Are nonprofits seeing increased corporate giving in healthier economic times?

Corporate giving to nonprofits is an important piece of nonprofit fundraising for charities but I was driven to find out just how a large a piece of the pie is raised via corporations. The results might surprise you as may recent trends in a global economy that is now in a fixed growth pattern, for the time being at least.

For ease of interpretation I’ll focus on the three markets where Miratel Solutions are most active; Canada, the United States and the UK. In the United States according to 2013 data corporate giving accounted for some $16.8 billion from a nonprofit fundraising total of $335.2 billion – representing 5.0% of overall giving. In Canada meanwhile there’s a very different story with some 19.1% of overall fundraising coming from corporations according to the most recent data I could find from 2012, almost four times the rate seen in the US. Recent data for the UK was harder to find but approximately 11.2% of all fundraising came via corporations in 2010, so therefore the three countries have vastly different results.

What all of this data tells us is that the dependence on public giving within the nonprofit sector is quite significantly different from country to country. The root causes for the different contribution rates from corporations are both cultural and highlight the evolution of philanthropy over the course of many decades, tellingly the actual giving rates (in terms of the ratio of adults who donate) for the public in all three nations are quite similar. Beyond that it’s not very revealing to compare the actual fundraising data between the countries due to a large number of social, political and historical factors. It’s for these reasons that the weight of fundraising responsibility/reliance falls onto different shoulders in different countries, however what is clear is that overall the burden is increasingly on public donations, particularly during times when we’re seeing austerity measures reducing social service funding in almost all western nations despite the economic growth.

Economically speaking slow, sustained and steady economic growth has been observed in recent years after the very lean periods during and post-recession, in fact corporate profits are far outpacing overall economic growth especially in 2014. One would hope that this would mean equal increases in corporate giving but that isn’t the uniform case.

What I wanted to evaluate is whether a healthier economy is leading to the gap in corporate giving closing or not? The facts are that it is widening and these record corporate profits are not seeing the US reduce the difference between these corporate giving rates.

Despite the financial windfalls corporate giving in the US has only increased three percent over the last twelve months, a healthy enough number until compared with what is happening in the UK and Canada. In the case of Canada improved economic conditions saw giving from corporations increase by about nine percent in 2013 and a smaller sample size from a recent UK study of the largest 130 corporations shows a 12 percent hike over the last 12 months.

One takeaway from this information is it seems that UK and Canadian companies are seeing long-term fundraising partnerships as a larger piece of their overall corporate responsibility for today and the future. In both nations companies that have a ‘long term association’ with a nonprofit organization stand at over 70% compared versus just under 50% in the United States. These partnerships also have a growing influence over the perception that customers have on a company and when faced with shopping for goods and services this is considered by more consumers than ever before. Whether these rates will change significantly in the years to come remains to be seen but in terms of understanding fundraising overall it’s important data to have to hand.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.