The aim of this book is to ensure your organization is empowered to be set up for the future of giving and generosity. To fully understand how to do this, you must understand the next generation of givers. One of the most important themes connected to the next generation of givers (millennials and Gen Z) is the incredible wealth transfer that is happening now and for the next few decades. Morgan Stanley reported it is the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, amounting to over $30 trillion in inheritance (OpenInvest, 2021)! In addition to that, millennial earning power will increase by 75% across the next few years.

The reason Morgan Stanley is studying and reporting on this is because it is a massive threat to their financial advisor business. A large portion of their assets under management (which determines a large portion of their compensation) will be transferred from their boomer clients to the next generations who don't necessarily need or want a financial advisor. This is a symptom of a larger sentiment with younger generations and how they want to manage their money overall.

SpendMeNot has a great list on how millennials manage money called “21 Massive Millennial Spending Stats” (Chapkanovska, 2022). I've linked this source in this chapter's references, but I will summarize it in my own words for you, speaking on behalf of millennials, as I am one.

1. We don't own homes.
2. We spend over $90,000 on rent before age 30.
3. We have multiple subscriptions for entertainment amounting to >$100 a month.
4. We spend more on coffee than on our retirement plans.
5. We are a sucker for Instagram ads.
6. We are also a sucker for overpriced cocktails.
7. We appreciate brands with values and will purchase from them.
8. We love style and spend a fashionable $524 on apparel every month.
9. Emergency funds are not important to us #Yolo.
10. At some point we've made a financial plan.
11. Our financial plan incorporates how much we spend online.
12. When we shop online, we specifically use Amazon, and it's a weekly ritual (or more!).
13. We love free delivery.
14. Surprisingly, millennial men are actually shopping more online than women.
15. Both men and women LOVE their skincare routines.
16. We don't own appreciating assets like houses, but rather, depreciating ones like cars.
17. We will spend money for our health care.
18. We absolutely love our pets and will spend a lot of money on them, more than our own health care.

However, despite being renters without a retirement, pet owners without a pension, and shoppers without savings, we still …

GIVE!

Leading to:

1. 19. At least half of us millennials give on a monthly basis to charity.

Closing out with:

1. 20. We will spend more than $4,000 annually on travel.
2. 21. We have stocks! At least 66% of millennial investors do.

Over half of new investors in 2020 were born between 1981 and 1996.

The preference of asset classes are in the following order:

1. Stocks
2. Mutual funds
3. Cryptocurrencies

The key learnings for nonprofit organizations is that despite some of our questionable financial decisions, our generation wants to give. And this giving will increase as incomes continue to grow, and a multiplier effect will flow from the appreciation on investments that millennials will gain in time alongside the receipt of their inheritance.

A report from Deloitte predicts that by 2030, millennials will experience the fastest growth in net wealth out of any generation (Srinivas & Goradia, 2015).

Another x factor to all of the previous points is the potential of cryptocurrency growth with popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Etherium (see Figure 2.1). In 2022, over 33.7 million US adults are said to own at least one cryptocurrency (Insider Intelligence, 2022), and 94% of cryptocurrency buyers are millennials and Gen Z (Gogol, 2022).

What we can take away from the graph in Figure 2.1 is that although Bitcoin is significantly down from its peak, it is still significantly up from before its rise in 2017, which imputes a 50× return if you invested in that time. In context, Apple within that same time frame is up four times, and Amazon is up two times.

Regardless of your view of Bitcoin or the future of it, it's hard to deny the unprecedented appreciation it has experienced in the last five years. And even with the 2022 market downturn it seems to have a new price floor because of how many large institutions such as Block (formerly Square), Tesla, and Morgan Stanley have now backed it.

Here is why understanding the great wealth transfer and how future generations think about money management is so important. The average age of a donor in the United States is 64 (Double the Donation, 2022). This means most organizations are literally one generation away from not having access to the resources that they need to survive if they don't start appealing to the next generations. As boomers age out, they will transfer wealth (on the magnitude of $30 trillion) to millennials who are doing the following:

• Investing more
• Owning cryptocurrency
• Primarily transacting online through beautiful and easy-to-use e-commerce platforms

If you are not already appealing to this, you will miss out on the next generation of generosity.

