This brief highlights trends in the number and finances of 501(c)(3) public charities as well as key findings on private charitable contributions and volunteering, two vital resources to the nonprofit sector. Figures on giving and volunteering include the most recent data available. Data reported on the nonprofit sector are from 2007–a snapshot of the sector just before the U.S. economic recession.
Arts Funding
Recession Pressures on Nonprofit Jobs
Nearly 40 percent of nonprofit organizations lack adequate staff to deliver their programs and services, a new report from the Johns Hopkins University Listening Post Project finds. According to the report, Recession Pressures on Nonprofit Jobs (17 pages, PDF), almost a third of the 526 organizations surveyed by the project reported making workforce reductions over the preceding six months (October 2009 to March 2010), while only 23 percent reported employment gains over the same period and 46 percent reported no change in head count despite facing greater demand for their services. In addition to workforce reductions, the survey found that nonprofits have taken other actions that impact staff and their ability to deliver critical programs and services.
Giving in Numbers: 2013 Edition — Report that follows corporate giving
Developed by CECP in association with The Conference Board, Giving in Numbers: 2013 Edition is based on data from 240 companies, including 60 of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500. The sum of contributions across all respondents of the 2012 survey, from which the data is pulled, totaled more than $20 billion in cash and in-kind giving. This report not only presents a profile of corporate philanthropy in 2012, but also pinpoints how corporate giving is evolving and becoming more focused since before the recession of 2008 and 2009. This is the ninth annual report on trends in corporate giving. CECP is grateful to the Newman’s Own Foundation and PricewaterhouseCoopers for its support in making Giving in Numbers possible.
National Arts Index: the Health and Vitality of the Arts in the U.S.
The National Arts Index is a highly distilled annual measure of the health and vitality of arts in the United States by using 76 equal weighted, national-level indicators of arts activity. This report covers an 11-year period, from 1998 to 2008. The National Arts Index fell 4 points in 2008 to a score of 98.4, reflecting losses in charitable giving and declining attendance at larger cultural institutions, even as the number of arts organizations grew. The 2008 downturn in the Index was not wholly unexpected. With 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations and 600,000 more arts-related businesses, 2.24 million artists in the workforce, and billions of dollars in consumer spending, the arts industries largely track the nation’s business cycle.
Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates (2010 Edition)
From the press release: The recent economic crisis caused the nation’s more than 75,000 grantmaking foundations to cut their 2009 giving by an estimated 8.4 percent–by far the largest decline ever tracked by the Foundation Center. Grant dollars fell from $46.8 billion to $42.9 billion. Yet according to Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates (2010 Edition), released April 16, 2010 by the Foundation Center, this cutback totaled less than half of the 17 percent loss in foundation assets recorded in the prior year.
Other key estimates for 2009 include:
- Independent and family foundations — which represent close to nine out of 10 foundations — reduced their giving 8.9 percent to $30.8 billion in 2009.
- Corporate foundation giving decreased 3.3 percent to $4.4 billion in 2009.
- Community foundation giving declined 9.6 percent to $4.1 billion in 2009, exceeding decreases by independent and corporate foundations.
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Foundation Center Launches Tool to Visualize Impact of Philanthropy
The New York City-based Foundation Center has announced the launch of a data visualization tool to help grantmakers, policy makers, researchers, and others better understand the impact of philanthropy around the world. Philanthropy In/Sight allows registered users to create customized Google maps to explore giving patterns, emerging trends, and funding relationships globally, nationally, or at the community level. Updated weekly, the center’s data on some 97,000 grantmakers and more than 1.6 million grants can be combined with dozens of demographic and socioeconomic data overlays to create mashups that help users understand where foundation dollars are having the greatest effect and where funding is most needed.
