It's commonplace in dot-org land to hear professionals quote as unquestioned fact things about charitable giving in this country that are either completely wrong, or wildly outdated. This seems like one more example of the immaturity of this sector -- do lifers in other lines of enterprise walk around believing basic objective facts about their sectors which are dead wrong? Doesn't seem likely.
Anyway, inspired by one such comment I recently pulled out the authoritative annual reports by Giving USA on charitable donations in the United States. The subject in mind was where the current ongoing boom in charitable giving is going (that is, to which causes or types of organizations?). I wanted to look at the last 20 years or so which is the real boom period, and wanted to see the overall trends rather than the single-year blips which always end up being the dumb newspaper headlines. So I plotted the annual totals from the years 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 (2006 data is not yet published), as percentages of change.
The overall context is that after adjusting for inflation, charitable contributions in the U.S. for 2005 totaled about 2.5 times as many dollars as in 1985. So total amounts given to every type of non-profit have risen, a lot. Individuals remain by far the major source though slowly declining as a fraction (from being more than 80 percent of the total in 1985 to around 75 percent of it now); the shares contributed by corporations and by foundations are somewhat higher now than 20 years ago.
Giving USA breaks all contributions down into several useful categories by organizational mission. Easily the biggest loser of this particular market share has been religious non-profits: from 53 percent of all donations in 1985 they dropped to 34 percent in 2000, ticking back up to 36 percent in 2005. (Or put another way: the share of all contributions that goes to religious groups has fallen by about one-third over the past 20 years.)
Three other major types of non-profits saw their shares of all giving decline a bit between 1985 and 2005: health care (from 11 percent to 9 percent), human services (from 11 percent to just under 9 percent), and arts/culture (from 7 percent to 5 percent).
So who have been the biggest relative gainers? (Keeping in mind that all types of non-profit have been gaining in absolute terms because the total contributions have risen so much across the board.) Education-focused non-profits have seen their market share rise from 11 percent in 1985 to almost 15 percent in 2005, and giving to foundations rose from under 7 percent then to more than 8 percent now (and the 2006 figures will likely boost this one even more).
What Giving USA calls "public/society benefit" non-profits (meaning groups which collect donations and pass them on such as the United Way) went from 3 percent of all 1985 donations to more than 5 percent in 2005. Other gainers have been by categories which in 1985 weren't even big enough to be counted by Giving USA: environment/animals (3.4 percent of all 2005 giving) and international affairs (2.5 percent). And there are more new types of non-profit entering the picture steadily: the "other" category received 6 percent of all 2005 contributions.
So the overall picture is that charitable giving while rising has also been spreading out, largely at the expense of religious groups.
Showing posts with label giving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label giving. Show all posts
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
The joy of giving
The great charitable-giving boom we're in nowadays has caught the attention of neurological researchers. Several studies have concluded that the act of giving (either in money or in volunteerism) makes people feel good at a really primal level.
Logical questions include both why and how that would be the case. Taking the broad evolutionary view, some researchers have argued that altruistic behavior is a positive for natural selection at a group level as distinct from Darwinian individualism. But homo sapiens is the only species which practices altruism outside its own genetic relatives -- is that a cultural adaptation or does it have a long-term natural-selection payoff? Creationists have taken to arguing that widespread human charity cannot be explained in Darwinian terms and hence represents a flaw in the science that they hate so much. Researchers more interested in the scientific method are actively exploring several hypotheses on the issue.
On the second part (how exactly are we wired to enjoy being charitable?), some researchers have concluded that it stimulates the same part of our gray matter which drives our gut-level interest in things like food, drugs and sex. (The joy of giving, indeed...say sweetheart is that a charitable remainder trust in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?) This reminds me of a development director I once worked with who grumbled when another staffer referred to a particular individual-donor solicitation idea as "sexy"; turns out he was just accurately "following the donors"!
Logical questions include both why and how that would be the case. Taking the broad evolutionary view, some researchers have argued that altruistic behavior is a positive for natural selection at a group level as distinct from Darwinian individualism. But homo sapiens is the only species which practices altruism outside its own genetic relatives -- is that a cultural adaptation or does it have a long-term natural-selection payoff? Creationists have taken to arguing that widespread human charity cannot be explained in Darwinian terms and hence represents a flaw in the science that they hate so much. Researchers more interested in the scientific method are actively exploring several hypotheses on the issue.