Why Millennials Will Be the Most Generous Generation the World Has Ever Seen

Being in the Silicon Valley for the last decade has made me privy to the phenomena of angel investing. As I have seen my friends grow in their careers, increase in income, and do quite well with their stock compensation, more and more of them have participated in investing into early-stage start-up ventures, known as angel investing. Angel investing is a phenomenon that goes beyond portfolio management or even smart personal finance strategy. This is because of some seeming disadvantages:

• It is a very risky asset class (most start-up companies fail).
• It is very illiquid (it's difficult to exchange your shares in a start-up for cash).

If it's not smart financially and your money is locked in for years, why do people do it? I believe it is due to this key principle: status.

Angel investing has become a status symbol in Silicon Valley. The dream is to say you were one of the first checks into Uber or Airbnb. That your $25,000 pre-seed investment turned into millions because of your intelligence, intuition, and/or access.

The creation of platforms like AngelList have accelerated the popularity and participation in angel investing. In 2010, it wasn't cool to be an angel investor. Just a few years later, it started to become popularized and was the reason you got invited to certain parties in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's the topic of watercooler conversation. People started to put their AngelList profile on their Twitter bios, and it became an extension of their identity. Therefore, the acceleration of angel investing wasn't just a financial decision anymore. It was connected to who you are, what you believed your expertise was in, and what you believed in overall.

This phenomenon has extended into crypto and the Web3 community. There are tribes of those who believe solely in Bitcoin, or who speculate on meme coins like Dogecoin, or those who will spend thousands of dollars to have a “bored ape” as their profile picture on Twitter.

Where millennials spend or invest their money is influenced by what gives them social currency and represents what they believe their identity to be. The principle is not too different from previous generations. Although boomers might have found their identity, status, and social currency in their house, yard, and white picket fence, millennials and Gen Z find theirs in the matrix, avatars, and digital identities. No longer are the next generations fixated on bricks and mortar, but rather on bitcoin and the blockchain (we'll break down the blockchain and cryptocurrency in Chapter 4).

The ways millennials think about giving and generosity, in relation to identity, is the same. Check out this excerpt from a Forbes article written in 2019 (Bader, 2019):

Lazy, entitled, self-obsessed and uninvolved. These negative stereotypes often attributed to the millennial generation are now so well-known that they have become the shorthand by which we identify those born between the years 1981 and 1996.

However, a new survey conducted by Fidelity Charitable turns at least one assumption about millennials on its head. Millennials, it seems, are a very generous bunch. In fact, they give more than twice as much of their money and time to charitable causes as either baby boomers or Gen X.

Fidelity Charitable's survey of 3,000 adults, including 288 entrepreneurs, found that millennials, on average, donate $13,654 a year to charity, compared to $6,200 for Gen X and $6,192 for baby boomers.

There are also substantial differences in the way millennials give, according to the survey. For instance, they are more likely to value charitable giving opportunities that help them learn, grow, or expand their personal influence. They also see giving as part of their core identity and want to be more directly involved in how and where their donations are spent.

Generosity Is My Identity

There was a time where my wife Kim and I sold our house in order to give. It was 2018, and as a church I knew my pastor was preparing to announce a big vision element: we were going to go from five locations to ten locations, planting five more churches … in one year! Remember what I said in Chapter 1… he's crazy. He has crazy faith and communicates bold vision!

In preparation for this particular vision gala, Kim and I were praying about the amount we wanted to give, a practice that we did every year the Monday before the Friday's vision gala. When we shared with each other what we both believed was in our heart to give, it was the same amount. This was incredible confirmation because we were aligned, and at the same time really confusing because we didn't have that agreed-on amount in the bank account. It was a very large amount for us at the time. Not wanting to show up on Friday with a fictitious number we could not follow through with, we started to think deeper about what we could do to have the means to give that amount.

After further prayer, we believed God highlighted our house as something we could sell so that we could give. At first, I thought that was the devil actually. Why would God compel us to sell our most treasured asset at the time? It was the only real form of asset ownership we had at that time. It was a coveted piece of property in the very expensive Bay Area!

Then I remembered this biblical principle: “where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.” So maybe it wasn't the devil after all, and actually God compelling us to give.

As context, we had purchased this townhouse three years before scraping together all the savings we had and selling all of the Google employee shares I was granted early in my career to have enough of a down payment to get into the house. Thankfully, we bought at a decent time, and the real estate market in our city grew substantially in that time, which gave us a good amount of equity. Selling the house would give us more than enough to meet our giving goal and to be part of our church's vision that year to the level we aspired to! We wanted this equity that we had in our house, this equity that we treasured, to be aligned with where our heart wanted to go—which was being part of the vision for our church.

