I attended a great session at BlogHer today about online charitable fundraising and activism. Afterwards, one of the other attendees asked me why I was there.
Hmm.
Well, a lot of it was because I have 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, there was $300 billion worth of charitable giving last year. Of that amount, 82% of 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 number, approximately 1/3 of individual giving comes through faith based organizations like churches. That number, I expected to be higher.
Considering the $300 billion in charitable giving, only about 1% of that is from online giving. 1%! It’s about $2-3 billion.
The session ended with some commentary about why people give. Nonprofit orgs find that people will give for primarily three reasons:
1, Because someone asks (solicitations)
2, When there is a disaster
3, Tax deductions (donations tend to increase at the end of the tax year)
Tax policy at work? Of course. I’ve been mulling 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.
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.