On the second part (how exactly are we wired to enjoy being charitable?), some researchers have concluded that it stimulates the same part of our gray matter which drives our gut-level interest in things like food, drugs and sex. (The joy of giving, indeed...say sweetheart is that a charitable remainder trust in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?) This reminds me of a development director I once worked with who grumbled when another staffer referred to a particular individual-donor solicitation idea as "sexy"; turns out he was just accurately "following the donors"!
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The "Slate 60" sounds off
Ten years ago, Slate editor Michael Kinsley was inspired (by something Ted Turner said in an interview) to create the "Slate 60": the philanthropy version of the Forbes 400 annual list of America's richest people. Arguably Kinsley was a bit ahead of his time in 1996, which was before Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Gordon Moore started famously taking turns doing modern-day Andrew Carnegie impersonations. (For that matter so was Turner, who has a right to feel like he was doing billionaire philanthropy before it was cool.)
Anyway it was a good idea and the ten years worth of lists make for interesting reading; one can see things like the sources of vast new personal fortunes, what subjects and institutions have the attention of the super-rich, and of course the unprecedented new scale of individual philanthropy. (Despite personal wealth in the U.S. being vastly less concentrated today than in Carnegie's time Bill Gates has already given away in real dollars several times as much as either Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller did; and yet all the giving for a year by the entire Slate 60 is a small fraction of total American individual giving which is closing in on $300 billion per year.)
This past November, Slate gathered members of the Slate 60 from its first ten years for a public conversation. I like the NonProfit Times writeup which is both thorough and just a bit cheeky ("With their limos waiting outside, donors gathered at the conference to discuss..." Those would be hybrid limos staffed by salaried drivers receiving family health insurance, I trust?). For example their reporter quoted Bill Gates Sr. scoffing at the dot-commers' notion that philanthropy only just this second became entrepeneurial (he has a point in a generalized sense of that word, not so much if the narrow fiduciary sense of it is meant).
The Chronicle of Philanthropy writeup is drier, though probably does a better job of getting across the key messages of a couple of people like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Slate meanwhile posted video and audio from the conference itself. (The conference also included prominent philanthropists who haven't personally made the Slate 60, such as Bono.)
Anyway it was a good idea and the ten years worth of lists make for interesting reading; one can see things like the sources of vast new personal fortunes, what subjects and institutions have the attention of the super-rich, and of course the unprecedented new scale of individual philanthropy. (Despite personal wealth in the U.S. being vastly less concentrated today than in Carnegie's time Bill Gates has already given away in real dollars several times as much as either Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller did; and yet all the giving for a year by the entire Slate 60 is a small fraction of total American individual giving which is closing in on $300 billion per year.)
This past November, Slate gathered members of the Slate 60 from its first ten years for a public conversation. I like the NonProfit Times writeup which is both thorough and just a bit cheeky ("With their limos waiting outside, donors gathered at the conference to discuss..." Those would be hybrid limos staffed by salaried drivers receiving family health insurance, I trust?). For example their reporter quoted Bill Gates Sr. scoffing at the dot-commers' notion that philanthropy only just this second became entrepeneurial (he has a point in a generalized sense of that word, not so much if the narrow fiduciary sense of it is meant).
The Chronicle of Philanthropy writeup is drier, though probably does a better job of getting across the key messages of a couple of people like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Slate meanwhile posted video and audio from the conference itself. (The conference also included prominent philanthropists who haven't personally made the Slate 60, such as Bono.)
Friday, December 01, 2006
Who's more generous?
The hot topic of the moment in the philanthropic media (including blogs) is a new book by an economist named Arthur Brooks, entitled "Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide". His thesis, based on a variety of survey data, is actually three-fold (and to some degree overlapping):
(a) religious households both liberal and conservative give more to charity than secular households do, even without counting giving to their churches;
(b) politically-conservative people give more to charity than do politically-liberal folks; and
(c) the wealthy and the working poor give about the same fractions of their income to charity, while the middle class gives much less.
