Fewer Donors, Bigger Checks. Interpreting the Latest Giving Data.

There’s a number that keeps showing up in conversations about American philanthropy. And it tells two completely different stories depending on how you read it.

Over the past decade, charitable giving from affluent households increased more than 30%. That’s remarkable. That suggests a sector that’s thriving. Resilient. Responding to need.

But here’s the other story that same data tells.

Donor participation dropped from 91% to 81%. Twenty million American households stopped giving to charity entirely. First-time donor retention? Below 20%.

Fewer people are writing checks. They’re just writing much bigger ones.

So which story matters more? The one about record-breaking totals? Or the one about democratic participation collapsing?

To answer that question, I wanted to talk with the researchers who created the data in the first place.

Amir Pasic is the Dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. It’s the world’s first and only school devoted entirely to the study of generosity. He oversees Giving USA — the longest-running report on American charitable giving.

Bill Jarvis is the Managing Director at Bank of America Private Bank. He’s spent nearly two decades tracking how wealthy Americans give through the Bank of America Study of Philanthropy. He bridges wealth management and charitable giving in ways few others can.

Together, they’ve surveyed over 15,000 affluent households since 2006. Their 2025 findings reveal a sector at a crossroads.

And that crossroads is exactly what we’re exploring today.

Interview

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Eric Ressler: Amir, this study has a lot of really interesting takeaways. As someone who’s been in the philanthropic space studying it as an academic for a really long time, what were the most striking things that you took away from this report?

Amir Pasic: This is a very valuable report, the Bank of America Study of Philanthropy. We’ve had a partnership with Bank of America since 2006, surveying high net worth individuals or affluent families and their behaviors, which are so vital for the health of our nonprofit sector. The continuation of this is in itself a remarkable resource for nonprofits and donors in the field.

In the most recent study, the 2025 study, we saw a significant increase in giving by high net worth donors. The average gift has gone up significantly, which is reflected in other studies that confirm that as well. We have seen a decrease in participation, however, in terms of the number of affluent donors who are giving, and that reflects a broader trend as well.

I think it’s really important to pause and focus on the top line. The average gift increased from 2015 when it was just over $25,000 to over $33,000 in 2024. So that is a remarkable increase. The other caution is that there was a decrease in participation of how many high net worth affluent donors have given from 91% in 2015 to 81% in 2025. So this reflects something of a broader trend we see across our society where we have the dollars up, but the number of donors down.

Eric: Bill, what were some of your takeaways?

Bill Jarvis: The dollars in fact are up. What’s more important though is that in inflation-adjusted terms, the dollars are at least constant. What we’re seeing here on the part of this group of affluent donors is that they are keeping pace with inflation. In other words, the real value of what they’re doing is being maintained. That’s very important because we’ve been through this burst of high inflation.

It is true that the donor participation, the incidence of donation in this study is down. But that also is consistent with Amir’s large social giving study called Giving USA, which comes out annually. That’s the study of mass giving in this country. If you look back to the beginning of this century, the population of Americans pursued this very broad model of donating. Two-thirds of American households taken as a whole were giving to charity. By 2020, and other surveys show that was now less than half in terms of the incidence of giving, the participation in giving. The inflection point was the global financial crisis, which damaged average household balance sheets from which they have not recovered and did not recover.

So what this means is that if you are listening to this podcast, you are fated, you are condemned to rely on this small group—what we would call the top 5% of the population in terms of assets and income. But the trigger, the asterisk there is that although they are the ones who are giving more and more at the top of this pyramid, they don’t like to be alone. They don’t want to be the people who are just by themselves.

So if you’re listening and you’re in development, or if you’re in a nonprofit that’s trying to raise funds, part of the other part that you’re condemned to, in addition to seeking monies from this top group, is to create breadth in your donor pool to the point where even the so-called—I mean, it’s a commercial term that’s become applied to fundraising—the return on investment for that more modest gift may be relatively small, but you have to build that base in order to get those higher net worth donors to be there and make those gifts for you.

Eric: Bill, I think that’s a really important point that I see a lot of the clients that we work with miss. They look at what I call retail donors as something that you either choose to go that way or you choose to go the high net worth route. And I think that is a mistake because the high net worth donors want to see broad support and momentum.

Bill: Yeah, and it’s a false dichotomy, and here’s why. Our anecdotal information, and I’m sure some of Amir’s research also tells us this—we read in the newspapers, usually several times a year, about charities who receive bequests or who receive extraordinary donations from people that they either didn’t know or they knew only tangentially or who were small donors or who were just volunteers and small donors.

As they approach the end of their lives, these people say, this is what I want my legacy to be. This is what I want to be remembered for. And here comes this relatively substantial bequest. So you just don’t know. If all you’re doing is focusing on the people who are visibly affluent or wealthy, you’re missing that opportunity to cultivate these other people of modest means.

The donor of modest means or the everyday donor is important. There are extraordinary donors hiding in that group and also taken as a whole, your gift of $50, $100, $250—if you add these up, they do make a difference.

