Thousands of charities promote their causes on Giving Tuesday, the annual day of philanthropy held after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Since it first launched in 2012, the giving day has grow exponentially and is now seen as the unofficial start of the holiday giving season. Last year’s total raised was estimated at more than $301 million, much more than the $10 million brought in during the campaign’s first year.
Should your charity participate this year or not? Here’s what the data tells us about Giving Tuesday—including which causes benefit most and which donors are most likely to step up with support that day.
Big nonprofits benefit most, but smaller charities are catching up.
Most Giving Tuesday dollars flow to big organizations, though large groups’ share of the total haul has declined over the years. Nonprofits with $10 million or more in annual revenue got nearly 60 percent of all the money collected during 2017’s Giving Tuesday, according to an analysis from the Blackbaud Institute, an arm of the software company that conducts research on fundraising.
When the campaign first launched in 2012, 80 percent of the dollars raised went to big charities, according to Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud. Since then, small and midsize nonprofits’ share of donations has grown.
“There’s something going on here,” MacLaughlin told the Chronicle in February. “Maybe a shift to more local and regional giving? It’ll be interesting to see if that continues to happen.”
Human services, health, and animal welfare are Giving Tuesday’s hot causes.
Some 19 percent of Giving Tuesday dollars went to human-service charities during last year’s drive, according to the Blackbaud Institute. Those nonprofits were followed by health-care organizations, such as hospitals and medical centers, and animal-welfare groups, which each brought in 12 percent of last year’s total.
The event’s donors are younger than the average age of supporters in general.
Giving Tuesday supporters’ median age is 25, according to a report from Classy, a company that provides online-donation tools. By contrast, the average age of all people who give to charity is 64, according to the Blackbaud Institute.
Most Giving Tuesday donors are women.
In 2016’s campaign, 63 percent of all Giving Tuesday donors were women, according to a study from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. That’s a higher share than the rest of the year, when women make up a little more than half of charitable supporters, according to the report.
Giving Tuesday attracts a lot of new donors.
Organizations acquire three to five times more new supporters on Giving Tuesday than on other days of the year, according to the Classy report.
And last year, three-quarters of the roughly 473,000 people who donated on Facebook during the drive had never given through the platform before, according to a study by the social-media site and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “This is a promising sign that Giving Tuesday is spurring donations from people who otherwise may not have been inclined to donate,” the report says.
A significant number of new Giving Tuesday donors give again.
Some 15 percent of donors acquired on Giving Tuesday give once more before the next year’s event, according to Classy.
Facebook and the Gates Foundation found something similar: One in five people who contributed during last year’s drive gave again within six months of the event; however, the data is unclear about whether they gave to the same charity again.
