THINKING ABOUT INDIVIDUAL DONORS

A new edition of Giving USA is out covering giving during 2013.  It reports that living Individual Donors made 72% of all US contributions with another 8% of total US giving taking the form of Bequests.  Do the math and you find that Individual Donors, living and dead have yet again made 80% of all US contributions.  No big surprise there.  When bequests are added to individual giving, the resulting figure has hovered within a percent or two of 80% for a long time. 

Repetition, however, can give a notion greater impact.  As a result, the new edition of Giving USA may even more firmly fix the “80% of all giving come from individuals” truism in some minds and that would not be a good thing.   While I’m not concerned when fundraisers say that, I do become concerned when fundraising managers propose to allocate their organizations’ limited fundraising resources based on that truism.

Let me be clear; we have no reason to believe that the Giving USA figures are inaccurate at the national level or when all types of nonprofits are included in the analysis.  Our own work suggests, however, that the actual giving ratio is likely to be very different at the generally secular groups where readers of this posting are most likely to work.

Since 2013, our Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey has included a question on giving by donor type. Because we wanted to give the members of Michigan’s professional fundraising community benchmark figures with which to inform their efforts, we narrowed our data gathering to the types of organizations that are most likely to employ professional fundraising staff.  To do that, we excluded religious congregations, K-8 parochial schools, public schools w/out district-level foundations, and very small organizations.

With the more focused dataset described above, we observed a substantially different pattern of giving.  Our data showed individual giving to be significantly less, and corporate giving to be a good deal more, important than implied by the Giving USA figures.  In the section below, figures are contrasted to the Giving USA figures for the same year below.

2014 (giving during 2013):

Individual Donors – 57% of all giving in our data vs. 72% in Giving USA data

Bequests – 7% of all giving in our data vs. 8% in Giving USA data.

Corporations – 21% of all giving in our data vs. 5% in Giving USA data.

Foundations – 15% of all giving in our data vs. 15% in Giving USA

2013 (giving during 2012)

Individual Donors – 58% of all giving in our data vs. 73% in Giving USA data

Bequests – 6% of all giving in our data vs. 7% in Giving USA data.

Corporations – 21% of all giving in our data vs. 6% in Giving USA data.

Foundations – 15% of all giving in our data vs. 14% in Giving USA

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*Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey 2014 & 2013, Montgomery Consulting.  These are corrected figures.  Responses of “other” were examined and – based on their specific content – reallocated to the other categories.

**Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2012 & *Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2013, both © Giving USA Foundation and researched and written at The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.