Discover the deepest reasons people give to nonprofits—and how fundraisers can tap into donors’ most potent motivations.

In The Quest for Belonging: How the Most Effective Nonprofit Leaders Understand the Psychology of Giving, Jeremy Beer draws from the latest social science to explain the primacy of identity—the need to know and affirm who we are—and belonging—the need to belong to something bigger than ourselves—as motivations for giving.

Beer argues that the better a nonprofit organization can speak to donors’ needs to construct and maintain an identity and to belong to something larger than themselves, the more successful the nonprofit will be in attracting supporters to its mission. He explains how nonprofit executives and fundraisers can effectively engage a donor’s identity and provide a sense of belonging in three powerful ways: by telling stories, by building genuine relationships, and by giving donors positive experiences with the organization and with one another.

The Quest for Belonging is packed with trenchant, useful, and sometimes surprising observations gleaned from Beer’s interviews with highly successful fundraisers, scholars, writers, and nonprofit leaders. This book is a trove of practical advice as well as a paradigm-shifting work on the psychology of giving and the art and craft of fundraising.

Jeremy Beer is the cofounder and executive chairman of AmPhil, one of the fastest growing and most respected providers of professional services in the nonprofit sector. His previous books include The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity and The Forgotten Foundations of Fundraising: Practical Advice and Contrarian Wisdom for Nonprofit Leaders. He hosts a podcast called Givers, Doers, and Thinkers, and his writing on philanthropy, fundraising, society, and culture has appeared in the Washington Post, First Things, National Review, the Utne Reader, and HistPhil, among other venues. Beer holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Kara.