Steve Lear

“In Part One ( August 14, 2025), Steve Lear featured the tenets of faith and life philosophies that often guide people’s generosity decisions. In Part Two, he spotlights a timeless giving model that you can customize to fit your unique needs.

“Giving Through a Modern Lens: The Wisdom of Ken Dayton”

While many giving guidelines exist, I am inspired by a philosophy that transcends denominations and cultures with its timeless wisdom. I have personally found the principles and strategies promoted by Minnesota businessman and philanthropist Ken Dayton to be sound advice, and I recommend his plan to my clients as a financial advisor.

Ken Dayton was one of five brothers who inherited Dayton’s department store, growing the family company into the retail giant known today as the Target Corporation. Dayton rose through the ranks, serving first as President and then CEO of the Dayton Hudson Corporation.

The Dayton family has a long legacy of corporate and personal giving. In 1946, they started committing their business to a standard of giving 5% of pretax profits back to the community, a philosophy soon adopted by other Minnesota corporations.

Ken Dayton and his wife, Judy, were strong patrons of the arts, making significant donations to support the Minneapolis Symphony, the Walker Art Center, and the Minnesota Opera, among others. They distributed over $100 million in their lifetimes and helped make Minnesota a national center for the arts.

Dayton took the time to reflect on his lifetime of giving to help other donors on their generosity journeys.

The Art of Giving 

In 1997, Ken Dayton delivered a speech that was later adapted into a concise article titled “The Art of Giving.” It was a message to donors about what it means to be a “good giver.”

After 40 years of both making and requesting significant gifts to causes he championed, Dayton was motivated to define his criteria for good giving.  Based on our philanthropic experience, Generosity Advisor Paul Odegaard (of the Minneapolis Foundation) and I want to revisit Ken’s timeless principles and recommend a few more.

Ken Dayton’s Giving Principles 

Dayton advised every good giver to adopt the following behaviors:

Be Intentional
1. Aim to be a good giver.
2. Define your yearly and lifetime giving goals.
3. Enjoy giving!

Be Responsive
4. Never refuse to be solicited.
5. See the solicitor as quickly as possible.
6. Respond to the solicitation as quickly as possible.

Be Humble
7. Always be humble, never arrogant. Treat your solicitor with respect.
8. Never be demanding. Don’t attach conditions to your gift or ask for special consideration.

Be Generous
9. Strive to give as much as you can, not as little.

Be Prompt
10. Pay immediately or as soon as possible.

Our Additional Giving Guidelines

Dayton’s advice laid a solid foundation for effective giving. We suggest adding the following guidelines to his list:

Be Consistent
11. Never stop giving. However, if you need to reduce the amount you give, do so. Significantly decreasing a donation is better than giving nothing at all. There will always be people in worse circumstances than you. Whatever your financial situation, you can still find some way to give back to others. Adopting this mindset will make generosity a habit.

Be Thoughtful
12. If you decide to stop supporting an organization, give them two years’ notice.

Be Discerning
13. Consider the best use of your money. At your funeral, no one will be talking about whether you own your home. Prioritizing a paid-off mortgage often creates a false sense of security; ask someone whose home has been destroyed by a natural disaster.

Be Visionary
14. Show your love to your family by creating a community where they can feel safe and thrive.

Be Altruistic
15. The highest form of giving is enabling someone to help themselves so they can help others.

Be Memorable
16. You only die when you are no longer mentioned in conversation. Make an impact!

Be Proactive
17. Remember, deferring solutions to today’s social problems often increases the cost of solving them.

Be Flexible
The art of giving changes, and what you did yesterday might not work tomorrow. Learn to pivot!

Giving Obstacles to Overcome 

Be mindful of the following scenarios, which often become obstacles to giving:

• Distracted Spending – Disney World is a wonderful place to visit, a marvelous distraction that channels your mind and money into spending, not giving. Maybe you’re sharing that experience with someone who can’t afford it, which is great. However, be cautious of the financial drain caused by excessive luxury spending.
• Negative Mindset – Uncertainty about the future can lead to a pessimistic outlook that distorts reality, manifesting itself as fear and avoidance. Why not choose to believe that things will turn out well 70% of the time? While there’s no proof of this, we believe optimism leads to a more balanced perspective.
• Exclusive Family Focus – People often adopt a “family first” attitude, but at what cost? Your family will not be safe and thrive without a functioning society.
• Failure to Plan – You can become self-absorbed and short-sighted if you never visualize the future. Planning – the act of considering both the positive and negative consequences – is necessary to make informed and productive decisions. Good planning helps you to allocate resources wisely and reduce uncertainty.

When Ken first spoke about generosity, financial planning had not yet graduated to its current capabilities. Today, you can learn “your number” to know if you are on track financially to reach your personal goals. Knowing this number allows you to establish a giving budget.

Ken Dayton strongly believed in increasing your generosity as your assets grew. “The absolute amount of our giving is unimportant because giving is relative to income. What is important is the trend of one’s giving and the way individuals determine and measure their own giving.” 

To help donors who were struggling with the question of how much to give, Dayton identified the following nine stages of giving based on his own generosity journey.

