Charitable giving in the United States continues to lag behind the pace of 2017, raising critical questions about how charities will fare in their fundraising by the end of the year.
The information, from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, is based on the Growth in Giving Database, which includes more than 18,000 organizations and $72 billion in donations since 2005. For the second consecutive quarter, nearly every metric the report analyzes is underperforming compared to 2017 data and several metrics have regressed even further since the first quarter.
For example, the overall number of donors giving in 2018 was down 6.3 percent in the first quarter compared to 2017 and declined to 6.6 percent in the second quarter. Similarly, the overall donor retention rate (the percentage of donors who continue to give to the same organization from one year to the next) was behind 4.6 percent for the first quarter, but 6.4 percent behind after the second quarter.