Coutts global report of major nonprofit donors offers encouraging fundraising trends

The current consensus of data reveals that overall nonprofit fundraising revenues in North America are experiencing a relatively healthy year of growth in 2014 following on from a promising 2013. Today I wanted to look at a report that takes a look at the upper stratosphere of philanthropy courtesy of the 2014 Coutts Million Dollar Donors Report which illustrates how the volume of the very largest donations are perhaps even more encouraging. Coutts began producing the ‘Million Pound Donors’ report in 2008 to provide unique data about fundraising in the UK, last year the report became more international global adding donations of $1m or greater from the USA, Russia, the Middle East, China and Hong Kong and have now added Singapore this year.

These large donations don’t automatically frame how the overall charity sector is performing but nonetheless the data offers some revealing information about the trends being seen at the very highest levels of private donations. The information shows just how important major philanthropy contributions are, what’s happening in economies quite different from our own and which nonprofit types are the most likely to benefit. It’s very difficult to try and cross-refer what is happening economically in different regions of the world but the report does provide some scope to attempt to do so.

It didn’t surprise me to learn that the biggest recipient by sector by a huge ratio was higher education which topped the list in the UK, USA, Singapore and Hong Kong in addition to placing second in two other regions. It’s assumed that major donors tend to see education as the foundation for success of people and nations in addition to being a natural fit for research, scholarships and endowments. As for the report itself some 34.4% of all donations were received by higher education which is vastly disproportionate to fundraising in general. This percentage was created by the contribution of some 1,995 donations which totaled $26.3 billion.

The chart above shows the percentage of funding by sector from the report and you’ll notice that along with the higher education support, foundations received a very substantial 18.2% of donations which collectively represented some $9.1 billion, collectively foundations and education therefore accounted for over half of all donations. Foundations are a very interesting method as the study explains as donors view them as “a means of banking mega-gifts, that is, distributing them – often to multiple organisations – over longer periods of time. Sometimes these larger donations are used to establish or grow endowments”

Perhaps the most illuminating element of the study is to see what the differences are between the various global regions when we tend to be routinely focused on what is taking place in North America. The study provides full analysis of each of the component regions from which the data was tabulated but a few standout pieces of information include;

• In the UK the number of $1 million donors increased in one year from 197 to 292, a remarkable leap of some 48 percent
• In the US over a fifth of all (273 in all) reported donated a total donation to charity of $10 million or greater
• In China most of the large donations were by corporations or corporate foundations, 85 percent of the entire total
• In the Middle East far more than 95 percent of all large donations went to overseas causes such as disaster relief and humanitarian acts

Overall this is another report that has such deep data that I can only really scratch the surface within the confines of a single blog post but would encourage you to download the full report via .pdf at this link to learn much more.
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