So we did it!

What would cause a couple like us to want to give at the level of selling their house in order to give?

• Was it the vision that compelled us to sell our house? Partly! I believe the vision is imperative to inspire big giving. I would actually say that it is now table stakes if a donor is going to even consider giving at all. There needs to be a big vision paired with clear articulation of what the giving will unlock. Although this is an important component, I don't believe it's the primary reason someone would be willing to sell their house in order to give. Frankly, I've been inspired by bigger visions from other organizations, such as Charity: Water, bringing clean water to every human being on the planet, or New Story, who is 3D printing homes with the vision to end global homelessness. It would actually be really romantic for us to sell our home in order to build a home through New Story. The reality is that although we do support organizations such as this, we have never considered selling a major asset like our house in order to give to it.
• Was it the delivery and presentation that compelled us to sell our house? The atmosphere, level of excellence for the event, importance of storytelling, and the level of conviction in your vision presentation all matter. The preparation and attention to detail communicate value, worth, and credibility. It invites the donor to trust where their giving is going, and because you show that you care, they have an opportunity to care as well. Although I believe the delivery of the vision is critical, I would highlight that Kim and I decided to start the sales process of our house even before the fundraising gala event.

There are many other components I can list that are important and need to come together as a minimum standard to position your organization to raise big funds for a cause:

• Consistent communication throughout the year highlighting impact.
• Opportunities for givers to volunteer and see the impact of your organization up close and personal.
• Timing of giving campaigns being scheduled during natural waves of momentum, for example, end of year.

All of these are important, but not the primary reason a couple would sell their house in order to give.

Kim and I sold our house to give because generosity had become our identity within the context of this community.

For us it had become a core identity that didn't necessarily even need validation from others. There is no public list that is posted in our church that ranks the most generous people in the community. Although our church community is brilliant at recognition, there is no promise of status or public praise on the other side of a gift. What we had was an opportunity to act on something that was consistent with what we wanted to believe about ourselves.

When you see yourself as a generous person and have opportunities to reinforce that with your actions, you are willing to pursue that in extravagant ways. Through giving, we are deepening our identity in generosity, and that experience brings forth many benefits chemically to your brain. It's actually similar to why millennials have focused much of their spending on experiences. Because when you build meaningful memories through experiences by investing in things like travel, you don't only benefit from that during the life span of the trip but you also receive the similar levels of physiological reward every time you remember and recall the trip.

A focus on what we are able to do by giving can most definitely unlock significant giving. But speaking to who donors can become through their giving will unlock extravagant, over-the-top, sacrificial giving. We had an appetite to become a generous family because this is what was celebrated and modeled within our church. There is language for those that want to align themselves to this lifestyle of generosity, and in our church, it's called kingdom builders. Becoming a kingdom builder is a status that is to be aspired to, but one that doesn't necessarily need public recognition. It is motivated by simply knowing you have become one.

The most beautiful part of aspiring for this type of status is that it is not attached to pressure; rather, it is attached to privilege. It provides an opportunity for a person to become who they aspire to be. If I can reinforce who I am, more than what I do, it is the most purpose-driven state I can be in.

As organizations come to understand this, it will unlock a multitrillion-dollar opportunity with the next generation of giving. Fundraising events will not just be a place to get some donations done, but a celebration of generosity and what the community has become. The goal is to create and cultivate a community of givers who attach their identity to generosity. That's when big giving is unlocked and creativity is at its best. People start breaking off limitations of what's possible and give in new ways that maybe you wouldn't have even expected. Donors will have new energy in their careers and a reason for why they work so hard. It will not be for the sole purpose of earning a paycheck for themselves or to buy a bigger house but to be part of impact, meaning, change, and something beyond themselves. You know you have cultivated this type of community when you start receiving these types of gifts:

• The up-and-coming entrepreneurs in your community want to align their business value with your impact so they will give you a percentage of their revenues or equity in their company.
• The creatives—musicians and artists—in your community will want to distribute a percentage of royalties to your organization.
• Real estate investors will give from the equity appreciation in their properties to your organization.
• Collectors of art, wine, and sneakers will give from their capital gains in these assets to your organization.

In Chapter 3, I will explain what is happening technologically to make all these types of donations possible!

