4th State of the Plate report released for 2011 church giving trends

ECFA and Maximum Generosity released their 4^th annual survey of church giving trends. You can see the ECFA press release here and visit the executive summary here.

At an overall level, giving is improving a bit. Comparing the portion of church reporting giving up, down or flat looks like this:

Annual giving trend report for ECFA members

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) released their second Annual State of Giving Report. 

Donations to all of their members in 2010 increased by 5.8% over 2009.

A few comments on interpreting the data.

Philanthropy articles in the Wall Street Journal

Five great articles in the Wall Street Journal on November 28. If you have yesterdays paper sitting around, grab The Journal Report section and save it.

I will discuss these articles in more detail later, along with my thoughts on the operate-as-a-business question.  In the meantime here are some links.  Check them out – they are not behind a paywall!

How have contributions of ECFA members fared during the recession?

ECFA has analyzed the giving of their members who renewed membership in the last six months. Looking at members with year-ends between April and September 2010 and comparing that to those member’s revenue from three years earlier produced some encouraging information.

This would include organizations who have been members at least three years, so there’s data for comparison. Keep in mind this would be for NPOs whose fiscal year-end dates were in the middle part of 2010.

That said, here is the summary:

High level of pessimism revealed in donor survey from Barna

Giving is not likely to get good anytime soon. Confidence level in the current Barna survey is not particularly strong and seems to be deteriorating. Seems to me that confidence in the future is a major driver in how people will give.

If you are raising funds for your organization or trying to figure out when you can expand, pay attention to this part of the survey.

Here is Barna’s May 2011 report: Donors Proceed with Caution, Tithing Declines.

Barna says donors are less shell-shocked – I guess ‘less bad’ is an improvement

Less bad – that is the description I’ve been looking for as I’ve read several recent surveys of donor giving patterns. Things are still grim but not quite as bad as a year ago.

David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group says the following:

Now, even as the economy shows some signs of improvement, donors are still reluctant to return to their previous levels of generosity. They may be less shell-shocked than 15 months ago, but they are still cautious.

 

2010 Giving trends for churches – part two

A few more observations on the data presented in an ECFA webinar with Brian Kluth, of Maximum Generosity, as the speaker. Previous post here discussed three-year trends.

Change in general giving (without designated funds or building projects).  The executive summary uses seven categories to describe the level of change.  I have combined the data into three categories.  Summarized changes in general giving:

2010 Giving trends for churches

Listened to a great ECFA webinar with Brian Kluth, of Maximum Generosity, as the speaker.  Survey of 1,507 churches show slight improvement in giving during 2010.

“State of the Plate” survey was conducted in February 2011.  It showed about the same proportion of churches experiencing a decline in giving along with an increase in the proportion seeing an increase.

Of interest to me is the 3 year trend data:

What to analyze in the giving patterns at your church

Two great articles on how to analyze the giving data for your church by Chris Gartman of PSK at their blog, Faith-Based Accounting.

The software you use for recording contributions by donor should be able to give you some great data. What can you learn from that information?

Increasing volume of distressed sale of church properties

No surprise there.

The Wall Street Journal reports here the volume of churches going through distressed sale of their property has increased rapidly over the last couple of years.  In addition to a good background article, which I think you should read, there is a great pair of charts that gives good info.

2010 giving trends – Comparison of ECFA and Guidestar surveys

Both ECFA and Guidestar recently released survey results of giving trends in 2010.  Wanted to put the results side by side.

Giving trend information from ECFA survey

More news on giving trends.  The news recently is almost good news, sort of.  At least the news isn’t really bad.  ECFA just released their Nonprofit Economic Impact Survey.

Giving trends for first 9 months of 2010 improve slightly

Guidestar reports good news in survey of over 2,500 charities: 2010 Fundraising Survey Results: The Worst May Be Over.

Giving trends for ECFA members

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) released their first Annual State of Giving Report.  Total giving to their member organizations changed imperceptible from 2007 to 2009.  From pre-recession year, giving declined a very mild 0.1 percent over two years.

“Nonprofit Starvation Cycle”

Stanford Social Innovation Review has a superb article on the cycle many NPOs have of starving themselves of critical infrastructure they need to be effective in their mission.

Superb summary: “The first step in the cycle is funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much it costs to run a nonprofit. At the second step, nonprofits feel pressure to conform to funders’ unrealistic expectations. At the third step, nonprofits respond to this pressure in two ways: They spend too little on overhead, and they underreport their expenditures on tax forms and in fundraising materials.