How Big Charities Are Faring in Their Fundraising Amid Covid

To better understand how the nation’s biggest charities have been affected by the health and economic crisis, the Chronicle contacted 370 of the largest nonprofits nationwide to request data about their fundraising performance this year compared with the same periods in 2019; 116 groups provided full or partial responses to our inquiries. Of those, 107 groups representing roughly 10 percent of all charitable giving nationwide before the pandemic provided data on their fundraising in the first half of the year.

Covid-Era Fundraising by Big Charities: Special Report

• Fundraising in Uncertain Times
• Virtual Events Have Gotten Mixed Results
• Fundraising Strategies Are Shifting

The groups we chose for this project are among the most successful fundraising organizations in the country. They frequently appear in our annual rankings of nonprofits that raise the most in cash and private support, America’s Favorite Charities (and its predecessor, the Philanthropy 400) . These groups raised a median of $135 million a year over the past three years, according to Chronicle of Philanthropy data.

Organizations provided estimates in most cases since nonprofits have not yet audited their pandemic fundraising.

Our goal for this project is to help policy makers, foundations, and others understand how charities are performing during these challenging times and to give fundraisers data that will help them understand how their peers are performing. That said, these figures do not necessarily show how all big charities are faring since many turned down our repeated requests for data, especially when we declined to post information in aggregate form.

Due to the special circumstances surrounding the pandemic and the challenges it has created for nonprofits, this data project supplants our America’s Favorite Charities ranking,

The numbers in the charts below reflect giving in cash, stock, and products in the first and second quarters of calendar year 2020, as well as the sum of those two quarters, and compare them with the same periods in 2019.

(Eleanor Walsh, Karenna Warden, and Soolgi Hong contributed to this report.)