So this thing happened in Canadian fundraising that I know has also been happening in US fundraising as well. It’s a thing which has been happening for over 20 years and was bound to get us in trouble sooner or later. Well, we’re now in trouble.
The percent of taxfilers who reported any charitable donation has been dropping precipitously for a long time now, year over year, and it’s frankly amazing that our total reported charitable donations kept increasing year after year all this time. However, Statistics Canada recently released the taxfiler stats for 2022 and it appears that we’ve finally reached a tipping point. You can’t have fewer and fewer people donating each year and expect the wealthy donors to offset the loss of the regular donors. It’s just not realistic!
That national tipping point, by the way, seems to have been driven by both Ontario and British Columbia. Both provinces experienced very sizeable decreases in total charitable donations.
Intriguingly, both Alberta and Quebec had increases! I wonder what their secret is…
Anyway, have a look at the dashboard below for more intel on charitable giving across Canada: