Posted on February 22nd, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Other news
Tagged as: giving, statistics
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The Centre for Charitable Giving (CGAP) and The Centre for Market and Public Organisation launched last week a detailed analysis of household giving in Britain since 1978. It’s a really thorough piece of work looking at how charitable giving has changed over time. It will hopefully inform the forthcoming White Paper on charitable giving, philanthropy and social investment.

Here are some of the main findings in the report:

• The millennium year marked a turning point in the long-term decline in the proportion of UK households that give to charity. Roughly a third of households gave to charity in 1978, but by 1999 this share had fallen to roughly a quarter. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the proportion of givers has averaged over 28 per cent.
• Average donations have increased in real terms over three decades. Looking at the whole population (both givers and non-givers), donations have more than doubled – from £0.96 per week in 1978 to £2.36 per week in 2008.
• Looking only at givers, donations have gone up three-fold – from £3.05 per week in 1978 to £8.66 per week in 2008.
• But there has been no change in donations as a share of total spending for more than 20 years. Households today give 0.4 per cent of their spending, exactly the same as they did in 1988.
• Charitable giving is largely recession-proof. Donations have typically grown in times of economic growth and have not fallen at the same rate as the economy during recessions.
• Charitable giving increasingly depends on elderly donors. The over-65s now account for more than a third of all donations, compared with a quarter in 1978. Higher giving among older age groups may reflect the values and beliefs of these generations.
• Better-off donors now account for an increasing share of total donations. Today, the richest ten per cent of donors account for 22 per cent of total donations, compared with 16 per cent in the early 1980s.
• At the same time, poorer givers are more generous in terms of the proportion of their total budgets given to charity. The poorest ten per cent of givers donate 3.6 per cent of their total spending to charity, compared with 1.1 per cent for the richest 10 per cent.

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