December 14, 2016/MasterCard

For organisations reliant on individual contributions, there has been a lack of information that could enable a better understanding of how, when and where donations are made.  This information gap keeps organizations from being able to develop efficient and effective fundraising efforts. To help, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth is issuing its first edition of Donation Insights—a report based on anonymized and aggregated transaction data that provides an analysis of current and historical donation trends. 

“We recognised that the Center can play a powerful role through data philanthropy, leveraging data analytics and capabilities to advance social progress,” said Shamina Singh, president of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. “With Donation Insights, social good organizations and researchers can now better understand the underlying factors that impact giving over time and plan accordingly.”

Some key insights include:

• Individual donations made through electronic payments have steadily increased over the last five years and are up 6.4% year-to-date through September 2016.
• Environmental and animal-related causes have become more popular, while disease & medical research causes have been losing ground in recent years.
• Election years are tough on charities – as the share in political giving rises, the share in charitable giving declines

“Donation Insights represents a leap forward in our understanding of the what, how much, where, and why questions of charitable giving practices in the United States and is a testament to the role of using corporate data to address knowledge gaps that can have broad social impact,” said Shena Ashley, director Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at The Urban Institute.

The Center is also making the underlying anonymized and aggregated dataset available to organizations and researchers interested in developing their own findings and welcomes any new insights for potential publication.

“Data such as this can be used to supercharge the work of social change-makers giving them new insights and tools to reach more people in need, strengthen communities and ultimately make greater impact on society’s toughest challenges,” stated Jake Porway, founder and executive director of DataKind, a nonprofit whose mission is to harness the power of data science for good.