On the plus side, the global nature of the pandemic has prompted some donors to think beyond their own backyards and to embrace direct cash transfers as a way of offering relief to people across the world. A sobering reflection of this is that some 1 million nonprofit workers in the US have lost their jobs because of the pandemic. ![]() The Wall Street Journal reported in August that even as Covid-19 donations were soaring, other charities were taking a big hit with galas, auctions, and fundraisers canceled, nonprofits were really struggling to raise the funds they rely on. “You’re seeing some cause areas get a tremendous influx, and others that are just drying up,” Vrana told me. But while nonprofits focused on Covid-19 relief are getting substantial funding in every US state - including rapid-response grants from community foundations that have raised more than $1 billion for the purpose - nonprofits doing crucial non-pandemic-related work are getting left out. It’s obviously great that donors are trying to make sure people get food and health care during a pandemic. That tracks with what Charity Navigator saw from March to October: Donations to Feeding America increased 1,980 percent year over year, and donations to Doctors Without Borders increased 131 percent year over year. According to a Harris Poll survey conducted for Fast Company, “hunger relief has seen the most charitable giving - 34 percent, among those who have given to charity during the pandemic - followed by religious organizations (31 percent) and health and medical organizations (29 percent).” The causes that are faring especially well are the ones with an obvious connection to the pandemic, like hunger relief and health care. Yet 56 percent of US households gave to charity or volunteered in response to the pandemic, and the first half of 2020 saw a 12.6 percent increase in the number of new donors to charity compared to one year ago. ![]() While you’d expect high-net-worth donors to give more during a crisis, you wouldn’t necessarily expect similar behavior from average people hurting from an economic downturn. ![]() And the exciting part is really the increase in small gifts and new donors.” “They’re showing an overall increase in the whole first half of the year. She cited a study from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which collects real-time data from several online fundraising platforms. “As far as we can tell, the overall trend line is up,” Victoria Vrana, a deputy director at the Gates Foundation, told me. ![]() But we’ve already got some telling data about how much people are giving. We won’t fully know until 2020 is behind us because around 30 percent of total annual giving happens in December, with many people making their tax-deductible donations on the very last days of the year. Has the Covid-19 pandemic - and its attendant recession - made us more or less generous this year? Has it changed the way we give? But what does generosity look like in 2020? People have donated millions to charity through Giving Tuesday fundraisers every year since the movement kicked off in 2012. Today is Giving Tuesday, a day that encourages everyone to refocus on doing good after the annual post-Thanksgiving shopping blitz.
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