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Category Archives: Giving
October 25, 2012, 10:38 am
Most Donors Plan to Give as Much or More in 2012, Survey Finds
Eighty-one percent of donors plan to contribute the same amount or more than in 2011, an annual survey by Fidelity Charitable finds.
That’s a larger percentage of donors who said their giving for the year would remain steady or grow than in both 2011 (72 percent) and 2010 (63 percent).
Among the 571 adults in this year’s survey, 29 percent said they would give more this year. Half the donors said that’s because they got a new job or a raise or otherwise feel better about their personal finances
Donors said on average they would give $2,400 this year, up from $2,100 in 2011.
And most donors, 89 percent, said that giving to the presidential and other campaigns would not cause them to reduce their giving this year.
The survey findings provide encouraging news for fundraisers and charities, said Amy Danforth, Fidelity Charitable’s senior vice president of marketing. “People…
October 24, 2012, 1:58 pm
Contest Seeks Ideas From Charities for Creating Jobs
A new competition unveiled by the Huffington Post, Skoll Foundation, and Crowdrise seeks to reward nonprofits with ideas for how to put Americans back to work.
The “JobRaising” challenge is open to all types of nonprofits–not just job-training groups–so long as they have a plan for fighting America’s high unemployment, organizers said. Nonprofits that make it through an initial stage of vetting will have a chance to compete for donations from the public. Groups that raise the most cash will also win prize money totaling $250,000 from the Skoll Foundation.
Sally Osberg, president of the Skoll Foundation, said in an e-mail to The Chronicle that the three organizations were searching for a way to “change the narrative” about unemployment “from a blame game focused on deficits and problems to one focused on solutions and opportunity.”
They zeroed in on nonprofits, Ms. Huffington…
September 25, 2012, 9:03 am
To Raise More Money, Talk About Impact, New Guide Advises
To raise more money, nonprofits need to tell donors how the organizations’ work is making a difference, counsels a new fundraising guide.
“Donors say that information about a nonprofit’s approach, expected results, effectiveness, and past performance—in other words, impact information—is most important to them but hardest to find,” write the co-authors of More Money for More Good.
The manual is based on a study that found donors would be willing to shift $15-billion in giving to high-performing nonprofits if they had easy access to good information about the organizations’ work. The study, conducted by GuideStar, the nonprofit online publisher of data on charities, and Hope Consulting, was based on surveys of more than 5,000 donors, 875 donor advisers, and 725 foundation officials.
Giving donors information about the effect of a group’s work doesn’t mean…
September 5, 2012, 12:18 pm
Correction: The Downturn and Multiyear Foundation Grants
Editor’s note: On Thursday afternoon, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy withdrew the study that was the basis for the following item. It said data from the Foundation Center was flawed.
Many nonprofits pinned their hopes on foundations to help them get through the worst of the downturn with multiyear grants, but now a new study finds that such contributions fell sharply from 2008 to 2010.
The study, by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, examined more than 900 foundations from 2008 to 2010, comparing their grants to those offered by a similar group of foundations in 2004 to 2006.
The share of grants that were for multiple years dropped by 55 percent in the downturn when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is excluded from the sample. That foundation gives more multiyear grants than any other philanthropy, awarding $2.6-billion in multiyear grants…
August 29, 2012, 10:28 am
Giving by the Rich Dropped $30-Billion During Recession
Many fundraisers say they still can’t raise as much as they did before the economy soured in 2008. Particularly difficult to come by, they say, are gifts from affluent donors.
Now newly released IRS data support that assertion. Giving by people with incomes of $200,000 or more fell by $31-billion from 2007 to 2009. People who earned much less than that, under $100,000, dropped their giving by a total of $4-billion. Altogether, the IRS reported that people of every income level wrote off $158-billion in charitable donations in 2009 and $172-billion in 2008. [Editor's note: The previous sentence has been corrected to fix an inaccuracy in the total deducted.]
As the nation is about to mark the fourth year since the collapse of the financial markets, many fundraisers had expected gifts from the wealthy to have recovered by now, especially given the gains in the stock market that…
August 22, 2012, 9:45 am
Older Women Are Far More Generous Than Older Men, Study Finds
Women who are in their 50s or older are far more charitable than their male counterparts, according to a new study.
Women are more likely to give a bigger share of their income to charity, and in the highest income bracket the total sums they donate are more than two times as high as men in similar circumstances: For a $100 average gift given by an older affluent man, women of similar age, income level, and other characteristics donate $256 on average, the study found.
Researchers at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy based their findings on data provided by more than 1,100 single men and women. They compared people with similar incomes, number of children, education level, and other characteristics and grouped them by share of income donated to charity.
At every giving level, women were more likely to make donations and to give…
June 20, 2012, 9:10 am
Wealthy Donors May Not Sustain New Capital Campaigns
The new edition of “Giving USA” suggests that the recession has made a much deeper mark on American philanthropy than even some experts realized.
And while the annual report says giving by the wealthy is picking up, at least in some parts of the country, that doesn’t mean many of the ambitious capital campaigns now getting under way will fare well.
“They are more ready to launch than donors are to give,” says Bruce Flessner, a Minneapolis fundraising consultant who regularly interviews affluent donors in advance of big fundraising drives by his nonprofit clients. Even for wealthy people, he says, “the pain is pretty fresh in their mind,” given the severity of the downturn.
Mr. Flessner may be right, as my colleague, Maria Di Mento, noted in a post Tuesday about the sluggish recovery of multimillion-dollar gifts.
To be sure, some wealthy donors may have been more likely to…
June 12, 2012, 7:44 pm
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Gives With No Strings
Steve Jobs may have been mum on his philanthropy, but his Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, was anything but at a gathering of fundraisers last week, surprising many in attendance with his first public talk on his giving philosophy.
“I would never give a gift that has restrictions,” he said, in an appearance at the AFP TechKnow conference, in Orlando, Fla. “I leave that to people who know more than me.”
He told a gathering of technology-oriented fundraisers that he doesn’t often deal face-to-face with nonprofit solicitors. But when he does, he gets involved with their organizations, often in a hands-on way. As a supporter of the arts, he has even performed in ballets and community plays.
Growing up, he wanted to be an engineer like his father. But he also harbored ambitions of being a teacher. So, after he became wealthy, he taught students at a California public school for…
April 3, 2012, 4:32 pm
Don’t Expect Too Much From Monthly Donors
Donors who give every month to charity aren’t very likely ever to make a big gift.
Penelope Burk, president of Cygnus Applied Research, said in a study of donors she asked: “Does being a monthly-gift donor cause you to be more likely to entertain a major-gift ask?” The answer, Ms. Burk said, is “No.”
That doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to convert some monthly donors into big contributors, but expectations should be low, she said. The smart plan is to look in other places to find wealthy people with the potential to give large sums.
“The best strategy to close major gifts or planned gifts is not to draw donors from existing feeder programs,” Ms. Burk says.
E-mail Raymund Flandez.
April 2, 2012, 5:14 pm
Wealthy Individuals Give Modestly, Study Finds
Most affluent individuals give modest amounts of money to charity, a new study has found.
Nearly 40 percent of households with incomes greater than $150,000 give $1,000 to $5,000 annually, according to the study by Phoenix Marketing International, a research company that conducts a monthly survey on the financial preferences of wealthy investors. One-third give at least $5,000, and 17 percent give more than $10,000, the study found.
About 30 percent of those polled said they gave to charity to help those in need, while fewer than 5 percent said they did so to receive a tax deduction. The Phoenix study surveyed more than 2,100 individuals last month.
Send an e-mail to Noelle Barton.
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