In 2024, nonprofits brought in more than 1.9 percent in donations than they did the previous year, according to the 2024 Trends in Giving Spotlight by the Blackbaud Institute. The report, which is one of the first that gives a hint about how giving looked last year, found that fundraising growth didn’t keep pace with inflation, which was 2.9 percent
“We’ve seen that this time frame has been one of significant changes and challenges,” says Carrie Cobb, chief data and AI officer at Blackbaud, a fundraising software company. “Despite this, fundraisers continue to be resilient and creative, and donors continue to be generous and really passionate about the causes that are most connected to them.”
The Blackbaud Institute is a research organization associated with the company that pulls from data the company has on nonprofit customer use and donations served through its systems. The report used two data sets. For general giving, it looked at 8,674 U.S. nonprofit organizations, totaling $55 billion in fundraising revenue. For online fundraising tallies, the data set included 5,151 U.S. nonprofits with more than $3.4 billion in fundraising revenue.
While the report gives a first look, it’s not a comprehensive view of 2024 giving, says Laura MacDonald, president of the fundraising consultancy the Benefactor Group and a former chair of the Giving USA Foundation.
“It’s $55 billion of giving out of a total charitable philanthropic economy of somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 billion,” she says. “It’s a significant slice, but I suspect that what they’re missing are some of the biggest gifts. The mega-gifts don’t generally get processed through [customer relationship management systems].”
MacDonald says the Blackbaud data may be more reflective of everyday donations rather than gifts from high-net-worth donors. She also points out that giving trends tend to align more closely with the stock market, and the S&P was up 23 percent last year, so she would expect comprehensive giving numbers for 2024 to track higher than what the Blackbaud Institute found.
Both MacDonald and Cobb note that the Blackbaud report, which includes data from previous years, shows a significant increase in giving from 2019 to 2024. MacDonald says that most organizations tried but were not able to retain the huge increases in giving in 2021. So the 2024 data continues on the positive trend line.
“The five-year view from the Blackbaud Institute illustrates a strong sector with near-record dollars given to nonprofits in 2024,” Cobb says.
What to Expect in 2025
While an increase of 1.9 percent may not be meteoric, it’s still a good number, says Josh Birkholz, CEO of BWF, a fundraising consultancy, and also a previous chair of the Giving USA Foundation.
“I think this is more a story of how much inflation is rather than giving being moderated,” he says.
Like MacDonald, he notes that giving tends to match the markets. Birkholz’s clients tell him that so far this year, donors are skittish because of the fluctuations in the stock market.
“The donors are like, ‘I’m not sure I want to commit to a five-year pledge right now,’” Birkholz says. “For some of my clients, their corporate giving is an area of a little bit of strain.”
MacDonald says she’s “seeing extreme caution” among donors and that her clients are debating if they want to launch capital campaigns when donors are anxious about the stock market.
Notable findings from the Blackbaud Institute report:
- The mean donation in 2024 rose to $937, up from $858 in 2023.
- The mean online donation declined from $216 in 2023 to $197 in 2024. Blackbaud attributes the drop to fluctuations in giving to different causes. For example, the K-12 education sector saw smaller online gifts, and fluctuations in a few causes made the average drop.
- Most causes saw increases in giving, such as health care, which grew 11.3 percent; animal welfare, 7.3 percent; and the environment, 5.6 percent.
- Those that declined include giving to international affairs organizations, which dropped 8.5 percent from 2023, and donations to public society benefit groups, which declined 0.6 percent.
- The election did not deter year-end giving, with 34 percent of annual revenue coming in during that period. Animal welfare, K-12 education, and medical research raised the most at year’s end.
