The Giving USA Foundation’s annual philanthropy report, released yesterday, indicates that while giving was down last year, it didn’t go down as much as people thought.  Specifically, it declined by just 2%.  But it was the second year in a row where total giving was more than $300 billion.  So, not bad, all things considered.  NPR’s Morning Edition has a nice summary on their website.

Numbers from our own clients are encouraging too.  Our experienced analytics team just completed a study comparing our August and November 2008 public broadcasting co-op campaigns — the first two campaigns right around the bad economic news breaking.  Overall, there was definitely a dip in August, but November rebounded quite nicely.  Whether that is a trend or not remains to be seen.

Response rates for acquisition and lapsed campaigns showed an increase from August to November, while add gift response was down slightly.  However, add gift and lapsed average gifts showed significant gains, while acquisition average gifts showed only modest gains (all were up however).  Finally, ROI was up for acquisition and lapsed but average gift wasn’t able to compensate for lower repsonse so add gift ROI was down slightly.

The entire detailed report is being sent to our public broadcasting co-op members next week.  Please let us know if you would like one too.

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