Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Designing Tomorrow explores a new playbook for modern social impact leaders and brands to reach their true impact potential.
Why do some social impact brands thrive, while so many others fail to get traction, build support for their cause, and make meaningful progress? Imagine your impact with truly sustainable revenue and resources. With deeper community engagement and relationships. With more influence in your social impact category.
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, each episode dives into the strategies, mindsets, and behaviors top social impact brands use to play and win in the attention economy. Go beyond high-level concepts to specific tools and tactics you can use today.
Watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes each Tuesday.
Let’s design a better tomorrow, together.
Designing Tomorrow is a Cosmic Production. Learn more at https://designbycosmic.com/
Designing Tomorrow is a registered trademark of Design By Cosmic, Inc.
Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Fewer Donors, Bigger Checks. Interpreting the Latest Giving Data.
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We break down the 2025 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy with the researchers who created it — exploring what this concentration means for nonprofit sustainability and the future of philanthropy.
There’s a number that keeps showing up in conversations about American philanthropy. And it tells two completely different stories depending on how you read it.
Over the past decade, charitable giving from affluent households increased more than 30%. That’s remarkable. That suggests a sector that’s thriving. Resilient. Responding to need.
But here’s the other story that same data tells.
Donor participation dropped from 91% to 81%. Twenty million American households stopped giving to charity entirely. First-time donor retention? Below 20%.
Fewer people are writing checks. They’re just writing much bigger ones.
So which story matters more? The one about record-breaking totals? Or the one about democratic participation collapsing?
To answer that question, I wanted to talk with the researchers who created the data in the first place.
Amir Pasic is the Dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. It’s the world’s first and only school devoted entirely to the study of generosity. He oversees Giving USA — the longest-running report on American charitable giving.
Bill Jarvis is the Managing Director at Bank of America Private Bank. He’s spent nearly two decades tracking how wealthy Americans give through the Bank of America Study of Philanthropy. He bridges wealth management and charitable giving in ways few others can.
Together, they’ve surveyed over 15,000 affluent households since 2006. Their 2025 findings reveal a sector at a crossroads.
And that crossroads is exactly what we’re exploring today.
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Thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.