Ken Dayton’s Nine Stages of Giving

1. Minimal Response: Giving only because you are asked.
2. Involvement and Interest: Your perspective changes once you volunteer for a nonprofit. When you believe in their mission, you want to help them achieve it. Your giving becomes more intentional and meaningful as you give not only money, but also your gifts of time and energy.
3. As Much as Possible: Dayton experienced the joy of giving when he realized he needed to give as much as he possibly could to make a particular fundraising drive successful. It required him to put more thought into giving by creating an annual generosity budget and a plan for distributing it. He found the experience transformational. “It frees the spirit and raises one’s self-esteem…What a shame that so many givers never make it to this third stage. If only they understood what it could do for their lives and their community.” 
4. Maximum Allowable: Dayton and his wife, Judy, began following a formula (Maximum Allowable by the IRS) to determine an annual giving budget, a move he described as a “marvelous discipline.”  Knowing this amount gave him the opportunity to plan their giving and to think more creatively about philanthropy. “It meant we could initiate projects as well as respond to others’ initiatives.”  
5. Beyond the Max: Dayton began to find this giving formula too restrictive; in a bold move, he and Judy decided to ignore the maximum allowable deduction to give whatever they wanted. “It was a breakthrough! No longer would we let the IRS tell us how much (or how little) we could give.” While it was difficult to watch their deductions disappear, “what a wonderful feeling it was to be able to give as much as we wanted and could afford.”  But without the Maximum Allowable benchmark, they had to invent a new way to measure their giving.
6. Percent of Wealth: Once Dayton decided to use total wealth as the new measurement for determining a giving budget, he found it to be a better tool. “If you invest wisely and don’t overspend on personal consumption, there is money left over both to give generously and to reinvest for further wealth accumulation. The trick is to determine the right percent-to-wealth standard for giving.”  This method helped them to see how much they could donate and still live comfortably.
7. Capping Wealth: This stage brings new considerations about how much money is enough and how much money you want to have at the end of your life. For the Daytons, the solution was to cap their wealth. “This means setting a limit on the total amount of your wealth and giving away everything you earn beyond that figure.” He acknowledged that uncertainty about the future prevents many people from giving large sums. However, if you have determined how much is enough, you can feel reasonably confident that you have set aside enough. But knowing that uncertainty will always exist, Dayton took a practical approach. “It may well be necessary at some future date to cut our giving program drastically. But in the meantime…we have been able to share our wealth and see it at work while some have been concerned primarily with increasing their wealth.” 
8. Reducing the Cap: When Dayton wrote about the nine stages of giving, he and Judy were in stage seven. However, he envisioned that two more stages would likely be needed to complete their giving journey.  While the Daytons weren’t ready to reduce their wealth cap, “we can visualize the possibility of doing so as we get older, as perhaps we spend less, and as we face our inevitable deaths.”  In an ideal world, Dayton believed you would give away your last dollar just before you died. “Who wants to die rich or turn $1.10 over to Uncle Sam for every $1.00 you give to your heirs? That is a very expensive and inefficient way to transfer wealth!”  But the ideal is not achievable because you can’t be certain how long you will live. The Daytons decided to focus on completing their lifetime giving plans through their wills. This positive mindset turned estate planning from a dreaded chore into an “exciting adventure.”
9. Bequest: The Daytons had transferred assets to their heirs while they were living, so they did not need to include them in their wills. Instead, they left nearly all assets to their nonprofits of choice, which avoided taxes and completed their 50-year giving program.

Dayton summarized his giving philosophy as follows:

“What is most important is to think seriously about how giving to great causes can affect both the donor and recipient. Planned giving can and should be a lifetime endeavor and should command the same kind of dedication and energy that accumulating wealth does. Only then does one live life to the fullest. 

The Timeless Principles of Dayton’s Plan 

Three distinct features characterize Dayton’s approach to generosity. He believed giving should be:

•  Fluid rather than fixed. Dayton advises increasing your giving as your income grows. “As your giving grows, so do you.” However, there is always the option to make changes dictated by your personal circumstances.
•  Proactive, not reactive. Instead of waiting to be asked, Dayton believed donors should actively seek out opportunities to support causes they found meaningful.
• A lifelong habit. Dayton was a disciplined donor who established an annual giving budget and modeled a “giving while living” philosophy. Because he found joy in giving, he looked forward to creating a legacy plan that outlined how his remaining wealth would continue to help the community after his death.

I continue to recommend Dayton’s plan because its positive mindset and practical wisdom equally benefit both donors and receivers.

Giving Remains Strong 

The takeaways from the 2025 USA Giving Report are hopeful:

• Philanthropy is resilient, persevering through turbulent times.
• Giving continues to grow, even if the economy tempers that growth and impact.
• Donors prioritize support for nonprofits that can effect the changes they want to see in the world.

Despite uncertainty, donors seeking to make a difference and improve their communities will always find ways to give. At SteveLear.org, our goal is to help people become good givers. Ken Dayton created a powerful framework for giving that’s about so much more than money; his real lesson is how to create lasting impact and a fulfilling life.

Let’s follow in his footsteps and work together to build a legacy of generosity that benefits future generations.