GivingTuesday raises $3.1B for charities
NEW YORK — GivingTuesday raised a record $3.1 billion in 24 hours for charitable causes in the US, earlier this week, as the event that started as a hashtag, in 2012, celebrated its 10th anniversary and its status as a staple of fundraising for nonprofits, the group’s leader said, Wednesday.
Despite the difficult economic year that many households have experienced, with inflation in the costs of basic goods, gas and housing, people were still willing to give, GivingTuesday CEO Asha Curran said.
“That’s really what we saw, yesterday,” she told The Associated Press. “That whatever it is that people are experiencing, they were as generous as they had the capacity to be.”
GivingTuesday estimated that giving increased about 15% from 2021’s $2.7 billion, outpacing inflation. Donations were tallied using an array of data sources that includes major community foundations, companies that offer fundraising software, the payment processor PayPal and large grantmakers like Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable. Their methodology for compiling the estimate seeks to eliminate duplicate data points, Curran said.
While it’s too early to know whether giving overall, this year, will stay on par with last year, and 2020, when philanthropic donations boomed, people in the US have been more resilient in their spending than might be expected given inflation and high interests rates.
Ragan Petrie, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, has puzzled over the durability of consumer spending and hypothesized that giving could be similarly resilient. She added that GivingTuesday has now become better known. And as a fundraising platform mostly limited to a single day, it has a builtin sense of urgency.
In another measure of the resilience of donations, Fidelity Charitable said, Tuesday, that for the first time since 2018, the value of grants from its donor advised funds exceeds the value of investments going into the funds.
The organization said this year’s totals marked the largest amount donated, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, since the group started tracking it.
DonorsChoose, which allows public school teachers to raise money for their classrooms, said this year’s GivingTuesday marked its second-highest day of giving in more than 20 years. It saw 52,000 people give $10.6 million including matched donations.
“As one of the nonprofits that joined the inaugural GivingTuesday 10 years ago, we are so excited to see what a global movement of generosity this has become,” the organization said in a statement.
The hashtag to promote fundraising, on the Tuesday, after Thanksgiving started, in 2012, as a project of the 92nd Street Y and the organization GivingTuesday became an independent nonprofit in 2020. The organization has also launched a campaign to raise $26 million over five years to expand their database of giving.
In the tenth year of nonprofits and donors marking the day, Curran said, people continue to show incredible generosity.