Why should you expect this type of exuberance for giving within your community? Because it's scientifically proven to be physiologically rewarding to the giver!

The Science of Generosity

Generosity and science don't seem like they belong in the same sentence. Can generosity be dissected in a lab? Is there a way to empirically measure how kind someone is? Is it just pseudoscience to believe generosity actually affects our well-being?

It may seem strange to look at giving, a more intrinsic idea, from a scientific lens. But recent research has proven that giving is great for our health on physical, emotional, and neurological levels.

Here are some of the noted benefits: stress reduction, improved mental health, longer lives, deeper emotional connection, and a general sense of feeling good.

Biologically, giving may seem counterintuitive. Aren't we supposedly bent toward survival and hoarding whatever resources possible? Aren't humans generally selfish?

On the contrary, science shows that we're wired to give. The saying “it's better to give than receive” isn't just a cute sentiment. We actually gain more when we give, which seems paradoxical.

A study done in 2015 found that performing daily acts of kindness lowered stress levels in participants. When they didn't practice generosity, their stress levels went up. That's because generosity increases levels of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin—chemicals in our body that help regulate mood and happiness (Scott, 2020).

One of the biggest strains on our mental health is anxiety, which is linked to stress. In another New York Times article published during the start of the pandemic, Wharton psychologist Adam Grant was quoted as saying, “There is a lot of evidence that one of the best anti-anxiety medications available is generosity” (Parker-Pope, 2020).

Hooked on a Feeling

Who doesn't want to feel good? Seemingly every part of our society is geared toward making us feel better, yet many of us are chronically unhappy.

In their groundbreaking book, The Paradox of Generosity, sociologists Christian Smith and Hillary Davidson (2014) researched, tracked, and interviewed individuals' spending habits over a five-year period. Here are some of their wild findings:

• 41% of Americans who donated 10% of their incomes said they never or hardly ever experienced depression.
• Those who described themselves as “very happy” volunteered almost six hours per month. Those who said they were “unhappy” volunteered just 0.6 hours.
• Those who were in giving relationships or practiced hospitality were more likely to be in “excellent health” than those who did not.

However, author Christian Smith emphasized that to reap the benefits of feeling good, generosity must be woven into our daily rhythms.

“It has to be a practice, it has to be something that is sustained over time, that people engage with regularly. One-off things just don't affect us that much, whereas things that we repeat, things that are sustained in our bodily behaviors and in our minds, have tremendous effects on us,” he said in an interview with The New Republic (Smith, 2014).

Smith's findings make sense. As we just touched on, generosity has proven over and over to release feel good chemicals in our body. But we can't just do it to chase a high. It has to be an organic process; otherwise, we don't get the same benefits.

“You can't cynically try and look to get [an] effect,” Smith said. “We have to learn just to be generous people.”

Empathy Inside My DNA

In a recent Scientific American podcast, social psychologist Liz Dunn discussed an experiment in which people were given money to either keep for themselves or give to others. The results were somewhat surprising: “What we found, consistent with all our past research, was that the more money people gave away, the happier they felt. Conversely though, the more money people kept for themselves the more shame they experienced” (Scientific American, 2010).

Although giving isn't intended to only benefit us, it makes us feel good and builds connections with others. This warm glow effect, as it's called, “activates regions of the brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust,” per an article from UC Berkeley (Suttie & Marsh, 2010). Giving also is linked to “less anxiety, less helplessness and hopelessness, better friendships and social networks.”

In other words: it builds empathy and helps us to better understand perspectives of those around us.

Resting My Case on the Greatest Opportunity for Generosity This World Has Ever Seen

Millennials are inheriting wealth and are ready to put that to work. Where they will spend or give in big amounts will be the places that are connected to their identity. There are sociological, spiritual, and scientific dynamics driving this trend, and the best investment you can make is to understand these dynamics, hire the right people, and partner with the right technology platforms that will help you be best positioned to be a recipient of this wave of generosity that is already starting to crest.

Knowing everything you know now, after this chapter, you should ask the following questions about your organization:

• Do we communicate in a way that is compelling to millennials?
• Do we have any major gifts coming in from millennials today?
• What type of gifts are given from millennials today?
• Are we aligning our messaging to highlight both impact and identity?

Now that you know the keys to unlocking the most generous generation the world has ever seen, and how they will be creative with their generosity, Chapter 3 will dive into the actual cutting-edge technology becoming available to facilitate this next wave of giving!