So to sum up (in my words not his): "middle-class secular people who usually vote Democratic are stingy hypocrites". That would be, um...me, and most of my friends and family, and at least 75% of my colleagues in the non-profit sector. No let's be honest, more like 90%. And a similar fraction of my former colleagues in newspaper journalism.
Coverage of the book, and of Brooks' various recent op-ed pieces promoting it, has centered on whichever of those arguments causes the most outrage with the particular writer. I did get into a brief online debate that's tangentially about this, over at White Courtesy Telephone, but before saying anything further about Brooks' facts I'll read the thing. All I've done thus far is to confirm at a surface level that at least a couple of the surveys that Brooks cite do support at least some of his claims, and locate an unrelated survey that supports at least one of his points. More than that will have to await reading the book and checking its listed sources.
(a) religious households both liberal and conservative give more to charity than secular households do, even without counting giving to their churches;
(b) politically-conservative people give more to charity than do politically-liberal folks; and
(c) the wealthy and the working poor give about the same fractions of their income to charity, while the middle class gives much less.
So to sum up (in my words not his): "middle-class secular people who usually vote Democratic are stingy hypocrites". That would be, um...me, and most of my friends and family, and at least 75% of my colleagues in the non-profit sector. No let's be honest, more like 90%. And a similar fraction of my former colleagues in newspaper journalism.
Coverage of the book, and of Brooks' various recent op-ed pieces promoting it, has centered on whichever of those arguments causes the most outrage with the particular writer. I did get into a brief online debate that's tangentially about this, over at White Courtesy Telephone, but before saying anything further about Brooks' facts I'll read the thing. All I've done thus far is to confirm at a surface level that at least a couple of the surveys that Brooks cite do support at least some of his claims, and locate an unrelated survey that supports at least one of his points. More than that will have to await reading the book and checking its listed sources.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
"Giving circles"
A new form of personal philanthropy which appears to be gaining steam in the U.S. is the "giving circle", in which groups of people gather once a month or so to pool small amounts into a single larger donation to a charity they've discussed and agreed on. So for example a dozen individuals or families each giving $20 might vote on a single charity each month that gets the whole $240.
All the examples being written about thus far in the media are groups of women, probably because that gives reporters and editors a chance to make smug analogies to sewing circles and book clubs, but there are all-male and mixed-gender examples too. Some of the amounts described are fairly impressive, like a Los Angeles giving circle that collects $5,000 per year per participant.
Some research has been done on this trend, see here and here. Though thus far it's not terribly rigorous, it does suggest that there are now thousands such groups and that most of them have been founded since the late 1990s. A couple of the big national foundations have financed those initial research and advocacy efforts.
Is this a good thing? Well...obviously the trend plugs into the concept of leverage: individuals who can each only afford $50/month can band together and feel like they're making a bigger impact. On balance people being recruited into giving circles seems likely to increase total charitable giving. And it certainly sounds like more fun to be philanthropic in that manner rather than just writing a check -- at least until serious disagreement arises, what's the over-under on that in months for a typical group? And I'm a big fan of donors behaving like investors, which the entire sector would be better for and which this concept would seem to encourage. So a tentative thumbs up from here, while acknowledging that we don't yet know much about the real-world long-term impacts of this concept.
All the examples being written about thus far in the media are groups of women, probably because that gives reporters and editors a chance to make smug analogies to sewing circles and book clubs, but there are all-male and mixed-gender examples too. Some of the amounts described are fairly impressive, like a Los Angeles giving circle that collects $5,000 per year per participant.
Some research has been done on this trend, see here and here. Though thus far it's not terribly rigorous, it does suggest that there are now thousands such groups and that most of them have been founded since the late 1990s. A couple of the big national foundations have financed those initial research and advocacy efforts.
Is this a good thing? Well...obviously the trend plugs into the concept of leverage: individuals who can each only afford $50/month can band together and feel like they're making a bigger impact. On balance people being recruited into giving circles seems likely to increase total charitable giving. And it certainly sounds like more fun to be philanthropic in that manner rather than just writing a check -- at least until serious disagreement arises, what's the over-under on that in months for a typical group? And I'm a big fan of donors behaving like investors, which the entire sector would be better for and which this concept would seem to encourage. So a tentative thumbs up from here, while acknowledging that we don't yet know much about the real-world long-term impacts of this concept.
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