Investing in non-crisis operations is just as urgent as responding when tornado sirens wail.
Americans are good in an emergency. After September 11, more than $2.8 billion flowed to charitable causes. After Katrina and the other Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005, the total influx reached roughly $5.3 billion.
The pattern held after October 7, 2023. Within ten days of the Hamas attacks, Jewish federations across North America had raised $388 million. By the time the two-year Israel Emergency Campaign closed in November 2025, it had raised $908 million.
Whatever else may be going wrong in American life, the reflex to give when something terrible happens is still alive.
The harder question is what keeps that reflex alive. An emergency reveals a society's reserves of generosity. Replenishing those reserves is slower work, and there is rarely a television camera around for it.
Emergency giving can look like civic participation while asking very little of the giver. A donation made on a phone in ninety seconds is real help. It is not nothing. But it may also be a one-time transaction, not the beginning of a real giving relationship.
Tocqueville's associations demanded more. They were slow, local, often tiresome. That was part of their value. Citizens learned to show up, argue, compromise, keep records, elect officers, and come back the following month. Somebody had to make the coffee. Somebody else had to call the member who had missed three meetings.
Disaster giving moves at the speed of the news cycle. A 2019 study by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, Candid, and Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that 29 percent of American households made a disaster-related donation in 2018. Yet only about 5 percent gave toward continued recovery from 2017's disasters, even though 2017 had been the costliest disaster year in the federal record.
Newer fundraising data show the same problem from another angle. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project estimated that total dollars raised across its dataset rose 5 percent in 2025. At the same time, the number of donors fell 3.6 percent, the fifth-straight annual decline (the slide started back in 2021), while overall donor retention inched up from 43.1 to 43.3 percent. Most of the revenue growth came from major and "supersize" donors. More money came in, in other words, but from fewer hands.
There is no universal expected retention rate for disaster donors, and it would be foolish to set one. The broader evidence still names the problem plainly enough: the first gift is easy to celebrate and hard to turn into a habit. So where do durable habits of generosity form?
In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 45 percent of Americans who prayed daily and attended religious services at least weekly said they had volunteered in the previous week. Among all other Americans, the figure was 28 percent. The gap came mainly from volunteering through houses of worship; everywhere else, the two groups looked about the same.
Congregations ask constantly, providing constant opportunities to give. They give people jobs, dates, obligations, and other people to answer to. So do PTAs, food pantries, burial societies, neighborhood associations, and volunteer fire companies. They turn generosity from an emotion into a schedule.
The Jewish response to recent crises shows what this preparation buys. The first Jewish federation in the United States, the Federation of Jewish Charities of Boston, was established in 1895 to coordinate local charitable work. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, better known as JDC, was founded in 1914.
When Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, JDC did not have to build a contact list while the shells were falling. It was already supporting nearly 40,000 poor Jews in about 1,000 locations across the country. On the day of the invasion, it activated emergency hotlines and volunteer networks and put its Hesed social-service centers on a war footing.
That network had been built for poverty, disability, isolation, and old age. And the war response simply commandeered it.
The same was true after October 7. Jewish federations could move quickly because the partnerships, the local knowledge, the vetting procedures, and the operating experience already existed. By the time the emergency campaign closed, it had made more than 4,200 grants through 877 nonprofit partners, supporting 208 Israeli communities.
Emergency speed had been purchased in advance. This is why the usual sneer at "overhead" misses the point so badly. Payroll, audits, safeguarding procedures, donor records, trained staff, and local relationships are stored capacity. Nobody throws a dinner for the person who migrated the database—but perhaps they should.
Every successful emergency appeal carries a temptation, though, to believe that it reflects a funding baseline. Crisis money is visible and emotionally immediate. Maintenance money is neither. It is much harder to raise money to keep the lights on than to respond to a catastrophe.
Boards can start to read a sudden surge as proof of long-term institutional health. Development teams can decide that urgency is the surest way to scare up a certain dollar amount, until everything somehow becomes urgent. That road has a ditch at the end of it.
To be fair, crisis giving and ordinary support do not have to compete. In 2024, federation annual campaigns raised $1.1 billion, a 7.3 percent year-over-year increase, while the Israel Emergency Campaign brought in another $683 million the same year. Most emergency-campaign donors also supported the annual campaign.
Even so, the distinction between the two kinds of money has to stay clear. Emergency revenue is temporary, even when emergencies are frequent. A recurring budget built on adrenaline will eventually run into a slow year.
A few disciplinary steps would help avoid that collision. Boards should treat emergency revenue as one-time funding, never as part of the permanent base. Before an appeal begins, they should decide what the money will cover, how indirect costs will be handled, when the appeal will close, what will happen to unused funds, and who may approve an exception.
Donors have a job here, too, including funding readiness in the years between sirens. Franklin's ounce of prevention was originally advice about house fires, and he followed it by helping found a volunteer fire company. Multi-year, unrestricted support for congregations, schools, camps, community foundations, and local service organizations is the same idea, and the same hard sell, because it rarely feels urgent.
And someone should keep track of what happens after the receipt is sent. How many first-time emergency donors make a second, ordinary gift? How many engage in any other ways at all? Those figures belong on the board agenda next to dollars raised. Otherwise, an organization may congratulate itself on a record campaign while its actual community dwindles.
The first invitation after the crisis is a good place to start. A donor who has already proved willing to act should be offered a concrete place in the institution. There is no shame in asking for another gift. But the larger prize is turning a moment of sympathy into a relationship, and eventually into an obligation.
The next catastrophe will probably find American generosity ready. Whether it finds American civil society ready depends on what we choose to fund between the sirens, when nothing is burning.
Siman Tov Baazov is a community builder and nonprofit leader working across Jewish life, philanthropy, and civic leadership. He is the founder of Accord Circle, a Miami-based nonprofit community. His research on donor retention, governance, and nonprofit sustainability examined twenty-seven organizations across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.