Vanguard Charitable donations to charity jumped by 45% for fiscal year 2024 ending June 30, for a total of $3 billion granted to charity for the year, Vanguard Charitable announced.
The total giving was made up of more than 222,000 grants to nearly 60,000 nonprofits representing human services, religion, education, health, environment and wildlife, and arts and culture. Since Vanguard Charitable’s inception more than 25 years ago, donors have granted more than $19 billion to nonprofits, Vanguard Charitable reported.
“Among many generous giving trends, we’re seeing a theme of donors embracing personal community connections to ramp up their support for nonprofits, whether within their favorite existing causes or a brand new one, and in addition to their expected and planned giving,” Rebecca Moffett, president of Vanguard Charitable, said in a statement.
“Our research shows that while this type of giving may be unexpected or responsive, it is in addition to a broader giving strategy,” Moffett said. “In fact, expected giving is seeing double digit growth of 17%, while donors also increased their responsive granting.”
The same causes drew the most donations as in the previous fiscal year, which were human services, religion and education. The five top charities by the number of grants were the following:
1. Doctors Without Borders
2. World Central Kitchen
3. Planned Parenthood Federation of America
4. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
5. Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ)
“Vanguard Charitable donors are often driven to give based on an experience or unexpected circumstance. This contributes to a high rate of unexpected giving–a rate that is increasing by 24% per year at Vanguard Charitable over the past decade, which ultimately increases overall giving thanks to the flexibility and value of a donor-advised fund. In many cases, what starts as a one-off grant evolves into consistent, year-over-year giving,” Vanguard Charitable said.
Vanguard also launched a program in late 2023 to partner with PayPal, called Grant Payments. More than $1 billion was granted through PayPal, a program that was designed to make it easier and quicker for grants to be made. “The solution eliminates the need of paper checks and simplifies the delivery of grants. Getting grants to charities quickly is critically important when supporting time-sensitive disaster relief efforts and when physical mailboxes may be inaccessible,” Vanguard Charitable said.