How much do Canadians donate to charity?
Rarely does receiving an email makes me shout “woo hoo!” Statistics Canada recently released Taxfiler data for 2021. The charitable receipts Canadians claim when filing their income tax provide excellent insights into charitable giving. Perfect? Nope. But receipts don’t exaggerate. People do.
Studies which ask people how much they donate suffer from a halo effect because people claim to be more generous than they actually are. (In a fun side anecdote, imagine answering the phone at a charity when the caller complains that they didn’t get their annual receipt. Some poor soul has to explain that the caller didn’t get a receipt because they didn’t give. It’s easy to forget.)
Fewer donors giving more
Fewer donors are giving more. Fewer than 1 in 5 Canadian taxfilers claimed charitable giving receipts in 2021. Sadly, this is not news and the number of donors continues to decrease. A declining number of donors give more each year, which hides the problem of how few people actually give.
The median donation amount is $360, up from $340 in 2020. Median means half of donors gave more and half of donors gave less. Let me explain this a bit, because not everyone is a statistics major. The $360 is the median donation amount for people who gave. If we looked at all Canadian taxfilers, most people didn’t give anything at all.
Aging donors
The average donor is now 56 years old, older than the average Canadian.
Across all age categories, average donations increased in 2021. The average annual giving total for a donor 65+ increased from $2,890 in 2020 to $3,310 in 2021. Older donors give the most, and we know from other research that it’s older donors who attend religious services regularly who lead the pack here.
Less than 10% of taxfilers do the majority of charitable giving
Let’s crunch some numbers. Fewer than 20% of Canadian taxfilers give at all. Only half of people who give, give more than $360. So that’s fewer than 10% of taxfilers who are giving $360+ annually. A donor who gives $25 monthly is more generous than the typical Canadian taxfiler. A donor who gives $5,000 annually to their place of worship, and who likely gives generously to many other causes as well, is in the upper stratosphere of Canadian donors. What will happen when these donors are no longer with us?
P.S. I’d wanted to recreated my 2020 Charitable Giving pie chart, but Statistics Canada didn’t release giving by donation totals this year. If you have $402.10 + HST, Statistics Canada will provide that information for 2021. Email me and we’ll data dive together.
Source data https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110013001