How collaborative data can transform charitable giving

From 2015 to 2022, charitable giving in the United States saw significant fluctuations, shaped by economic cycles, social movements, and global events. Yet, despite the generosity of donors, the allocation of funds to nonprofits has often lacked consistency, predictability, and equity—factors critical to ensuring long-term impact and sustainability in the sector. 

As leaders of Candid, GivingTuesday, and Network for Good, we came together with a shared goal: to explore whether our organizations, through collaboration, could better understand the deeper patterns driving charitable giving by leveraging our collective data sets. Too often, data on individual and institutional giving remains siloed. We recognized that the first step would be to explore the potential connections between these datasets, with the specific goal of understanding what insights could be gained about capital flows within the nonprofit sector. 

Together, we aimed to answer several key questions, including: 

• How have individual and institutional giving patterns varied across different cause areas and geographic regions? 

• Are there opportunities for greater synergy between individual donors and institutional grantmakers? 

• Can we predict future giving patterns, and could these predictions lead to more equitable and timely distributions of funds? 

• Do changes in economic circumstances affect individual donors and institutional grantmakers in the same way? 

The result of our collaboration is the Dollars and Change report, a comprehensive study of U.S. charitable giving trends from 2015 to 2022. The report offers key insights into the movement of capital within the sector and reveals disparities in giving. For example, we found that while individual giving increased by 58%, and institutional grant dollars grew by 74%, a small percentage of donors are responsible for a significant portion of the contributions. Just 0.3% of individual donors contributed nearly half of total donation dollars, and the top 0.1% of institutional grantmakers accounted for over a third of all grantmaking dollars.  

Other findings point to shifts in giving that seem linked to the COVID and racial crises of 2020. For example, the year 2020 saw a 26% increase in individual donations to human services nonprofits (e.g. organizations providing direct services such as food, shelter, support, and aid). Among institutional grantmakers, 2020 giving increased the most for public benefit organizations (32%) such as community and economic development organizations, foundations, and civil rights and advocacy organizations. Moreover, geographic analyses found that pre-COVID (2015-2019) states with lower levels of unemployment received more funding; however, in recent years (2020-2022), this association weakened—and in the case of Candid and Network For Good data, it flipped, with more money tending to go to states with higher levels of unemployment. 

Beyond the numbers, the Dollars and Change report revealed both opportunities and limitations in merging diverse data sets. Of the 16 research questions our research teams identified, we were able to fully address four and partially answer six. The remaining six questions required data that either doesn’t currently exist or lacks the necessary detail, consistency, and standardization. As outlined in the report, these unanswered questions—and the gaps in data—include whether there is a causal relationship between individual and institutional donors, in one direction or another, and how specific events affect the flow of funds. 

While we gained valuable insights into how charitable giving responds to societal shifts, we also discovered that, as a sector, we still lack the tools needed to fully explore some of the key questions that inspired this work. At the same time, identifying these limitations was in itself a useful finding. Nonprofits often don’t have access to the systems and resources necessary to analyze trends in giving effectively. Without these tools, we can’t fully understand how funds flow through the sector or ensure that donations align with the areas of greatest need. Now that we better understand the nuanced differences in what—and how—data fields are collected across platforms we can build towards broader system alignment to address data gaps. These findings serve as a call to action. To improve how funds are distributed and better support communities, the nonprofit sector must invest in data-driven strategies. This means developing systems that enable us to analyze donor behavior, predict giving patterns, and drive more equitable distributions of funds. 

We invite other organizations to join us in this effort. By sharing data and developing new methodologies together, we can spark a sector-wide transformation—one that is more transparent, efficient, and equitable in how it allocates funds.