Last year the recession had less impact than feared on big gifts made to charities in Britain, according to a new report released jointly by Coutts, a British bank, and the University of Kent’s Centre for Philanthropy, Humanitarianism, and Social Justice.
In fiscal 2008, researchers at the university documented 189 gifts of a million pounds — or the equivalent of $1.7-million — or more each to British charities. That was only a slight decrease from the 193 gifts of that size made in fiscal 2007.
The collective value of the 189 big gifts last year, equal to $2.3-billion, was 13 percent lower than the cumulative total in 2007. And the number of donors giving at the million-pound level declined by 6 percent, according to the annual report, the second of its kind.
The researchers noted that the drop in assets among the wealthy in Great Britain has been far greater than the decline in their large gifts. They have seen their wealth shrink by anywhere from 24 to 37 percent, the report said. “Given the far greater falls in wealth that have occurred during the past year,” the researchers wrote, “philanthropy has proved to be remarkably robust.”
Compared with the biggest gifts in fiscal 2007, the report found three other recession-related characteristics among the large donations it examined last year:
- More gifts were given with the stipulation that they were to be spent immediately, rather than being held for later distribution.
- There was a rise in anonymous giving by donors who made the largest gifts, a trend that has also been noted among U.S. donors.
- More donors decided to make large gifts in installments rather than all at once.
