Arts Groups’ Data Shows Fundraising Declines

Fundraising at 70 North American arts organizations declined 14 percent across the first nine months of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, according to a new report.

The report is the latest to try to quantify the impact of the pandemic on arts nonprofits, which have anecdotally reported some of the deepest fundraising decreases in the nonprofit world since the onset of the health crisis. Conducted by Purple Seven and TRG Arts, the report is notable for its use of ticketing and customer-relationship software data provided by the nonprofits that participated in the survey, which allowed the authors to track in detail how donors interacted with the groups over time. The report includes seven Canadian organizations. The groups averaged $4.9 million in charitable donations in 2019.

There is at least one bright spot in the report: The total number of donations to these groups rose by nearly 14 percent, from 182,976 to 208,261, from January to September.

But the total value of contributions to these groups declined from $285 million in 2019 to $245 million in 2020, with the average gift size declining 24 percent, from $1,557 to $1,178.

And while the total number of donations over the first nine months was up, the data shows a troubling drop in the number of gifts made in the third quarter of 2020, according to Jill Robinson, CEO of TRG Arts.

“The people who are most likely to be motivated by a special campaign or motivated by their own past behavior to support the arts leaned in initially,” Robinson said. “As we moved toward the fall, everyone has begun to see this pandemic is going to continue, and its impact on the economy — especially the arts and cultural economy — is going to continue, and there was a bit of downshifting in energy and behavior.”

The number of gifts exceeding $1 million for these nonprofits decreased from 17 to seven in the first nine months of 2020 compared with the same period last year. The total value of those gifts declined 9 percent, dropping from $48 million to $43.8 million across that same time span. While these gifts account for less than one-tenth of a percent of the number of donations, they have accounted for 17 and 18 percent of the money these groups have taken in through contributions in 2019 and 2020, respectively.