Robert MacNiell is planning a 100-person wedding at a whiskey bar in Raleigh, North Carolina. The big day is a little over a month out, but the paperwork is already taken care of. 

“We actually were married legally five years ago during COVID,” MacNiell said. 

And like a lot of couples these days, MacNiell and his husband Paul Ingram had already been living and building a life together even before that. They’re long established in their careers as an interior designer and a research scientist.

“I'm 40, my husband is 50,” MacNiell said. “We kind of have the stuff that you need for living already. We've kind of figured that out.”

So, when they get their friends and family together to celebrate, MacNiell and Ingram will not be asking for gifts. Instead they’re collecting donations for The Trevor Project, a non-profit that works on suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth. 

“The administration right now is, we’ll say, at least unfriendly to people that are LGBTQ,” MacNiell said, pointing to the recent elimination of a government hotline targeted for queer kids in crisis. “I thought that this was a great opportunity to kind of, maybe fill that gap a little bit.” 

As American couples wait longer to tie the knot, wedding planners say traditional wedding registries are falling out of favor. 

“I think a more modern generation is like, that’s weird to have somebody buy me my sheets. I can probably pick those out and get those,” said Meghan Clem, co-founder and CEO of Intertwined Events in Southern California. 

Clem said honeymoon and home down payment funds have been gaining ground for a while, but in the last five years a growing number of couples are inviting their guests to make donations in lieu of gifts. 

“As we’ve come out of COVID, as we’ve seen people really embrace big hard things in our communities and such, we’ve seen them really want to do more,” Clem said. 

About 15% of Intertwined’s luxury wedding clients incorporate charitable giving into their celebrations in some way, and Clem expects that percentage to grow in the coming years. The free wedding website Zola reports 5% of its users do the same. But the trend tracks with what we know about how younger people engage with charity. 

“They like to give differently than their parents and their grandparents,” said Genevieve Shaker with the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. “They like to give in social ways that involve their friends. They like to make a statement.” 

Shaker said that’s especially true of Gen Z. As that generation comes of age, some non-profits could tap into this trend and make weddings part of their fundraising strategy. But getting wedding traditionalists on board might take some work. 

“If I were to put on my registry, like, ‘Please donate in lieu of,’ I’m not sure people are necessarily going to do that,” said Jessica Rosenberg, who is getting married next spring on a farm in the Hudson Valley. 

Rosenberg said she and her fiance don’t have space in their New York City apartment for physical gifts. They’d like to gather donations for Parkinson’s research to honor a family member, but Rosenberg imagines a charitable registry would be a hard sell, particularly for their guests from older generations. 

“They might think, ‘Well, I could have done this on my own time. I really want to give it to this couple who I’m here to celebrate their future together,’” Rosenberg said.

So the couple is compromising. They’ll ask the 250 people on their guest list for cash gifts to help them buy a house, and plan to donate some of that money to charity. Right now, Rosenberg is thinking 5%.