Archive for October 2011

The Globe & Mail is overflowing with interesting articles on the non-profit sector these days.

There’s now a section called Giving in the Life section. It’s a little strange that it’s in that part of the newspaper (and website), as most of the content there is normally pretty fluffy and there are lots of real journalism in this series so far. The weekend edition felt like it was 80% about the charitable / non-profit sector. There are important articles about regulation, the thoughts of the current federal government, trends in both foundation giving and donor giving.

The Mt.Royal Institute for Non-profit Studies recently published a report, e-Giving in Canada:Donation Trends in the 21st century. The researcher, Kim Warnke, analyzed data from two organizations involved in online donations, Mobile Giving Foundation and CanadaHelps, in order to see what trends existed in Canada.

We know that you’re busy, so we pulled out the three trends she identified:

TREND #1
The mean revenues, in both the core and non-core categories, of those organizations using e-Giving tends to be higher than the mean revenues of all Canadian charitable organizations.

TREND #2
Relative levels of participation tend to be similar within ICNPO categories regardless of the method of e-Giving used and over time.

TREND #3
Although e-Giving will continue to grow, the economic environment will affect e-Giving revenues of charities in some ICNPO Categories more than it will in others.

So, basically:
1. larger organizations are the earlier adopters of online and mobile giving;
2. organizations are more or less likely to adopt online and mobile giving depending on their subsector (health, research, social services, etc.);
3. the larger economic situation will effect online and mobile giving in some sub-sectors more than in others.