Curious about recent trends in foundation funding priorities across the country? The Foundation Center has issued their annual report, Foundation Giving Trends: Update on Funding Priorities, highlighting nationwide trends in philanthropy in 2007. Key findings include:
- Giving increased by 13.2% between 2006 and 2007.
- A record 188 foundations gave grants of $10 million or more in 2007.
- Of the 10 largest grants, eight were made by the Gates Foundation, mainly for health-related activities and international development.
- Environment/animals experienced the fastest growth in grant dollars in 2007, at 28.5%.
- Funding for international activities reached a record 23.4% of all grant dollars in 2007.
This annual report looks at trends in giving by more than 1,000 foundations across the country, including the 15 largest funders in nearly every state. Over half of all grant dollars (totaling $21.6 billion) given by U.S. foundations are represented by the report’s sample.
Detailed information on giving trends by foundation type, size, and region, as well as by subject focus, type of support, population group served, and geographic focus is also available in the full report.
Thanks, Kate & Steven, for your responses.
To Kate’s point, I would say this is an issue in all research that is focused on actual funding, actual outcomes, or actual anything. It takes time before “actuals” are available, and then it takes time to analyze those actuals. Both MCF and the Foundation Center rely on tax data to see how grant dollars are actually allocated. And tax data is lagged. But, for MCF at least, it’s the best method we have at the moment for obtaining accurate information about actual funding. (MCF will be issuing its annual Giving in MN report on 2007 trends later this year.)
One way MCF attempts to provide real-time information is by surveying members about their grantmaking plans for the future. But planned giving and actual giving don’t always match up; and we (at MCF) think it’s important to have an accurate record of where the dollars actually went.
Of course, it would be ideal to have a real-time electronic grants reporting system (perhaps like what Steven mentioned the Foundation Center has) to provide more timely data … but MCF isn’t there yet. In the meantime, we are doing all we can to continue to provide both meaningful forward-looking survey results(we’ll be issuing an updated outlook on grantmaking in MN report later this spring), as well as to provide a record of actual giving, using data that is lagged but accurate.
I definitely understand Kate’s desire for real-time data on grantmaking, and we at the Foundation Center are working hard to improve the currency of the information available. In fact, we have close to 200 foundations—many of them among the largest funders—now reporting their grants directly to us electronically. And we’re working hard to encourage more funders to report in this timely way.
The bigger question is whether the world of philanthropy has changed so much since late 2008 that past grantmaking priorities have no value for predicting what will happen going forward. For example, given the scale of the current crisis, will arts and education and social science funders shift their grantmaking to human services? A research advisory we released last November (foundationcenter.org/focus/economy/advisories.html) found that fluctuations in giving priorities during the 2001 to 2003 downturn were no larger than those seen during the years both immediately preceding and following that period, and new survey findings we’ll be releasing in mid-April will shed further light on this question.
Of course, this is a much more severe downturn. But it still seems reasonable to expect that the funding priorities and strategies mapped out by foundations prior to the downturn, often with a clear connection to donor intent, will continue to be the critical factor in grantmaking decisions going forward. However, we won’t be able to say that with certainty until we have sufficient data from enough foundations after this crisis comes to an end.
2007 research seems so … yesterday. It’s interesting to think about how we’ve used trend information like this as a predictor for the future. But now, of course, we know that foundation actions in 2007 will not tell us much of anything about 2009 and 2010. It’s time for these kinds of research reports to be replaced by real-time, useful information using online reporting and data sharing.