Rose-Colored Glasses: The Trouble With Industry Numbers on American Generosity | Philip Rojc | Inside Philanthropy, December 08, 2022 Philip Rojc

"...Paeans to Americans’ rising generosity and willingness to keep their wallets open during COVID are a dime a dozen these days, and they’re not without some justification. However, the prevalence of these rosy numbers in nonprofit media — especially around the holidays — drowns out some of the hard questions we still need to be asking about where American generosity is falling short.

Part of the problem with many of these top-level reports is that they paint only a partial picture of what’s happening in the sector, and often gloss over or fail to address realities that run counter to that picture. The report from Classy and GoFundMe, for instance, begins with only the briefest of acknowledgements that the power and prevalence of small donors is declining next to that of large donors, before embarking on a lengthy, datapoint-heavy ode to the “citizen philanthropist.”

The national donor-advised fund sponsors are another set of stakeholders that continually engage in this sort of thing. The National Philanthropic Trust, a leading DAF sponsor, which also happens to release the nation’s only really comprehensive annual account of DAF giving (funny that), regularly uses its report to talk up positives around DAF giving and downplay potential negatives.

Other DAF heavyweights do the same, including the nation’s largest grantmaker, Fidelity Charitable, as well as its peer and competitor Vanguard Charitable, which released poll results last month along with a claim that “nearly 1 in 4 American donors with a charitable giving budget increased their giving due to rising inflation.” (Emphasis mine.) To read some of these reports is to enter a world where the generosity of the American populace is surging to new heights — for reasons usually left unexplained — and where nonprofits worried about their bottom lines amid deep economic uncertainty and social turmoil should, well, worry less.

Most savvy philanthropy watchers (including, I imagine, readers of Inside Philanthropy) understand that some of the headier numbers trotted out during the end-of-year giving season need to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s not that these figures are wrong or intentionally deceptive — in fact, they’re often key to understanding trends in the sector. But we need to bear in mind that most of these reports are coming from interested parties, or are funded by them. And those parties will, understandably, want to present the environment in which they operate in a favorable light...."