Defending Giving USA’s Record of Accuracy

To the Editor:

Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University appreciate The Chronicle’s coverage of giving in America (“Americans Didn’t Pull Back on Their Giving Last Year, Report Finds,” June 17). However, the reporting of different surveys, covering different time frames and using different methodologies, may create unnecessary confusion among readers representing nonprofit organizations across the country.

There is no question that 2009 was a very difficult year for all nonprofit organizations. The many stories reported in The Chronicle are extremely useful in learning about the experience of specific nonprofits, but they show only part of the picture.

As The Chronicle’s own survey confirmed, some organizations experienced a decrease in giving while others experienced an increase or saw philanthropy remain flat. This is true every year whether giving over all is up or down. And while these surveys are useful, they don’t really tell us the magnitude of the increases or decreases or the overall cumulative effect on giving nationally.

This is where Giving USA provides a unique and valued service to the nonprofit community. Not only are these annual data based on a proven model, grounded in rigorous scientific research but also Giving USA is the only study that tracks sources and uses of philanthropy going back more than 50 years.

Because of this, Giving USA is able to identify trends, including the impact of recessions and economic downturns, as well as factors that influence giving by sources and uses, all of which help inform the work of the nonprofit practitioner.

On the subject of the reliability of Giving USA’s numbers, as The Chronicle’s story also reported, Giving USA revises its estimates annually as Internal Revenue Service data are released.

Reviewing this information for the period 2002 through 2007, the time frame of the last full set of revisions of tax records by the IRS, we can confirm that Giving USA’s estimates are within 1.15 percent of the final IRS numbers for those years. (The one exception occurred in 2005, when the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act inspired additional giving that the report did not attempt to estimate.)

This is an astonishingly close estimate, considering all of the factors that affect giving, and it gives us confidence in the Giving USA annual estimates.

We appreciate the work of other scholars and practitioners who work to shed light on the direction of giving in this country and the factors that affect that giving. We believe this encourages healthy debate and ultimately enriches the body of knowledge. But for that debate to have meaning, it is essential to understand the model and methodology used to gather those data and to ascertain the reliability of those data over time.

Edith H. Falk
Chair
Giving USA Foundation
Glenview, Ill.
Patrick M. Rooney
Executive Director
Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
Indianapolis

Ms. Falk is also chief executive of Campbell & Company, a fund-raising consulting company in Chicago.

To the Editor:

In your articles covering Giving USA, your sources said the figures presented by Giving USA were too optimistic a description of what is actually happening in philanthropic giving. In the midst of a recession, it may provide some comfort that giving was down a smaller percentage than the overall economy. But ask any nonprofit: Down giving is still down giving.

Whether Giving USA is closer to reality than its critics claim is largely beside the point.

What does matter is that larger public-policy issues transcend the differences of a few percentage points in voluntary giving. Let’s not clutter up our headlines with what are really footnotes; the headlines should continue to speak about people in uncertainty, organizations in stress, and societies in transition—the seriousness of our mandate demands no less.

Richard Marker
Chair
New York University Academy for Grantmaking and Funder Education
New York