Copying something I wrote in response to a similar question about OFTW:
FWIW, I don’t think [the average giving level] is a great reference point. The 2015 Money for Good study found a median gift of ~.4% of income in their sample (which overweighted high income households), and 1% giving would be something like to top quintile. So getting young people to (initially) donate 1% to effective causes seems like an excellent win.
Very interesting! This highlights a number of issues. They mention 2% of GDP is charity. But I believe not all GDP shows up as gross household income. And typically EAs use pretax income (adjusted gross income in the United States), which is lower than gross household income. Some surveys use “disposable income”, which is probably even lower than pretax income. So there could easily be a factor of two difference here, and indeed this study found 3.6% average giving (though it was only of people with household income greater than $80,000 per year). There is also the question of whether mean % donations should be person-weighted or donation-weighted (the latter would agree with the GDP number better). But in other studies, I think I’ve seen that even in low income groups, average giving is still over 1%. Some have even claimed that higher income people give a lower percent of their money, but I am skeptical of this. So I’m not sure what’s going on here.
Copying something I wrote in response to a similar question about OFTW:
(I work at TLYCS, OFTW’s fiscal sponsor).
Very interesting! This highlights a number of issues. They mention 2% of GDP is charity. But I believe not all GDP shows up as gross household income. And typically EAs use pretax income (adjusted gross income in the United States), which is lower than gross household income. Some surveys use “disposable income”, which is probably even lower than pretax income. So there could easily be a factor of two difference here, and indeed this study found 3.6% average giving (though it was only of people with household income greater than $80,000 per year). There is also the question of whether mean % donations should be person-weighted or donation-weighted (the latter would agree with the GDP number better). But in other studies, I think I’ve seen that even in low income groups, average giving is still over 1%. Some have even claimed that higher income people give a lower percent of their money, but I am skeptical of this. So I’m not sure what’s going on here.