Giving grew by just over 4 percent in 2017, a significant boost from the previous year’s flat performance, according to a new report.
Online contributions performed even better: They rose just over 12 percent compared with 2016, making up nearly 8 percent of all giving in 2017, according to the Blackbaud Institute, a project of the fundraising-software company.
Medical research, advocacy groups, and international-affairs organizations derived the highest percentage of their giving online, with each cause taking in just under 12 percent of their support that way.
“It was a pretty positive year for fundraising and a real reversal of some negative trends we saw in 2016,” says Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud.
Twenty-one percent of all online gifts in 2017 were made by people using mobile devices. That share has climbed steadily over the past several years, up from 9 percent in 2014.
“We’re well over the tipping point with mobile,” says MacLaughlin, who adds that during some months, the share of gifts coming in through smartphones and tablets is much higher than 21 percent. “I don’t think we’ve seen the ceiling yet. It’s just another reason why organizations need to pay attention to mobile fundraising.”
The report analyzes overall giving trends from 8,453 charities, representing more than $29.7 billion in fundraising revenue generated last year, and online giving data from 5,709 charities that got more than $3.1 billion in gifts. The study compares the same organizations over two years; all of the groups are Blackbaud customers.
How Causes Fared
Year-end giving remained vital for charities, which overall took in just over 18 percent of 2017’s gifts in December. The causes that received the largest share of their giving that month included health care (nearly 23 percent), international groups (nearly 21 percent), and environmental and animal-welfare groups (just under 20 percent).
Human-service charities took in only 11 percent of their year’s giving in December; for those groups, September was by far the most lucrative month, when almost 22 percent of the year’s support arrived. The spate of hurricanes that tore through the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean fueled disaster-related giving to those charities that month.
Here’s how giving performed at different types of charities last year:
Note: The public and society benefit category includes associations, advocacy groups, think tanks, and veterans organizations.
Giving rose for many reasons in 2017, MacLaughlin says, including a strong economy and stock market, reaction to the 2016 presidential election, many natural disasters that hit the United States and its neighbors, and the increasing ease of making online and mobile donations.
Average gift sizes climbed last year to $132 per donation, up from $128 the previous year. Among contributions of $1,000 or more, the average gift size grew to $2,000 last year, up from $1,200 in 2016.
“While charities have concerns about the number of donors who are giving, those who are giving are giving more generously,” MacLaughlin says. (For more about the decline in donor numbers, see our How America Gives special report.)
Giving Tuesday’s Impact
The report also includes analysis of data collected from more than 7,200 charities that have participated in Giving Tuesday, the annual day devoted each year to promoting philanthropy.
Large organizations, those with annual revenue of more than $10 million, collected 57 percent of all money raised last year on Giving Tuesday. When the event started in 2012, 80 percent of donations went to the largest charities, MacLaughlin notes. The share collected by the largest organizations has steadily diminished in the years since, with midsize and smaller charities taking more of the pie each year.
“There’s something going on here,” he says. “Maybe a shift to more local and regional giving? It’ll be interesting to see if that continues to happen.”
When Giving Tuesday began, in 2012, medical-research organizations were the biggest beneficiaries, collecting one-third of the total donated that day. In 2017, such nonprofits gathered only 6 percent of total giving. Instead, the biggest hauls on Giving Tuesday last year were by human-service charities (19 percent), followed by health-care groups and environmental and animal-welfare nonprofits (12 percent each).
