Every synagogue with a B'nai Mitzvah programme has an under-appreciated fundraising asset sitting in its calendar: the tradition of the mitzvah project. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in the congregation choose a cause, work on it for months, and often direct a portion of their B'nai Mitzvah gifts to it. This is one of the most durable pieces of Jewish philanthropic practice in North America, and it works. When we talk to executive directors and stewardship pastors about synagogue fundraising ideas that fit alongside the mitzvah project rather than compete with it, the birthday-based model comes up as a natural extension for the rest of the congregation — the parents, the grandparents, and the members who are past their own B'nai Mitzvah year but still want a giving occasion that feels personal.
Why the mitzvah project is the right anchor
Congregation Shearith Israel's B'nai Mitzvah guide describes the tradition plainly: students may make a donation to synagogue funds, donate items the synagogue needs, or dedicate a portion of their B'nai Mitzvah gifts to an organisation they care about, whether that is a women's shelter attached to the building, Mazon for hunger relief, or trees planted in Israel. Every year, dozens of families across every mid-size synagogue quietly redirect thousands of dollars in birthday-adjacent gifts to causes the child has personally chosen.
That is exactly the mechanic a birthday-based fundraiser scales. The mitzvah project already teaches the community that a life-stage moment (a thirteenth birthday, coming of age) is the right time to redirect a small gift to something meaningful. The birthday-based model asks a simple follow-up question: why should that stop at thirteen?
The birthday model, in a synagogue context
In a birthday-based synagogue fundraiser, every member — not just the B'nai Mitzvah student — has a birthday page. Their friends and family are invited, warmly, to make a small gift to the synagogue or to a fund the member cares about, in honour of that birthday. The member does not give money themselves. They do not receive an ask from the synagogue. What they do is invite the people they would have gotten cards and small gifts from anyway to redirect that spend to their community.
For the synagogue, this becomes a year-round giving channel that runs on the same emotional logic as the mitzvah project. For the member, it is a mitzvah project extended into adulthood. For the friend or family member who gives, it is a warm, low-friction moment — the same $36 or $54 gift they would have made anyway, now doing more.
The proof: ~$50 per donor, across 40 communities
The clearest evidence that this works comes from outside the Jewish world, and that matters because it means the mechanic is not specific to any one faith tradition. PAP Corps runs the same model across 40 communities, raising roughly $350,000 a year. The average gift per donor per year is about $50 — a warm gift, well within what a family friend would give for a birthday card and cake. Multiply that across a synagogue's active membership and you get a fundraising channel that runs quietly all year without ever needing a gala.
For synagogues that want to model this against a hypothetical two-year rollout, the same core metrics apply as in any consistent giving programme. The Benefits of Regular Donor Engagement covers the retention and lifetime-value math in detail: at https://onegiftfoundation.org/resources/the-benefits-of-regular-donor-engagement.
How this fits alongside High Holy Day giving
The single biggest concern executive directors raise is whether a birthday-based channel will cannibalise Kol Nidre appeals or the annual High Holy Day pledge. The evidence and the experience of chapter-based communities running the model both point the other way. The birthday channel taps a different wallet — the wallet of the member's friends and extended family, not the member's own household giving budget. Kol Nidre giving is the member's own annual pledge to their community. Birthday giving is the member's friends and family choosing to celebrate the member by supporting the community the member belongs to. Those are two different asks, made to two different sets of people, in two different emotional registers.
A three-step rollout for a mid-size congregation
The most common rollout we see is a small, opt-in pilot. Step one: identify 12 to 20 members whose birthdays fall in the next three months and who are already highly engaged. Board members, committee chairs, adult B'nai Mitzvah students, and members who lead sisterhood or brotherhood chapters are natural first picks.
Step two: give each pilot member a warm, ready-to-send invitation, a personal page, and a simple explanation of where the gifts go. Most synagogues choose to route birthday gifts to a general operating fund or to a specific named fund the member cares about (a youth-house fund, a cemetery fund, a religious school scholarship fund). This gives the member a real choice and makes the ask feel less generic.
Step three: measure two things in the first ninety days. Total dollars raised across the pilot birthdays, and average gift per unique donor. If the first is clearly non-zero and the second is landing in the $25-to-$75 range, the model is working. That is when you widen it to the full membership.
On tone
Warmth matters more than mechanics. The invitation copy should sound like a member's own voice, not a synagogue newsletter. It should reference the specific cause or fund the member has chosen. It should never ask the recipient to give a specific amount. The gift is not a transaction — it is a celebration.
The 12-month view
A synagogue that launches a birthday-based channel in the fall typically sees its first meaningful cohort of birthday campaigns land between January and March, as the pilot members' birthdays come up. By the second summer, the channel is running quietly on autopilot alongside High Holy Day appeals, memorial funds, and the mitzvah project. And when the current class of B'nai Mitzvah students graduates into adult members, they arrive already fluent in the model.
Learn more about How WishWell Works or book a 15-minute WishWell demo at https://onegiftfoundation.org/ryan.