Sunday, October 24, 2010

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Donations Dropped 11% at Nation's Biggest Charities Last Year

October 17, 2010

Donations Dropped 11% at Nation's Biggest Charities Last Year

By Noelle Barton and Holly Hall http://philanthropy.com/article/A-Sharp-Donation-Drop-at-Big/125004/

Note: This article corrects figures for Catholic Charities USA that appeared in an earlier version. As a result, the order of the top 10 charities has changed.

Donations to the nation’s biggest charities dropped 11 percent last year, a decline that was the worst in the two decades since The Chronicle started its Philanthropy 400 rankingof the organizations that raise the most from private sources.

Nonprofit organizations say they don’t expect to have done much better by the time 2010 ends. More than one in four of the groups provided projections for 2010, and the median change they predicted was an increase of just 1.4 percent.

The 400 institutions in the survey raised $68.6-billion in 2009. The drop they suffered in contributions was nearly four times as great as the next biggest annual decrease: 2.8 percent in 2001, when charities also struggled to raise money from recession-battered donors.

The median amount raised by charities on the Philanthropy 400 also declined last year to $98.8-million, down from $105-million in 2008, meaning half raised more and half raised less. The Philanthropy 400 is based on the most-recent year of data available for charities; most organizations reported data for the 2009 fiscal year but some groups reported data for other periods of time...http://philanthropy.com/article/A-Sharp-Donation-Drop-at-Big/125004/

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Donations Dropped 11% at Nation's Biggest Charities Last Year