Giving Resources
Learn about the latest research and innovations related to philanthropy products and services.
Looking for videos from the 2021 Greater Giving Summit? Find them here.
Unlocking Generosity with Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Giving
As nonprofits emerge from the shock of the pandemic and financial crisis, there is an opportunity to reinvent philanthropy for a new era of activism. This is a moment to move away from transactional giving, churning through donors and asks, to a new model of making giving more relational, customizing, and engaging. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) well is the key ingredient to scaling this approach. This paper outlines the processes, products and promise for scaling AI for giving.
Download the full report here.
Further Direction on the Application of GiveLists
ideas42 summarizes more than two years of lab and field testing related to the Better Giving Studio concept, GiveLists. A GiveList is an expert-informed curated list of effective charities, and it is supposed to be a solution to the combination of choice overload and information deficiency that may inhibit giving. Though the full report of their findings will be published in a couple of months, this blog post describes some of the best practices related to GiveLists that ideas42 uncovered through their research.
Read the full blog post here.
Study on Race, Gender and Giving
The Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy recently completed the first study of the intersection of race, gender and philanthropy.
Its report, entitled Women Give 2019: Gender and Giving Across Communities of Color, shares WPI’s findings that generosity is a value shared by all communities, and that women across race and ethnicity are leading through philanthropy. The study also demonstrates the unique perspectives women of color bring to philanthropy and underscores the importance of understanding and engaging donors from diverse backgrounds
To learn more, check out the full report and view the infographic.
To bring the research to life, WPI also partnered with the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago and Facebook to launch “Who Is A Philanthropist?,” a video campaign that spotlights how diverse women are giving back to their communities in unique ways.
Data from 2018 #GivingTuesday
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that on #GivingTuesday 2018, charities in the United States raised at least $380M online, representing 27% more than last year, from 4 million people. From 2017 to 2018, donations on Facebook increased from $45M to $125M, gifts processed on Blackbaud rose from $60.9M to $62.6M, and donations on Classy software grew from $10.3M to $15.4M. In addition to these platforms reporting an increase in donations, Blackbaud, DonorPerfect, and Classy reported growth in the average size of contributions. Web traffic on Guidestar increased 33% from #GivingTuesday 2017, setting a new record for the site.
We know many of our partners, including #GivingTuesday itself, are busy digging into the data and trends, so look for more donor insight to come out of #GT 2018 in the coming months, including from the over 50 other countries with official #GT campaigns!
A look at the data from #GivingTuesday in previous years reveals six #GivingTuesday trends about donor and the nonprofits they support: 1) big nonprofits benefits most, but smaller charities are catching up; 2) human services, health, and animal welfare are the hot causes; 3) donors are younger than the average age of supporters; 4) most donors are women; 5) #GivingTuesday attracts new donors; and 6) a significant number of new donors give again.
COVID-19 and Disaster Giving
On March 11, the Giving By All team had an informal, internal learning session on COVID-19, including a summary of what we’ve been tracking in the sector and hearing from partners. While an imperfect resource, we thought we’d share the PowerPoint we created with you all in case the compilation of facts, resources, and research is helpful. We will continue to track the latest developments and make updates as needed.
You can view and download the PowerPoint here.
Making Decisions in Group Giving
Shared Nation reports on an experiment it conducted to test the efficacy of pairwise voting as a mechanism for large-scale collective giving. Pairwise voting is an efficient process where members of a group contribute to a cooperative decision by voting between randomly-generated pairs of investment options. Evidence suggests that this system of voting can help large online groups make efficient decisions that increase their overall impact. Read more about the experiment and its takeaways here.
Playbook on Effective Matching Campaigns
Giving By All teamed up with Alvarez and Marsal to create a guide for running effective match funding campaigns.
Matching is a common tool for driving many individual donations. And while it may seem pretty straightforward, there’s actually a lot of interesting elements that can be used to create the right match campaign to achieve your goals. For example, with different rules in place, a campaign can increase the total amount given, the number of givers, and/or the average donation size.
