Global Generosity Skyrocketed Last Year but Less so in the U.S.

A report based on a GivingTuesday research collaboration delivered hopeful news on global generosity, finding that 83.6% of people worldwide donated to others in some way last year.

But, in a surprising “double-whammy,” the recently released research also found that both the number of givers, and the dollars they donated, fell last year in the U.S. for the first time since 2010. Also, stock market declines in 2022 appeared to cause large donors everywhere to give less.

The research, titled “Rethinking Resilience: Insights from the Giving Ecosystem,” was compiled by GivingTuesday Data Commons, a project involving more than 300 organisations and more than 50 global data labs. The Data Commons looks at “giving behaviours, contexts and patterns, movement growth, and altruistic motivations” with a goal of determining and sharing best practices for driving philanthropy.

GivingTuesday began in 2012 as an effort to encourage charitable contributions on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., and has expanded into a global movement.

“Rethinking Resilience” gleaned data from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and North America, finding that 56% of people across the globe gave in at least three ways last year, including donating their time, donating things they owned, or providing money; also, 57% gave to all of the three types of recipients that the report tracked: formal charities, informal groups, and individuals.

The report “makes it clear that in many communities, giving to others is not an optional ‘extra’ but rather a first principle of community membership,” Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday said in an introduction to the research.

The Data Commons goal, Rosenbaum said, is to “bring the same sorts of data-driven tools to the social sector that the business sector has had for decades.” These tools should help to counter what has become a narrow view of philanthropy.

“Our research reveals that broadening outreach and engagement to include previously under-represented demographics can significantly improve organizational resilience, especially in times of economic volatility and uncertainty,” Rosenbaum said.

The report found a significant rise in volunteering everywhere, which often happens when the economy is shaky. It also found that young people everywhere were “giving more often and in more ways” than older ones.

Overall, this global data gathering exercise revealed that giving can look far different country to country. The “most inescapable insight,” the report said, is that less wealthy countries were consistently more generous than wealthy ones. Kenya, for instance, demonstrated “a near universal commitment to generosity across all metrics,” with India as a close second.

In the U.S., the number of givers fell by 10%, driven by an 18% drop in new donors and a huge drop in donor retention: 26.4% from first-time donors and 3.5% from repeat givers.

Contributions by “major” philanthropists, who give between US$5,000 and US$50,000, and “supersize” ones who give more than US$50,000 fell the least, but because of the large size of their donations, the drop off was more keenly felt. Total dollar contributions fell by 1.7% last year.

The biggest decline among these philanthropists was in the fourth quarter of last year as a 20% drop in stocks took a toll. That fall off could be “the canary in the coal mine,” the report said. “Should large donors suddenly retreat further, the impact on an unprepared social sector could be devastating.”

The message to nonprofits is to actively build a wider, more diversified base of support beyond big philanthropists to “strengthen resilience and reduce the adverse effects of steadily growing competition for a shrinking pool of increasingly cautious large donors who may be retreating in the face of economic uncertainty and volatility,” the report said.