Eric: I want to touch on something potentially a little bit complex, which is that my takeaway from this study was a little bit of a double-edged sword. There’s definitely some positive news here. We’re seeing the absolute number of philanthropy increase, even in relation to inflation. But we’re also seeing that concentration. To me, that feels like a result of growing income inequality in America and broadly as well. What I worry about is that more and more returns to this almost Gilded Age style of philanthropy, which we all know is not sustainable. I’m seeing it on the front lines with the clients that we work with where they’re struggling right now. We have a lot of funding down largely from the fallout of the federal administration policy change that’s happened this year.

Amir: This is a very good question, and it goes to a lot of the core issues that we’re facing. The concentration issue is part of the broader societal challenge. Where did all that wealth come from? Is it equitably distributed? And how can we as a society look at this issue? Those are very good questions.

But the issue of generosity, caring for each other, and giving is such a fundamental part of the human condition. It is built into our humanity, built into the way we organize ourselves as families, as communities. We’ve seen it throughout history, and we’ve seen it even as wealth has grown more or less evenly distributed.

The research that we’ve conducted over the years shows that lower-income individuals give a higher proportion of their assets than wealthier individuals. So even as there are inequities in our society and inequality in our society, there’s still that impulse to care for each other. That is fundamental, and that’s something that we should always harken back to.

Now, when we think about this concentration of wealth, it also gives us a clue about where change can be made. If you had to change the mind of 100 million people versus 100 people, which would be easier? In some sense, this concentration of resources means there’s an opportunity for influencing change at a very significant level. That’s not the goal for everyone, but for those who think about advocacy and changing social systems, it does provide a different pathway.

Bill: I want to take us to another part of the study, which I think is really important and actually one of the most encouraging findings, which is the extraordinary bounceback in volunteering among affluent Americans. It was 30% at the low in the pandemic where people were nervous, didn’t want to do it. And now it is 43%. We estimate the average volunteer contributed 120 hours to two organizations.

Why does this matter? Because our data shows that volunteers give two and a half times more than non-volunteers. We’ve tested that, and it’s significant to the 99% confidence level. So volunteering is the gateway to philanthropy. When you give your time, you have an opportunity to really understand the organization, to understand what they’re doing, to understand their priorities, to assess their effectiveness. You can also assess whether the organization’s values are aligned with your values. And then you have a much better, more intimate understanding of whether you want to be supportive or not.

Eric: That’s a really, really important data point. Because I would have thought that folks who have achieved a significant amount of financial means would be too busy to volunteer, right? They don’t have time.

Bill: This comes back to that idea that humans are social creatures. We’re wired for this. This is not exceptional behavior.

Amir: Absolutely. We sometimes think that self-interest is the only motivation that people have, but the research is overwhelming that generosity is built into our nature. It’s essential to how we survive as a species. We see volunteering as an expression of that, and it cuts across all income levels and all sectors of society.

Eric: I’d love to hear you talk a bit about generational differences in giving and how Millennials and Gen Z are different from their parents. What are you finding?

Bill: Gen X and Millennials are now two-thirds of affluent donors, so they predominate. We’re also seeing the rise of Gen Z donors. For organizations that exist today, this matters a lot because younger donors prioritize issues over organizations. It really doesn’t matter if you have a very strong established brand. You have to turn that inside out and lead with what you do and why what you do is important and then attach your brand to that. You’re having to reintroduce yourself to this next-generation donor.

Other things that we see about younger donors—they’re more interested in online giving and being involved in social media. They talk about their philanthropy more. Forty-two percent of younger donors associate their names with gifts, whereas 31% of older donors do, and 69% of older donors give anonymously.

Amir: There’s an extraordinary change that’s going to take place. One of the things we learned from this Bank of America study is the great wealth transfer—$84 trillion over the next 30 years—which is the largest intergenerational wealth shift that we’ve ever seen. Only 13% of affluent respondents involve children, grandchildren or younger relatives in their giving decisions. This is a catastrophic disconnect.

If nonprofits are not soliciting and cultivating the pipeline of donors who are giving less, then they’re abandoning the future by just focusing on where the money is right now. You have to be asking about both. How do we preserve what we have today and build for what we need in 20 or 30 years? That’s the real challenge for nonprofits.

Eric: Can you talk a bit about donor-advised funds and how we should be thinking about them?

Bill: Twenty-four percent of affluent households use a DAF, a charitable trust, or a private foundation. Among those with $5 to $20 million in assets, 48% either have or plan to have a giving vehicle within three years. Structured giving represented 18% of donations in 2024, nearly double from 11% in 2015.

These vehicles enable donors to give with greater intentionality. They can set up the vehicle, make the gift, get the tax deduction in that year, and then take time to thoughtfully decide which organizations to support. The benefit is it enables that kind of thoughtful giving.

Amir: There are debates about DAFs. The criticism is that some donors get the tax benefit immediately but the money sits there indefinitely. But as Bill says, the evidence shows they actually pay out at higher rates than foundations. On average, DAFs are paying out at 20 to 24%, which is much higher than the 5% minimum for foundations.

