How Americans Give

Contents

1. The report that keeps the count
2. The totals over two decades
3. Who gives
4. Where it goes
5. The affluent
6. Men, women and twenty years
7. Phones, texts and impulse
8. Nebraska

Brent O’Mara supports several Omaha causes, the American Heart Association among them, and every such gift ends up as one line in a national count that has been kept for seventy years. In June 2009, with the economy in recession and the stock market months past its worst fall in a generation, Nancy Raybin, chair of the Giving Institute, told NPR that Americans had given more than $307 billion in 2008, 2 percent less than the year before, and called two years above $300 billion great news, because people had expected giving to collapse along with the economy and it had not.³ Religious giving had risen more than 5 percent that year, while donations to human services groups fell almost 13 percent even as their lines lengthened.³ Her report was the count every later figure in this entry comes from.

The report that keeps the count

Giving USA describes itself as the annual report on the sources and uses of charitable giving in the United States, first published in 1956 and researched since the 2001 edition by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy on behalf of the Giving USA Foundation, which the Giving Institute founded in 1985.¹ Its estimates cover giving by about 53 million households, roughly 16 million corporations, more than a million estates and about 82,000 foundations, to about 1.1 million registered charities and an estimated 300,000 religious congregations.¹ It measures the national total, not what any one organization or region experiences.¹

Figure

Share of U.S. adults who gave to charity, percent

• 200066.2
• 201849.6
• 202045.8

The totals over two decades

The line has climbed through two recessions and a pandemic. NPR reported $335 billion for 2013, close to the level before the 2008 downturn, with most of the increase coming from individuals and donations to education, health, the arts and the environment rising faster than the rest.⁴ Fortune recorded $471 billion for 2020, 3.8 percent more than the year before, even as more than a third of nonprofits reported being at risk of closing within two years.⁵ Lilly Family School researchers writing in The Conversation put 2023 at $557 billion, a 2.1 percent decline after inflation but about 42 percent above 2003.²

Who gives

The number of givers has moved the other way. The same researchers found that the share of American adults who give to charity fell from 66.2 percent in 2000 to 45.8 percent in 2020, with the drop accelerating in the first pandemic year, from 49.6 percent in 2018.² Total dollars rose because the people who still give are giving more: the typical donor’s annual giving went from $3,131 in 2018 to $3,651 in 2020, and donors with higher incomes, more education and more wealth gave larger amounts than before.² The researchers pointed to inflation, cultural shifts, declining religious affiliation and a loss of trust in institutions, and to the 2017 tax law, after which the share of taxpayers itemizing fell from about 30 percent to about 10 percent, which one of them estimated had reduced giving by $20 billion in 2018 alone.² The deduction at the center of that estimate is explained in the charitable deduction.

Figure

Fewer donors, larger gifts

typical donor's annual giving in 2018

$3,131

the same figure in 2020

$3,651

share of taxpayers itemizing, before and after the 2017 law

30% to 10%

estimated reduction in giving in 2018 from that law

$20 billion

Where it goes

Religion has always taken the largest share. Giving USA’s special report on donor advised funds, which classified three million grants, found that across 2014 to 2018 religious causes drew about 31 percent of all charitable dollars and education about 14 percent, whereas the accounts it studied sent 29 percent to education and only 14 percent to religion, with cultural and civic organizations also favored by account holders.⁷ Money flowing out of those accounts amounted to roughly 7 percent of all giving in 2020, a share that was rising, which is why they have their own entry in donor advised funds.⁷

Figure

Where the money goes, 2014 to 2018

	All charitable giving	Grants from donor advised funds
Religion	31 percent	14 percent
Education	14 percent	29 percent
Arts and culture	Smaller share	About 9 percent
Public society benefit	Smaller share	13 percent

The affluent

Giving by wealthy households is measured separately, every two years. Marketplace reported the 2023 edition of a survey by a large bank and Indiana University: about 85 percent of affluent households gave in 2022, 3 percent fewer than in 2020, and their average gift fell from $43,195 to $34,917, a pullback from a surge of generosity in the first pandemic year when, as the lead researcher put it, the need was very visible.⁶ The well off were still giving more than before the pandemic, and about 37 percent volunteered, which one of the survey’s sponsors called a gateway to giving.⁶ Fortune’s commentator, a bank founder who had pledged half her wealth, argued from the other side that more than $1 trillion sat in private foundations and $140 billion in donor advised funds rather than in working charities, and backed legislation to move it faster.⁵ The institutions she named are described under private foundations elsewhere on this site.

Men, women and twenty years

The Lilly school’s Women’s Philanthropy Institute has followed the same households since 2000. Its 2024 report, drawn from the Philanthropy Panel Study, found that the decline in donor participation affected both men and women but started later and was less pronounced for single women than for single men, that single women’s giving rose overall and to secular causes during the pandemic, and that women who lost earnings in the pandemic were less likely to give than single men or married couples in the same position.⁸ The average amount given by donor households, it noted, stayed relatively steady across the two decades.⁸

Phones, texts and impulse

The newest channel was measured early. The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that one in five American adults had given online and one in ten by text message, and studied the people who texted an estimated $43 million to Haiti earthquake relief in 2010: 89 percent heard about the campaign on television, half gave immediately, three quarters were texting a donation for the first time, and most had done little research before or since.¹⁰ More than half went on to text gifts to later disasters, and those who urged friends to give did so mostly in person rather than online.¹⁰ What any household gives, and how, depends on personal circumstances, while the tax consequences belong to qualified professionals in financial planning and tax.

Figure

Giving by phone

of U.S. adults who had given online

20%

who had given by text message

9%

texted to Haiti earthquake relief in 2010

$43 million

of Haiti text donors giving by phone for the first time

74%

Nebraska

Nebraska gives more than its size would suggest. Candid examined giving from 2015 to 2022 and found that the state, modest in population and in its count of nonprofits, stood fifth or better among the states in charitable dollars per resident, a standing matched only by the District of Columbia, and held it for gifts from individuals and from institutions alike.⁹ Foundations linked to one Omaha family account for about 17 percent of grant dollars reaching Nebraska nonprofits, but the report’s authors credited habits as much as fortunes: the state is in the top quarter for nonprofits per capita and 13th for grantmakers per capita, and its grantmakers keep more than three fifths of their money with local organizations, a pattern the Omaha Community Foundation’s president attributed to donors who set standards more than a century ago.⁹ The city’s own tradition has its entry in philanthropy in Omaha.

The surveys measure how much, from whom and to what. They say nothing about the form a gift takes, and for a donor who owns shares, land or a business interest that has grown in value, the form can matter as much as the amount. That choice is where the next entry begins, gifts of appreciated assets.