Philanthropy trends are the long-run shifts in how people give: money moving through structured funds instead of one-off checks, donors asking what a gift actually changed before they renew it, and a steady pull back toward causes close enough to see. The headlines change every year. These underlying shifts have held for a decade.
What follows is the donor side of that picture – how giving behavior is changing and why. The parallel question, how nonprofit organizations themselves are changing, is covered separately in the Foundation’s guide to nonprofit trends.
Giving is being planned, not just felt
The clearest change in donor behavior is that giving now gets scheduled. People decide on an annual amount, pick a short list of causes, and commit for more than one year at a time. Some of that is generational – younger donors arrived with the habit of automating money – and some of it is that financial advisors and estate attorneys now raise charitable giving as a normal part of a plan rather than an afterthought at the end of a meeting.
The practical effect is that a gift is increasingly a decision made once and executed repeatedly. A donor who sets up a fund is not choosing a recipient that day; they are choosing a mechanism that will keep choosing recipients for years. If the distinction between reacting to a need and building something that outlasts it is new to you, the Foundation’s explainer on philanthropy versus charity draws the line clearly.
Fewer donors, larger gifts
Total dollars given in the United States have held up reasonably well. The number of people giving has not. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, run by the Association of Fundraising Professionals with the GivingTuesday Data Commons, has reported year after year that donor counts are falling even in periods when dollar totals rise.
Two things follow from that. Organizations are more exposed than they used to be, because a larger share of their budget now sits with a smaller group of people. And small donors matter more than the size of their gift suggests, because there are fewer of them holding the base. A recurring $25 gift is worth more to a small nonprofit today than the same gift was worth fifteen years ago, and not because of inflation.
The vehicle is becoming part of the gift
Donors used to think about who to give to. Now they think about how. Appreciated stock instead of cash. A distribution straight from an IRA. A named fund at a community foundation. A bequest written into a will. Each of these moves the same generosity through a different pipe, and the pipe changes the tax treatment, the timing and often the size of what the recipient actually gets.
This is not a fad. It is a response to a tax code that treats a gift of an appreciated asset differently from a gift of cash, and to the fact that far fewer households itemize deductions than once did. Donors who used to deduct every check now bunch several years of giving into one, or route it through a fund. The Foundation’s ways to give page sets out the routes it handles. Tax rules change and they interact with your own situation, so run any of this past your own tax advisor before you act on it.
Trust is checked, not assumed
A donor deciding between two organizations today will look one or both of them up first. Form 990s are public and free. Candid and Charity Navigator publish profiles. Local reputation still carries most of the weight in a small county, but it is now backed by a paper trail that anyone can pull in about ninety seconds.
The more interesting shift is what donors check for. Overhead ratio is losing its grip as the single test of whether an organization is worth funding, because a low overhead ratio can just as easily mean an organization is underinvesting in the staff and systems that make its work possible. Experienced donors have moved on to asking what changed, for whom, and how anyone knows.
Local is absorbing more of the money
Place-based giving has gained ground for an unglamorous reason: a donor can verify it. If you fund a scholarship at the high school four miles from your house, you will eventually meet the student. National causes cannot offer that, and the trust gap has to be closed some other way.
Community foundations sit in the middle of this shift because they aggregate. A $1,000 gift on its own does not fund much. Pooled with others, invested, and paid out under a spending policy, it can fund something small every year indefinitely. Generosity at every scale, and the day the sector sets aside to recognize it, is the subject of the Foundation’s piece on National Philanthropy Day.
What the trends will not tell you
Trends describe averages, and no donor is an average. A shift toward multi-year commitments is not an argument that your one-time gift is wrong. A shift toward measurement is not an argument that a cause with hard-to-measure outcomes deserves less. Read the direction of travel, then decide what fits the money you actually have and the community you actually live in.
| The shift | What is driving it | What it means for your giving |
|---|---|---|
| Planned giving replacing impulse giving | Advisors now raise charitable giving as a routine part of financial and estate planning | Decide an annual figure once; stop re-deciding every appeal letter |
| Fewer donors, larger gifts | Small-donor participation has been falling for years | Modest recurring gifts carry more weight than they used to |
| Structure over the single check | The tax code treats assets and cash differently; fewer households itemize | Ask how to give, not only who to give to |
| Verification before commitment | 990s and charity profiles are free and instant | Expect to be checked; check others |
| Money moving closer to home | Local outcomes are visible and confirmable | Small local gifts pool into something that lasts |
What these shifts look like at a community foundation in Paola
Miami County Community Foundation is a 501(c)(3) community foundation established in 2007, based in Paola, Kansas, and it holds charitable funds for individuals, families, businesses and churches across the county. Its mechanics show most of these trends in miniature.
Structure over the single check: a donor can open an endowed fund with $10,000, and the balance stays permanently invested. As Executive Director Tammy Booe puts it, “you never, you cannot fall below that amount.” Under a 5% spending policy, only the earnings are spendable, which makes roughly $500 available to give away each year from a fund of that size. A donor who wants the money spent instead of held can open an expendable fund from $1,000; it can be spent to zero, and when it is, the fund closes. The fee is 2% – 1% administrative and 1% community support – and setting up a fund takes seven to ten business days.
Local and verifiable: the scholarships held here are awarded at Paola, Osawatomie, Louisburg and Prairie View high schools, and almost every one of them is applied for through the student’s own counselor rather than through the Foundation. Many of the funds here began after someone died, and they carry the name of the person they commemorate. You can see what the Foundation currently holds on its funds page. Note the Foundation’s own language for what it pays out: “we don’t call them grants,” Booe says. “We call them donations or contributions.”
Visibility shapes giving too, which is why celebrity charities get the attention they do.
What to do with any of this
If you have been giving in small reactive amounts and want it to add up to something, the useful next step is not a bigger check. It is a structure – a fund, a recurring gift, a line in a will – that keeps giving after you stop thinking about it. Miami County Community Foundation can talk through which of those fits, and what it would cost. Call (913) 404-7287 or email info@micocf.org.
