Multiple people use the term Transformational Giving to describe their systems or strategies of fundraising. Humorously, they use the term in diametrically opposite ways. I’m not sure whether to fight for the term or to rest content with Shakespeare that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.

In the online version of Contributions magazine, Kay Sprinkel Grace reels off a list of gifts–$150 mil to Stanford U, $12 mil to College of the Ozarks, $5 mil to the George Washington School of Medicine–before concluding:

These gifts – some huge, others modest only by comparison – have a common tie: their impact. Because of their size, relative to the overall budget of the organization or the project, they are transformational.

Transformational gifts may be categorized as “big” or “major” gifts, but what distinguishes them is their unique capacity to alter the programs, perception, and future of an organization. More than gifts, they are true investments in the future of an organization and of the community.

This phenomenon – the product of a robust economy and a heightened understanding by donors of the importance of philanthropy in building communities and institutions – is one of the most important milestones in the entire history of philanthropic growth in this country.

Well, so much for that whole robust economy thing there…

What seems to make a transformational gift transformational for Sprinkel Grace is that it is disproportionately huge in relation to the organization through which it is given, as well as disproprortionately large in relation to the size of the opportunity or problem it is tackling.

While Kay goes on to talk about how the givers of these gifts want very much to be involved in the organizations through which they make them, it’s absolutely fascinating to me that what she never makes explicit is that a gift can be (and, in our definition of TG, is most properly understood to be) transformationally given when it is disproportionally impactful on the giver.

When the widow gives her two bits to the Temple treasury, Jesus does not pronounce her gift transformational because of its impact on either the Temple budget nor the impressive slate of activities the Temple was undoubtedly undertaking. He pronounces it transformational because the gift for all intents and purposes wiped her out.

So I for one will continue to plug away for a standard definition of Transformational Giving that is measured first and foremost in relation to the giver (hence why we don’t call it Transformational Receiving or Transformational Spending Of Donation Dollars).

To that end, I resurrect this gorgeous quote by Dr. Lenore Ealy, Project Director of the Philanthropic Enterprise, from a 2004 blog post (eons ago in Internet years) on Gift Hub:

The measure of a gift is the transformation of the giver as well as of the recipient and society. The transformation may be spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, or political. The crust of self-interest breaks open like a cocoon, and, having once been a caterpiller crawling on the earth, out flies an entirely new, far lighter, creature of the air.