Younger people are less likely to say they’ve stopped donating to charity because they can’t afford to give and more likely to say it’s because they don’t feel like they have been asked or don’t feel connected to the charity. Compounding donors’ disconnect, 59.1% of people with household income exceeding $70,000 who stopped giving to charities during the past five years agree with the statement “there are people out there with significantly more money who should give to charity instead of me.”
These are among the findings contained in a 51-page white paper, Special Donor Trust Report: Donor Participation, from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance, also known as Give.org. The data is culled from responses of 3,100 adults across the United States and Canada collected during December 2022. Researchers were seeking a better sense of why donors disengage from charity and possible ways to reverse the generosity decline that has much of the sector concerned.
Gen Zers (aged 18-24) who claim to have stopped donating are nearly a dozen times more likely than Boomers (aged 57-75) to cite “not being asked” as a reason and only about one-third as likely to cite financial hardship despite the significant generational wealth gap between them. More alarmingly, Gen Zers are the least likely of all generational groups to have maintained or increased their charitable giving during the past five years, a finding that portends a major challenge for the sector’s relationship with this growing demographic.
Findings from the study echo some of the changing generational views around giving reported earlier this year by researchers at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy in the report What Americans Think About Philanthropy and Nonprofits. Shockingly, the authors of that study went on to report that that only 5.4% of adults across all age groups believed they or their immediate families had personally benefited from charitable services the previous year.
It’s perhaps for this reason that young people’s views of generosity are no longer limited to financial support of formally established organizations. Instead, they increasingly find expression through direct assistance to individuals, volunteerism, cause-related advocacy, and shopping at socially responsible businesses, according to the Give.org authors. Still, financial support remains the lifeblood of the charitable sector, a challenge for which the authors candidly admit they don’t have a silver bullet as nonprofits grow ever more reliant on a shrinking pool of wealthy donors.
“News about declining numbers of households contributing to charities is concerning as this makes the sector more vulnerable and less pluralistic. Unfortunately, our survey also shows that people who stopped or decreased their giving to charities over the past five years are least likely to say they might increase their giving moving forward,” said H. Art Taylor, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance.
One glimmer of hope is the finding that young people are most likely to cite wanting to be “part of something bigger” as a reason for giving, suggesting their generosity potential may not yet be fully tapped. Young people are also more likely to trust a variety of solicitation channels including social media, giving circles, and crowdfunding sites, the full power of which much of the sector is only now beginning to realize. “These results suggest that ‘meeting Gen Zers where they’re at’ calls for a more distributed outreach strategy and articulating the relative strength of charity impact across broader forms of being generous,” Give.org spokesperson Elvia Castro told The NonProfit Times.
Other findings in the report include the following:
- Nearly half – 45.4% – of Gen Zers cited “not being asked” as their reason for not donating to charity versus 3.8% of Boomers who gave the same answer.
- Finances are the second most common reason Gen Zers gave for why they stopped contributing to charity and the most commonly cited reason for all other age groups. Still, the disparities were significant as only 27% of Gen Zers gave this response versus 77% of Boomers who did the same.
- The factors most often cited by lapsed donors across all age groups as likely to motivate them to give again were “making it easier to find charities serving their own community” and “making it easier to find charities led by people of their political identity.”
- Among those who stopped contributing to charities, only 1 in 4 (25.5%) think that donating to charity has a stronger impact on society than shopping at socially responsible businesses. By contrast, 58.3% of people who increased their contributions to charity believe donating to charity has a stronger impact.
The good news is these findings could point to a way forward, according to the authors. “The bad news is that some of the themes that come across in our findings are tied to broader societal trends with undeniable momentum such as growing economic inequality, loss of a sense of community, and polarization,” they write.
