July 29, 1999 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Frustrated by the scarcity of reliable data on charitable giving, the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy is leading an effort to create a national repository of information on such donations.
Elizabeth T. Boris, director of the Washington center, said that currently the best available numbers are those pulled together annually by the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel’s Trust for Philanthropy in its publication, Giving USA (The Chronicle, June 3).
But she noted that that publication derives its estimates of how much Americans give and the types of charities they support “by piecing together surveys and data collected by many organizations.”
In addition, Giving USA only provides nationwide estimates. It contains no information for anyone interested in analyzing regional, state, or local trends in giving.
“We’re getting calls every day from folks trying to do that,” Ms. Boris said.
The center hopes through this venture to develop standards for reporting on charitable giving, so that information from different types of groups can be compared. She said her organization hasn’t yet sought money for the project, preferring to determine first the extent of work that it will involve.
The center last month invited representatives from a wide range of non-profit organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions to a meeting in Washington to discuss what information is available, where to find it, and how to gather it into a central data base. Among the two dozen groups that sent representatives were the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, United Way of America, the Council on Foundations, and the Conference Board.
Eustace D. Theodore, president of CASE, which represents education fund raisers, said the center faces an imposing challenge. When CASE developed standards for educational institutions, he noted, it had to persuade hundreds of schools and colleges to report data in a consistent manner. But, he said, at least they were all keeping track of the same basic information. Doing the same thing for organizations that work in fields that range from the arts to health care will be very difficult, Mr. Theodore said.
“The challenge is essentially a ‘data of Babel’ challenge; that is, the challenge of constructing a common language,” he explained. But it is a task worth the effort, Mr. Theodore added. “It will be possible, at the time this data base comes into existence, to look across different institutional settings and have the ability to talk about important processes across those institutional types. For example, not only how much is raised, but how much is raised based on the number of potential donors, how much is raised for different kinds of projects.”
When — or even whether — this effort comes to fruition remains an open question. Ms. Boris said the center is still in the process of putting together ideas of how the repository could be created. The critical matter of how the effort will be paid for has yet to be confronted.
“We don’t have any money for this project yet,” she said. “There may be expectations that are too grandiose for anybody to support.”
