January 24, 2008 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Many donors say they want to support antipoverty efforts, but they don’t realize that the groups to which they contribute aren’t focusing on helping the needy, two Google executives told a gathering this month of academics, businesspeople, foundation leaders, and nonprofit officials at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Most donors overestimate the percentage of their gifts that will go to help the needy, said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, and Ellen Konar, who heads the Online Sales and Operations Customer Labs at Google. Donors also have the least amount of confidence in the charities that do the most to serve the poor, they told the audience.
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search-engine company, commissioned a survey of 10,006 households, which was conducted in April.
Of the more than 8,000 survey respondents who reported that they had made a charitable contribution in 2006, nearly 50 percent cited helping the poor and disadvantaged as their primary reason for giving, a higher percentage than any of the other choices. Donors in the survey estimated that roughly two-thirds of their giving benefited the poor.
But an earlier study (The Chronicle, August 9) sponsored by Google.org and conducted by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University found that the percentage of charitable contributions that help the needy is closer to one-third — a figure that Ms. Sandberg noted was very conservative and probably is even lower.
Religion and the Needy
Donors in the new survey whose largest gift in 2006 went to religious organizations estimated that 60 percent of those gifts serve the needs of poor people. By contrast, the Center on Philanthropy study found that only 20 percent of contributions to religious organizations went to help the needy.
There were also discrepancies in health and education, areas that together represent half of all giving by wealthy individuals, said Ms. Konar.
Donors who gave to health organizations estimated that 45 percent of their gifts benefited poor people, while the Center on Philanthropy study found that 10 percent of health-related contributions were used to benefit the poor.
In education, donors estimated that 39 percent of their gifts helped the needy, compared to the earlier study’s findings that 16 percent of education gifts serve the needs of poor people.
“To some extent this gap is caused by misunderstanding,” said Ms. Konar. “People think they’re giving to the poor when they’re actually not.”
When asked how confident they were that their largest gifts would benefit poor people, donors who had given to educational organizations had the most confidence, at 83 percent.
That was followed by people who had given to religious organizations (79 percent) and arts and culture groups (76 percent).
People whose largest gift had gone to the types of organizations most likely to serve the needs of the poor reported lower levels of confidence, 61 percent among donors who had given to groups that focus on basic needs, such as food and shelter, and 49 percent among donors who had given to umbrella organizations like the United Way.
“The organizations that are most likely to be giving to the poor are the ones that even people who give [to them] have the lowest confidence that that money will actually get to the poor,” said Ms. Konar.
Ms. Sandberg, who is also a board member of Google.org, said she hoped the studies would raise awareness of how small a percentage of charitable giving benefits people who live in poverty.
She said she also hoped the findings would encourage donors — especially the wealthy, whose giving accounts for a large portion of all contributions — to change their giving habits.
The company’s research efforts grew out of Ms. Sandberg’s concern about the topic as she looked at large gifts reported in the news media, as well as at her own giving and that of her friends and colleagues.
“I started giving speeches a couple years ago literally saying, ‘The problem with charity is that it goes from the rich to the rich,’” she said. “Charity goes from us to Harvard and Stanford and to our institutions.”
Large foundations and their sometimes eye-popping endowments — like the $33-billion endowment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — receive a lot of attention, said Ms. Sandberg. But the amount that they give away pales in comparison to the $220-billion individuals contribute in a year, she said.
“Individual donations really matter,” Ms. Sandberg added. “They don’t seem to make the headlines, but it’s a lot more than Google.org and the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller and all the big foundations.”
