Donation Insights Helps Address the Information Gap Facing Charitable Organizations

For organizations reliant on individual contributions, there has been a lack of information that could enable a better understanding of how, when and where donations are made.  This information gap keeps organizations from being able to develop efficient and effective fundraising efforts. To help, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth is issuing its first edition of Donation Insights—a report based on anonymized and aggregated transaction data that provides an analysis of current and historical donation trends.

“We recognized that the Center can play a powerful role through data philanthropy, leveraging data analytics and capabilities to advance social progress,” said Shamina Singh, president of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. “With Donation Insights, social good organizations and researchers can now better understand the underlying factors that impact giving over time and plan accordingly.”

Some key insights include:

• Individual donations made through electronic payments have steadily increased over the last five years and are up 6.4% year-to-date through September 2016.
• Environmental and animal-related causes have become more popular, while disease & medical research causes have been losing ground in recent years.
• Election years are tough on charities – as the share in political giving rises, the share in charitable giving declines

“Donation Insights represents a leap forward in our understanding of the what, how much, where, and why questions of charitable giving practices in the United States and is a testament to the role of using corporate data to address knowledge gaps that can have broad social impact,” said Shena Ashley, director Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at The Urban Institute.

The Center is also making the underlying anonymized and aggregated dataset available to organizations and researchers interested in developing their own findings and welcomes any new insights for potential publication.

“Data such as this can be used to supercharge the work of social change-makers giving them new insights and tools to reach more people in need, strengthen communities and ultimately make greater impact on society’s toughest challenges,” stated Jake Porway, founder and executive director of DataKind, a nonprofit whose mission is to harness the power of data science for good.

About Donation Insights:

Donation Insights is a report based on anonymized and aggregated transaction data that can provide a better understanding as to when people give, what factors impact their giving, how they donate, and the regional breakdown of donations. To assist organizations, it includes indices for U.S. total donations and nine categories using the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) system by leveraging anonymized and aggregated donation activity on the Mastercard payment network.  The research does not model up for all forms of payment, but does make adjustments based on estimates for share shifts within electronic payments. The Center is providing access to the dataset in addition to the report with a donation amount index, and year-over-year growth rates for the number of donations and average donation size by category. You can download the report and dataset HERE.

About the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth

The MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth focuses on promoting equitable and sustainable economic growth and financial inclusion around the world. As an independent MasterCard subsidiary, it combines data, expertise and technology with philanthropic investments to empower a community of thinkers, leaders and innovators on the frontlines of inclusive growth.  Follow us on Twitter @CNTR4growth.