There was a story in the Cambridge News earlier this year about a local man with significant physical disabilities who gets around on a mobility scooter. His scooter has been breaking down. People in his community noticed, and someone started a fundraiser to get him a new one. That story stuck with us, not because it is unusual, but because it captures something that feels increasingly rare in the way we think about giving: someone saw a specific need, told the story honestly, and asked for help.
We have been thinking about giving a lot lately, partly because of the 2026 Budget changes to the donation tax credit, and partly because of a conversation one of us had with a parent who gets genuinely frustrated when a charity he has supported for years interrupts his afternoon to ask him for more money over the phone. He will donate to them again, when he feels like it, because he thinks they do good work. The phone call does not make him more likely to give. If anything, it makes him less inclined to.
The mailer is our equivalent irritant. When a large charity sends us a glossy envelope full of case studies and a pre-addressed return slip, our first thought is not generosity. It is maths. A standard letter costs $2.90 to post, and that is before design, print and paper are factored in. A reasonable estimate for a typical direct mail piece is around $5 per recipient. That is $5 spent on persuading us to give, rather than on the work the charity exists to do. We bin it, and we feel slightly worse about the organisation than we did before it arrived.
We are not naive about this. Charities have to fundraise, and direct mail does work on aggregate, or organisations would have stopped using it years ago. But it does not work on us, and we suspect it does not work on a lot of people who would happily give if approached differently.
What does work for us is specificity and connection. We have supported LifeSkills Cambridge for close to a decade now, because they provide counselling services for children in our community, and because the waiting list is always longer than their capacity. That gap is not abstract. It is children not getting help they need because the funding is not there. Supporting LifeSkills feels like filling a specific hole, not contributing to a general pool.
We have also made a multi-year commitment to Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, which is the largest ecological island in New Zealand and one of the most remarkable conservation projects the country has produced. It recently lost $3.2 million in government funding over three years. That loss does not disappear because the government has decided it is no longer a funding priority. The mountain, the birds, the ecosystem and the people who have dedicated years to protecting it are still there. Private support matters more now than it did before that decision was made.
And then there are the individuals. Clients, friends, people we know through our community, raising money for causes that have landed in their lives in a personal way: Sweet Louise, the Heart Foundation, cancer research, local initiatives. When someone we know asks us to support something they care about, the answer is often yes, because we understand the story behind the ask. The cause is not abstract and neither is the person telling us about it.
This matters more now than it did a few years ago, and not just because of our own preferences.
The Budget has introduced a $100,000 annual cap on the donation tax credit, which limits the rebate available to the largest donors. The government's own documents acknowledge they do not know with certainty how those donors will respond to having their tax incentive capped. The charitable sector's response has been clear: organisations that depend on major gifts are worried, and they are right to be. At the same time, government grants to conservation, community services and the arts have been reducing across multiple Budget cycles.
The gap those two trends create does not close itself. It closes because people decide, individually and in their own time, that the work matters and deserves their support. Not because they received a phone call at an inconvenient moment, or because a glossy envelope arrived that cost more to produce than it should have.
We are not suggesting everyone needs to give more, or that individual giving can substitute for structural funding at scale. But we do think that being deliberate about where your giving goes, and supporting organisations and people whose work you can actually see and understand, is worth more than the same dollar amount spread across direct debit commitments you barely remember signing up for.
The Cambridge man with the scooter did not need a gala dinner. He needed people to notice, and a handful of them did. That is how a lot of the most useful giving actually works.
