Online Charitable Fundraising & Activism
I attended a great session at BlogHer today about online charitable fundraising and activism. Afterwards, another attendee asked me why I was there.
Hmm.
Well, a lot of it was because I have an interest on behalf of my nonprofit clients. Online charitable fundraising and activism is changing the face of the nonprofit world, though more slowly than I thought.
Another reason that I trekked over to see it was my hopefulness that b5media will continue to participate in charitable causes – our Blog Off was my first foray into online charitable fundraising. It was a great experience. The blogosphere offers tremendous opportunity to raise awareness and money in the nonprofit world – in the same way that for-profit businesses have been doing for years.
But there’s still a lot of catching up to do.
So here are a few facts that were shared at today’s session that I found interesting:
According to Giving USA, charitable giving totaled $300 billion last year. Of that amount, 82% of the dollars were given by individuals – I have to say that I was totally floored by that number. I expected to see a much lower percentage. It’s actually kind of amazing that the corporate giving is so low, don’t you think?
Of that, about 1/3 of individual giving comes through faith-based organizations like churches. I expected that number to be higher.
Considering the $300 billion in charitable giving, only about 1% comes from online giving. 1%! It’s about $2-3 billion.
The session ended with some commentary about why people give. Nonprofit organizations find that people will give for primarily three reasons:
- Because someone asks (solicitations)
- When there is a disaster
- Tax deductions (donations tend to increase at the end of the tax year)
Tax policy at work? Of course. I’ve been mulling it over a little bit (the session was just a couple of hours ago), and I’m going to follow up on this later. For now, I’m just kind of digesting.
82% of charitable donations are made by individuals – and they cite tax deductions as a primary reason. Clearly, our tax policy is driving some donations. Just think how much more of an impact there might be with an above-the-line charitable donation (meaning not having to itemize)… More on this later.
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Hi, Kelly —
Can you elaborate on that “primary reason” thing? I always thought the majority of charitable donations came from lower-income people — most of whom don’t have enough deductions to make it worth itemizing (i.e., their donations are, in effect not deductible). I take it that’s not the case?
Urb
Oops, I think that was my poor wording. I meant that tax deductions were cited as a primary reason – meaning one of the top three – not as THE primary reason. I agree that lower income folks tend to give move – and I think that they tend to because of #1 and #2 (being asked and giving for disasters). That’s why I think that making the deduction above the line would encourage giving even more because it would give those folks an extra incentive.