Year-End charitable giving: Most people are terrible at it. Don’t be one of them.: ’Tis the season of giving: of gifts, of parties, and of donations to charities. Some 40 percent of all individual charitable donations are made in December. For many charities—such as Teach for America, which received 80.5 percent of all individual donations for 2012 in December, and Save the Children, which raked in 68.6 percent of donations in that same month—end-of-year fundraising is the difference between a successful year and financial hard times.
The American charitable sector is the largest in the world, with Americans contributing more than $300 billion per year in money plus $260 billion in volunteer time. With 1.1 million charities to choose from, it’s not easy to decide where all that money should go. Yet all the data show that American donors are just not interested in putting in much time or effort into making those decisions.