Last Year’s Giving: Good, but Studies Differ on How Good

The reports all agree: Giving was up in 2014. But by how much?

That depends on whom you ask.

Online payment platforms and nonprofit-sector analysts use various metrics to measure donations and often work with different, sometimes proprietary, data sets.

The diverse and often murky methodologies make it difficult to distill a single useful number from all the data.

Blackbaud reported that donations increased by 2.1 percent last year among nearly 4,800 nonprofits that have used its services for at least 24 months.

Small nonprofits (those with revenue of less than $1-million a year) experienced more growth—5.8 percent—than medium and large nonprofits, both of which saw 1.3 percent more in donations in 2014.

According to Atlas of Giving, though, charitable giving grew more than 9 percent in 2014, and the 1,018 colleges that responded to the annual “Voluntary Support of Education” survey recorded a 10.8 percent increase in giving. Among those colleges, giving from alumni increased by 9.4 percent, and the average gift increased by 25.5 percent, although donor participation among alumni dropped from 8.7 percent to 8.3 percent.

What about online donations? Also up, and also variable. Blackbaud reported an 8.9 percent increase for the year, with small nonprofits raising 10.6 percent more online, medium nonprofits raising 9.7 percent more, and large nonprofits raising 8 percent more.

Meanwhile, Network for Good reported that online giving in December rose nearly 13 percent at 10,000 charities that use its online-giving platform, compared with results in December 2013.

At PayPal, an online payment-processing company, December giving rose nearly 50 percent, compared with the same month a year earlier.

Few groups report trends in mobile payments, but PayPal noted that the amount of money donated via mobile devices grew 58 percent in 2014.