The Giving Climate reads the economic and philanthropic conditions shaping giving and turns them into a clear, role-specific strategy for your donors, your sector, and the months ahead. Pick your role. Get your read in under 60 seconds.
It comes from your board, your executive director, your dean, your clients, or just from you, staring at next year's plan. The honest answer has always been some version of "it is hard to say."
Annual reports look backward. Giving USA is annual. Headlines contradict each other. And the decisions in front of you, how to segment, where to focus, what to project for the year, are being made now, on instinct, without a read on the conditions underneath them.
The Giving Climate is built for the people doing the work.
No spreadsheets, no economics degree, no waiting for next year's data. Know the climate before you make the ask.
Behind every read is a model watching more than a dozen economic, social, and political signals, from market conditions and consumer confidence to institutional trust and the giving-specific trends most benchmarks miss. You never have to touch any of it. The signals are the engine. Your strategy is the point.
The Giving Climate was tested against 25 years of giving data, and on the confident calls it was directionally right 84% of the time. It read the downturns and the recoveries that reshaped fundraising, the kind of shifts most teams only understood in hindsight. It is honest about its blind spots, too: sudden behavioral shocks that no economic signal can see coming.
Most development teams entered 2022 planning for another strong year. 2020 and 2021 had been unexpectedly generous. The reasonable assumption was that momentum would continue. It did not.
A score of 33 out of 100. The inflation signal alone scored 10. Consumer confidence dropped to recessionary levels. The segment picture was critical: major donors scored 52, mass market donors scored 21. The model flagged a bifurcated environment before it showed up in any benchmark report.
Shift acquisition spend toward major donor cultivation. Proactively offer recurring donors a pause option before they cancel. Hold mid-level upgrade asks until confidence signals recover.
Giving USA confirmed it in 2023: total charitable giving fell 3.4% in real terms. Small donor participation declined across broad-based programs. Organizations that had protected their recurring base outperformed those that stayed the course.
March 2020 was disorienting. Markets had collapsed. Offices were empty. Every instinct said pull back, pause, wait and see. Many organizations did. Many likely left significant funding on the table.
By April 2020, the model would likely have indicated a score of 68. Near-zero interest rates scored 85. DAF contributions were accelerating, building on a trend already years in motion. Major donors scored 74. The data was telling a different story than the headlines.
For human services and health organizations: prioritize major gift conversations where donor capacity was genuinely holding. The emotional urgency and the underlying capacity were converging in a way the data supported even when instinct said otherwise.
Giving USA reported 5.1% growth in 2020. DAF distributions hit an all-time record. Human services and health organizations captured the largest gains. Organizations that acted on the data outperformed those that waited for certainty.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was moving fast. It would double the standard deduction and significantly reduce the number of Americans who itemize charitable deductions. Most development teams understood this in the abstract. Few changed their strategy in time.
This is the case that shows why the policy layer matters. A purely economic model would have scored 2017 as favorable. S&P was up. Unemployment was low. The tax policy risk signal scored 18. It is what tells the real story, and a purely economic model misses it entirely.
Prioritize year-end solicitations and communicate the tax benefit explicitly to mid-level and major donors who itemize. Begin preparing for a structural shift in 2018 mid-level giving.
December 2017 giving surged as donors front-loaded gifts. Then 2018 giving fell 1.7% in inflation-adjusted terms. Mid-level acquisition softened as the itemization incentive weakened for millions of Americans. The window closed and most teams had not acted.
Run the Analysis for your role and you do not get a raw number to interpret. You get strategy written for your job: what the current climate means for your donors, how to shape your approach across segments, and where the next six months are pointing. A major gifts officer and an annual fund lead running it the same afternoon get two different reads, because they are running two different strategies.
"Capacity among your top donors is holding steady even as the broader climate softens, so your major gift strategy can stay ambitious while your mass-market projections should stay conservative. Weight your effort toward the relationships already in motion, and structure larger commitments over time rather than as single gifts. The next two months look stable before the outlook tightens slightly into the fall."
The Giving Climate was built by a fundraiser with more than 15 years in nonprofit development, out of the frustration of never having a straight answer to a simple question: what should our strategy be, given where the economy actually is?
Sometimes I was the one asking. More often I was the one expected to have the answer. And for most of those years, the honest answer was that I did not really know. Not with any rigor. Not in real time. Not in a way I could put a number on.
Financial advisors have dashboards. Marketers have consumer sentiment indexes. Development professionals responsible for millions of dollars in charitable revenue have been making gut calls. The tools that exist are annual, backward-looking, and built for researchers.
It exists to give development professionals the read they have always needed and never had. You are the one who knows your donors and does the work. The Giving Climate makes sure the conditions are working in your favor.
Sign up and we will send occasional climate briefings, research from the model, and a note when new features launch. No numbers to decode, just a clear read on where things are heading.