In its annual report on charitable giving published earlier this week, Giving USA signaled that donations are on the upswing, exceeding pre-recession levels for the first time in seven years to total $358 billion for 2014. This reflects an increase in total giving of 5.4% from 2013. Historically, charitable giving levels correlate closely with the overall health of the economy, and improved economic health remains the reason cited by most charities to explain the recovery in funding.
Not all charities benefit equally from this good news, however. While total donations are up, these increases are not distributed evenly among all types of charities. For example, while giving to religious charities improved from the previous year by just under 1%, and this category makes up the highest percentage of total giving at 32%, giving to religous groups continues its downward trend from the 40% to 50% of total giving it represented in past decades. The biggest winners in 2014 were charities working in arts, culture, and humanities, which enjoyed a 7.4% increase in funding from the previous year. The only category to see a drop in giving from 2013 to 2014 was international affairs, which suffered a 3.6% decrease.
Charitable giving has amounted to about 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) for over four decades, which remained true for 2014, at 2.1% of GDP. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, giving by individuals still comprises the vast majority of total giving at 87%, but individuals did not increase their giving between 2013 and 2014 at as fast a rate as corporations and foundations, which saw gains of 11.9% and 6.5%, respectively. Individual giving is still shy of pre-recession levels with an increase of only 4% from 2013.
Patrick Rooney, associate dean for research and academic affairs at Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, told The New York Times, "The Great Recession was really a double whammy in the sense that there were more individuals who had greater need - there were more people who were unemployed, more people who were hungry, more people who were homeless - at the same time that there were substantially fewer resources...We're now back to where we were before that. All the sources are growing, some more rapidly than others, but they're all growing at pretty reasonable rates."
The Chronicle of Philanthropy publishes an annual list of the biggest U.S. donors called The Philathropy 50. Think you're a generous donor? To earn even the bottom placement on the list your donations in 2014 would have needed to exceed $43 million. As might be expected, the top place went to Bill and Melinda Gates, who were responsible for $1.9 billion of charitable donations.