Eric: One other thing that really stood out to me in the study is that nonprofits are actually the most trusted institution when it comes to solving problems. That feels pretty significant.

Bill: Year after year in our study, when we ask what confidence people have in societal institutions to solve problems, large and small companies, the branches of government and so on are really pretty much at the bottom. Who is at the top? Nonprofit organizations, individuals, and very importantly, future arising generations.

This is the opportunity in the society that we live in, but it’s important for us to recognize that that exists and to take that responsibility happily. There are some societies in the world where individuals do not have this ability to make a difference and are constrained by law, by power structures, by social practice from doing those things which we can do here.

Eric: That’s really powerful. As we start to wrap up here, I want to leave each of you with a double-ended question at the end. One is one major piece of advice or guiding philosophy for executive directors, development directors, folks who are out there who need resources and support for the good work that they’re doing. How should they be thinking about where we are and where we’re going? And secondly, what are you most inspired, motivated, and activated about right now in this current landscape despite some of the setbacks that the sector has seen? Amir, I’ll start with you.

Amir: I think generosity and giving are such an important part of society. In a time when so much is up in the air and being changed in front of our eyes, the title of your podcast comes to mind. We are designing tomorrow through the voluntary and generous actions of our population. This is really the antidote in many ways to the polarization, the enmity, the distress of coercion that we feel internationally, nationally.

The great American tradition that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized in the 19th century when he came here—people binding together, getting together in innovative ways, not waiting for somebody in authority to come and help them out and tell them what to do. This is the core of the dynamism of American society. The executive directors of nonprofits are really the leading edge of this in many ways, trying to redefine for communities how they stand and how they’re going to deal with where we’re going next.

So I think that is the depth of the mission, the importance of the mission. You always come back to that when you’re running a mission-driven organization, whether it’s formally a nonprofit or whether it’s a social enterprise or even if you’re working in a quasi-governmental entity that is dealing with the community. Always come back to mission.

If your mission is no longer relevant, then we do also have opportunities to say, we can’t do our mission, let’s start something else. So don’t stick with a mission that doesn’t have a relevance for today. We’re not in the business of continuing organizations just to survive with the organization. Always come back to the mission. How is it relevant to where the world is going? How can we help move and design tomorrow?

The second part of the question is what gives me hope and inspiration. I’m at a university where we deal with young people on a daily basis. You have to have faith in the future when you see young people curious and ambitious about the possibilities in front of them. That is both the greatest opportunity, but also our greatest challenge when we have young people who don’t see that opportunity. So those of us with gray hair, that is our responsibility to make sure that they see that the world is in their hands and they are the ones who are designing tomorrow.

Eric: That’s beautiful. Thanks, Amir. Bill, I’ll let you weigh in too.

Bill: Designing tomorrow, Amir, you’ve been with us on the mountaintop here. I’m going to take us down to a little more implementation. I have two recommendations to our audience.

One is to make a strategic investment in development and advancement. This is very important. In so many cases, in too many cases perhaps, we see nonprofits that think they can just hire a consultant to do a campaign, or they think they can just have one part-time person doing it. If you look at the organizations that are successful at fundraising, first of all, it is glued to their strategic plan. The strategic plan has a three or five-year trajectory. There are things that you want to continue doing, things that you’re not doing that you want to start, things that you’re doing you want to do more of. Each of those has a price tag. And for each of those price tags, there is a principled source of funds.

You have to think through whether it be membership, annual giving, the gala, things like that—how are you going to get these monies? This is where strategic fundraising comes in. And that then gets embodied in the things we’ve been talking about, in volunteering, in cultivating the donors, enabling them to think that the organization is aligned with their values and so on and so forth.

The second point that I would say in terms of advice is I would like to make the case for endowment. Now, many people think endowments are only for rich organizations, but endowment is a kind of capital for a nonprofit. It speaks of stability. It frees you from the vicissitudes of having to worry about annual giving. It also, if you have donors who are visionary enough, enables you to endow the key offices of the nonprofit in a way that will enable you to hire people who are just as good as that visionary implementer that you’ve got in that place right now. So that also begins to give you stability.

I do believe that strategic investment in development and also thinking strategically about endowment and the role that it could play in achieving that stability for the organization—its ability to lift its head above the turmoil of the day-to-day and to think more about the future.

In terms of what gives me encouragement, I echo what Amir said. One of the questions that we ask in the study is what confidence do you have in societal institutions to solve problems? And as you can imagine, consistently year after year, large and small companies, the branches of government and so on are really pretty much at the bottom. Who is at the top? Nonprofit organizations, individuals, and very importantly, future arising generations.

This is the opportunity in society that we live in, but it’s important for us to recognize that that exists and to take that responsibility happily. There are some societies in the world where individuals do not have this ability to make a difference and are constrained by law, by power structures, by social practice from doing those things which we can do here. So I would say it’s an encouragement. Thank you, Amir, for taking us to that mountaintop to think about again, forming that future, designing that future.