American charities have probably left at least $13 billion behind simply because of not asking donors and the timing of asks to people who have a track record of giving. Following traditional seasonality of giving is stunting charities’ ability to generate additional income.
Not asking is counterintuitive since new research in the Giving Pulse report from GivingTuesday for the fourth quarter of 2024 shows people, in general, trust charities and are willing to give.
“What we have been seeing in Giving Pulse clearly really are concerning trends. A lot of people are being left out of nonprofit engagement. This at least correlates with an increasingly critical reliance on a small number of large donors to maintain the funding of the nonprofit sector,” said Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday. “That is just not resilient, and it leaves us with a lot of risk,” he said.
Key takeaways from the report include:
* Levels of trust in the nonprofit sector, a sense of community belonging, and civic intent (a measure indicating a community-minded orientation, as well as a pattern of recent generosity) remain consistent across the four main geographic regions of the U.S. and community types (as identified by the American Communities Project).
* Negative news about nonprofits does not depress generosity. People who noticed coverage of nonprofits were more likely to be generous, regardless of whether the news they heard was positive or negative.
* Solicitation matters. People are more likely to support causes, organizations, and people when they are asked. As the organizations in the nonprofit sector ramped up solicitation activities in the last quarter of 2024, this period remained vital to the resilience and health of the social sector.
* People living in different regions of the U.S. experience different levels of solicitation to give. To drive more giving, there are opportunities to expand the reach of current solicitation efforts.
Headlines out of Washington, D.C. that include funding freezes on previously contracted services is financially hurting the sector. “The fact remains that if ever there was a time for broad community support of our nonprofit sector … we are going to have big gaps in our funding models now,” said Rosenbaum. “At the same time, we have a population of people who are not only very generous when engaged they want to respond to their concerns with generous action. It gives them agency over the things they care about.”
The other challenge with not engaging all levels of donors is influence. The question is “the whole ‘who is really influencing’ how the nonprofit sector solves problems if that donor pool is shrinking,” said Rosenbaum. It begs the question “how relevant are nonprofits to everyday people,” along with the financial risk that creates, he said.
People living in different regions of the U.S. experience various levels of solicitation to give. To drive more giving, there are opportunities to expand the reach of current solicitation efforts, the data shows.
Rosenbaum said, that there is “a substantial missed opportunity between May and August” for engaging donors. “We keep trying to push everyone into giving between GivingTuesday and December 31, when people are very much prepared to give at any time of the year and the data really supports that,” he said.
When it comes to negative news about charities, he said research shows that while the impacted charity will suffer financially, those who believe in the causes will donate, and probably give more, to other charities with the same mission.
The full report is available at ….. https://www.givingpulse.givingtuesday.org/q42024