The Matching Playbook draws on expert research and insights from practitioners to offer helpful definitions, lessons learned and case studies that unpack matching campaigns with a goal to influence the number and quality of match campaigns and spread the power of match giving.
Report on Corporate Social Investment
CECP, in association with The Conference Board, recently released Giving in Numbers 2018, its annual research report on corporate social investment and corresponding infographic. Over 250 multi-billion-dollar companies, representing 17.4M employees and $11.3T in revenue, participated in this year’s survey.
The report documents an increase in total giving by companies, looking at a three-year matched set between 2015 and 2017, and median total giving increased by 15%. Contributions to disaster relief increased by more than 300% over this three-year period. And the proportion of companies with open matching-gift programs increased, with a higher dollar amount matched in 2017 compared to companies with limited matching-gift programs.
Check out the full report for more workplace giving insights.
New Experimental Evidence on Giving
Our partners at Ideas42 explore how people in the United States approach, consider, and follow-through on giving. We proudly funded their recent report, Best of Intentions, that shares findings from experiments to unlock greater and better giving. Their work was also recently profiled by Fast Company.
The report includes promising findings from a recent pilot study of our GiveList concept, which tested the impact of presenting donors with expert curated lists of effective nonprofits to help inform donation decisions. The report uses a similar framework about the donor journey and donor outcomes as Better Giving Studio. It also includes examples of experimentation on several different types of platforms, from Donor Advised Funds to workplace platforms and online charity evaluators.
To reach out about this work, you can contact ideas42 at [email protected].
Corporate Volunteering, Giving, and Grants Technology Review
The RW Institute (RWI) works to improve the private sector’s contributions to positive social and environmental change through networking opportunities, learning and development programs, innovative research, and thought leadership. This review is a report on 40 of the 51 technology solutions from around the world that support the human and financial investments of corporate citizenship programs. RWI partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in writing this report, which is intended to provide managers responsible for corporate community investments with the ability to quickly identify solutions that align with their needs and program design. It is hoped that this information will benefit the field of Corporate Social Responsibility by reducing inefficiencies and procurement costs as well as informing the selection of right-sized solutions.
Read the full report here.
Review of the Behavioral Science Related to Giving
Our partners at ideas42, a behavioral science research firm, share an updated review of the latest research on giving behavior. Topics addressed include personal identity and emotions, incentives and message framing, and hassle factors associated with giving. A collection of more than 100 studies, this review ultimately points to the importance of behavioral insights as a mechanism for more effectively directing dollars towards effective solutions and removing barriers to action for individual donors.
Read the full literature review here.
Literature Review on Charitable Giving
#GivingTuesday and Powered by Data just released Issues & Innovations in Charitable Giving Behavior: A Research Review. The literature review compiles research on insights into charitable giving with a goal of informing practitioners and service providers on the current state of giving behavior and encouraging further research.
Check out the report to learn about contemporary trends; issues related to theories of giving, mechanisms of giving, and online giving; and innovations in the field.
Research on Gender and Giving Around the 2016 Election
In its new paper, Charitable Giving Around the 2016 Election: Does Gender Matter?, the Women’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) used a gender lens to examine “rage giving” around the 2016 election. Researchers found that donations to the majority of charitable organizations in that time period did not increase above expectations in non-election years, but donations to progressive organizations engaged in key election issues significantly increased due to female donors. In fact, the difference between men’s and women’s giving to these charities increased 6X in the week after the election.
To learn more, read the full report and view the infographic.
Exploring the Roots of Generosity
A project from the John Templeton Foundation called The Science of Generosity surveys the economics, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology of giving. The report investigates the roots of human generosity, the positive effects of giving, the individual factors linked to generosity, and the social and cultural drivers of giving. Among the interesting findings are evidence of especially strong associations between generosity and psychological health, happiness, and well-being.
Read the full report.