problem to be solved.”

This week, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for knowingly addicting a young woman to their platforms. The finding wasn’t negligence. It was malice — a word that means they knew, and continued anyway.

Paul Klein wrote something sharp in response: that this is the industry’s Big Tobacco moment, and that the playbook is already familiar. The companies won’t stop. They’ll sponsor wellness initiatives, launch family safety centers, build school curricula. And the infinite scroll, the autoplay, the algorithmic amplification — the features that actually manipulate behavior — will stay exactly where they are.

He’s right. And sitting with that, I found myself thinking not just about the platforms, but about us.

By which I mean the nonprofit sector. The fundraising world. My world.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth: many of the organizations doing the most essential work for young people — organizations whose entire mission is human flourishing — have been running their donor engagement through the same platforms a jury just found liable for knowingly harming a child. We used the tools because the reach was real and the price looked right. I’m not casting stones. I’ve been in rooms where those decisions made complete sense on a spreadsheet. I’ve sold the ‘customer 360’ like it was an end game and not the journey that was important.

But this verdict made me think about why I work the way I work.  Why I came back to center.

I came up in fundraising at a time when relationship was the only tool anyone had. You called people. You sat with them. You listened — not as a technique, but because it was the only way to understand whether your mission connected with their lives. There was no algorithm to optimize. There was just a person across the table, deciding whether to trust you.

That wasn’t inefficiency. That was the work.  

Somewhere along the way, the sector started treating relationship as something you layer on top of your digital strategy. Technology promised scale, and we said yes, because the needs were urgent and the margins were thin. I understand that. I’ve lived it.

But I’ve also spent a long time watching what actually moves people to give — not just once, but over a lifetime. And it is not a well-targeted ad. It is the moment when a donor feels truly known, and their participation feels like an expression of who they are rather than a transaction they completed.

The tobacco companies didn’t stop making cigarettes. But the culture shifted. A generation decided that smoking wasn’t sophisticated anymore — it was a marker of being manipulated. That reframe was more powerful than any lawsuit.

I think something similar may be beginning now. And I think it creates an opening for all of us who work at the intersection of human generosity and human need — to lean harder into what made this work meaningful in the first place. The human connection.  We’re a little out of practice, because of the collision of covid and the proliferation of these very tools. Hmmm.  Let’s flip that script.  

I want to work in a sector that, when its own moment of reckoning comes, can say the opposite. That we knew what mattered. That we protected it. That when tools arrived promising to scale human connection merely because more is better, that we chose wisely — we chose the slower, harder, more human path.

That’s not a claim. It’s an aspiration I’m still working toward.