How two development directors see the Giving USA data in their work

The Giving USA 2017 report has been out for almost two weeks, and much has been written about the big picture trends.

• Giving increased for the third year in a row – rising to a new high of $390 billion.
• All nine major subsectors saw giving increases, for only the sixth time in four decades.
• Individual donors drove the increase, contributing 80 percent of the total.
• Mega gifts were down and mid-range donors made up the difference.

But what about the local trends in giving? What did your nonprofit experience in 2016?

We asked two of our clients for their reaction to the numbers, and here’s what they had to say…

Lynn Etkins, Chief Development and Marketing Director, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles

The 2016 numbers prove to me – yet again – that individual giving is what continues to drive the nonprofit sector.

It is critical for nonprofits to maintain the daily tasks of building relationships with those who connect to our work and keeping them engaged.

It seems that other trends go up and down – corporate giving, foundational giving, bequests – but if people like what we are doing, see that we are making a difference, know that we are good stewards of their dollars, they will continue to support us and ask others in their circles to join them in giving.

Billy Mann, Development Director for Boys & Girls Clubs of Toledo

At Boys & Girls Clubs of Toledo, we use the annual Giving USA data to track our resource development activities against current national trends.

This year’s data, reflecting on 2016, shares many similarities in trends we are seeing from our donors and funding base. The most relevant among these are the rate of giving increase, increases in total giving, giving by household, and giving by individuals as a percentage of overall giving.

Additionally, over the last three years, Boys & Girls Clubs of Toledo has seen its total income from donors exceed pre-recession levels. Gifts from corporate donors were the first category to make this leap, as early as 2012. Counter to the Giving USA data, corporate giving continues to rise for us locally.

It has taken individual giving a while longer to catch up with that rate of increase, but we have seen success that matches the Giving USA data over the last few years.

Finally, I continue to watch the percentage of household income donated each year: it still hasn’t risen to pre-recession levels and remains such a small piece of overall income.

It’s interesting to see how the larger trends play out at the local level. Do your donors track with the national numbers or has your organization seen some singular trends of its own?

Let us know!