Six out of ten U. This is different from the patterns in any other country. Even our cousins the Canadians give to charity at substantially lower rates, and at half the total volume of an American household.
There are many reasons for this American distinction. Foremost is the fact that ours is the most religious nation in the industrial world. Religion motivates giving more than any other factor.
A second explanation is our deep-rooted tradition of mutual aid, which has impressed observers like Tocqueville since our founding days.
Third is the potent entrepreneurial impulse in the U. But what lies beneath our high national average? Do subgroups of the U. What exactly do we know about who gives in America, and what motivates them? Dissecting who is generous and who is not can be controversial. And not all of the research agrees. So we have methodically waded through heaps of studies and drawn out for you the clearest findings.
Some of it will surprise you. There have been several attempts to compare the charitable giving of different U. The most straightforward measures match the itemized charitable donations of local taxpayers to their incomes both pulled from official IRS figures. The Fraser Institute and the Catalogue for Philanthropy have each used variations of this method to reveal what fraction of their annual resources residents are giving away to philanthropic causes, versus consuming or saving for themselves.
Measured by how much they share out of what they have available, the most generous Americans are not generally those in high-income, urban, liberal states like California or Massachusetts.
Rather, people living in states that are more rural, conservative, religious, and moderate in income are our most generous givers. See the two charts above for listing of the top and bottom givers. This same pattern is seen in data very different from the IRS returns. A third take on this topic was assembled by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The researchers used the latest IRS returns available— in their most recently published update. The results? Not much different from the portraits above. Regional results are above.
Below are the top and bottom ten states for giving, according to the Chronicle calculations. On the other hand, scant-giving households are heavily concentrated in relatively wealthy and secular New England.
This effect holds up not only across states but also in major cities. For instance, denizens of Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta donate from 4 to 6 percent of their discretionary income to charity, while counterparts in Boston, Hartford, and Providence average just 2 percent.
Silicon Valley is legendary for its wealth, yet lags badly in charity—the Chronicle data show San Jose and San Francisco falling near the bottom among our 50 biggest cities, giving away just 2.
There are about the same number of people in urban, high-education San Francisco County as there are in the rural, religious state of South Dakota, economist Arthur Brooks once noted. And families in these two regions give almost exactly the same amount to charity every year. Their results are quite different from all other measures.
Modern Slavery Statement. Skip to main content Donate to a charity Register Log in. Search box. Menu Close Donate to a charity. For charities For individuals For philanthropists For companies. CAF Bank Manage your bank account. Donors to an international development charity were more likely to respond to a match—funding campaign if they knew that that the match came from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation than if it came from an anonymous source. In our own research working with a large employer and Marie Curie, we have found that celebrity supporters increase donations to charity, and fast — but that this only appears to work for people who have donated to the charity before.
The good news is that charitable giving is contagious — seeing others give makes an individual more likely to give and gentle encouragement from a prominent person in your life can make also make a big difference to your donation decisions — more than quadrupling them in our recent study.
Habit also plays a part — in three recent experiments those who volunteered before were more likely to donate their time than those who had not volunteered before. In summary, behavioural science identifies a range of factors that influence our donations, and can help us to keep giving in the longer term. This is great news not just for charities, but also for donors. Research has revealed that spending money on others actually makes us happier than spending it on ourselves, and giving to others can actually make us healthier.
So what are we waiting for? The science behind why people give money to charity. Experts from the nudge unit explain how fundraisers can make their messaging more effective. Behavioural insight research shows that when it comes to charitable giving the public are often ruled by their heart, not their head.
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