News/Stats/Studies

Americans gave about $290 billion to charity last year. That was $10 billion more than the amount of charitable giving in 2009. The estimates are from the Giving USA Foundation and its research partner, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

The largest share of charitable giving goes to religious groups. Giving USA says the received 35 percent of all donations in 2010. Schools and other education-related organizations were second on the list. They received an estimated 14 percent of all charitable giving last year.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that private donors have committed $18 million to the 23 highest-rated projects in the 2011 Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund competition, ensuring that they have met the i3 matching requirement and qualifying them to receive $150 million from the i3 program.

Earlier this fall, the U.S. Department of Education announced 23 applicants as the finalists to receive part of the $150 million available in fiscal 2011 i3 funding.

With less than two weeks left before the holiday giving seasons ends, many charities have already raised more compared with 2010 — and some are even expecting a windfall, a new Chronicle of Philanthropy poll finds.

Fifty-four percent told The Chronicle that they raised more money in November and the first part of December than they had at this point last year. One out of five of the 152 organizations in the survey said contributions are outpacing last year’s donations by 20 percent or more.

The United States now ranks the highest in terms of charity in a massive global survey that put the nation in fifth place in 2010, according to CAFAmerica, a member organization of the United Kingdom based Charities Aid Foundation International Network of Offices, providing charitable financial services to individuals, global corporations, charities, and foundations.

According to those surveyed, two out of three Americans said they donated money to charity (65 percent), more than two out of five volunteered their time (43 percent) and roughly three out of four helped a stranger (73 percent).

After collecting data over the past year, the National Philanthropic Trust released its 2011 Donor-Advised Fund Report.
 
One of the highlights in this year’s report includes a marked increase in contributions to donor-advised funds. National charities received nearly $4 billion, which was an increase of 42.3% from the previous year and more than half of contributions to all sponsoring charities.

Tax-exempt organizations with January and February filing due dates will have until March 30, 2012, to file their annual returns, the Internal Revenue Service announced.

The IRS is granting this extension of time to file because the part of the e-file system that processes electronically filed returns of tax-exempt organizations will be off-line during January and February. The agency stressed that the rest of the e-file system will continue to operate normally and urged all individuals and businesses to choose the accuracy, speed and convenience of electronic filing.

Colleges and universities in the U.S. earned an average of 19.8 percent on their endowments in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, continuing a post-recession rebound that began in fiscal 2010, preliminary data from 284 schools show.

But that strong posting was not enough to push endowments to their pre-recession levels and barely lifted five- and 10-year average returns above the average effective spending rate of 4.3 percent, says the report from Communfund Institute and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Google this week released its annual Zeitgeist report, which tallies the 10 most popular and fastest-rising searches in a wide range of categories. To come up with the fastest-rising terms, it compared searches this year to those in 2010.

“Donate to Japan,” “Red Cross Japan,” and “Japan relief” were the three fastest-rising charitable searches in the United States this year.

The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving, a broad-based fundraising index that reports overall giving trends of 1,264 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations representing $2.56 billion in yearly giving on a monthly basis, reported that charitable giving rose 2.2% for the three months ending October 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010. The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving, comprised of actual revenue data from 1748 nonprofits representing $424 million in yearly online giving, reported that online giving rose 10.6% for the three months ending October 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010.

People are more inspired to give when they see others contributing their time and money to a good cause outside their homeland, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin.

In a series of experiments, researchers examined how physical and social distance affects people's willingness to participate in philanthropy. Respondents were more motivated to give to a cause when they learned of others assisting people in need outside of their homeland.