One in Four Donors Stopped Giving. The Reason Isn't What You Think.

Twenty years ago, two out of three Americans gave to charity. Today, fewer than half do.¹ Millions of people who used to give have simply stopped.

That’s not apathy - that’s a system failure.

When researchers asked why, the answer wasn’t money. It was trust.² Seventy percent of donors say trusting a charity is essential before giving—yet only 20% report high trust in charities. In the UK, 5.2 million fewer people donated in 2024 compared to 2019.³ The trend is global, and it’s accelerating.

The problem isn’t that charities aren’t doing good work. The problem is that the infrastructure meant to show that work is broken.

I’ve seen this firsthand. At Givespark, I work on nonprofit data infrastructure—collecting and processing information so financial advisors and charitable giving advisors can make reliable recommendations to their clients. The challenge isn’t finding data. It’s finding data that’s current, complete, and trustworthy. That challenge shouldn’t be this hard.

When Disaster Strikes, Data Disappears

When Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica in October 2025—a Category 5 storm that left 77% of the island without power—donors worldwide wanted to help. The usual names appeared immediately: Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, World Food Programme. But what about the Jamaican organizations on the ground? The local groups who knew which roads were passable, which families were most vulnerable, which communities were still recovering from Hurricane Beryl just 16 months earlier?

They existed. They were working. But if you wanted to find them, compare them, understand who was doing what—good luck. No central directory. No way to see where gaps remained or what had already been done.

When disaster hits closer to home, the problem becomes even more visible - after the Palisades and Eaton fires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, the FireAid benefit concert raised over $100 million for relief efforts. By any measure, a success. The money went to 120+ nonprofit organizations, reaching more than 150,000 affected residents.

But within months, controversy erupted. Community councils demanded accounting. Congress launched an investigation. Social media filled with accusations of fraud and mismanagement. An independent audit by Latham & Watkins found no evidence of misuse—the money was going where it was supposed to go. But the perception of problems persisted because donors couldn’t see for themselves.

Here’s the telling detail: as of this writing, FireAid has yet to file its first Form 990. The organization raised $100 million, distributed most of it, faced a Congressional investigation, commissioned an independent audit—and still, no official public financial record exists. The only data available is on their website and one PDF report. Not because they’re hiding anything, but because that’s how the system works.

This is the transparency gap in action. Even organizations doing everything right can’t prove it through official channels. And donors, burned too many times, assume the worst.

The Mechanics of Delay

FireAid’s situation isn’t unusual—it’s the norm. The IRS allows nonprofits up to 11 months after their fiscal year ends to file their Form 990. Then the agency takes months more to process and publish. If you wanted to check any charity’s finances today, you’d find data from 2022—maybe 2023 if you’re lucky. For a sector moving over $500 billion annually, we’re making decisions based on archaeology, not journalism.

And even when organizations do file, the data is incomplete. Of the roughly 1.9 million nonprofits registered with the IRS, only a fraction file 990s in any given year—many fall below reporting thresholds, others miss deadlines, and some simply forget until they’ve lost their tax-exempt status.

Meanwhile, current information does exist—just not where you’d expect. Scroll through a local food bank’s Facebook and you’ll see photos from last week’s distribution. Check a wildlife group’s Instagram for updates from the field. But this information is scattered across dozens of platforms, formatted inconsistently, impossible to compare. A donor who doesn’t have hours to research has no practical way to find it.

Platforms like Charity Navigator and Candid attempt to bridge this gap. Charity Navigator offers free ratings but opaque methodology—a four-star rating doesn’t tell you if an organization’s approach resonates with you or what they accomplished last quarter. Candid offers deeper data but charges significant fees. Neither solves the fundamental problem: they’re still working with data that’s months or years old.

Other Countries Are Doing Better

This isn’t an unsolvable problem. Other countries have built more transparent systems.

In Australia, the ACNC (Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission) maintains a central registry where charity data is publicly accessible. Organizations must file within six months of their fiscal year end—half the time the US allows—and that data is published on a searchable register and shared with researchers through data.gov.au.

In the UK, charities must file their annual return within ten months of year end. 360Giving has created an open data standard for grants, with over a million grants totaling more than £265 billion now searchable through their GrantNav tool.⁴ Government departments publish their grants data publicly.

Neither system is perfect. But the direction is clear: shorter deadlines, centralized registries, open data standards. The US, with the world’s largest philanthropic sector, lags behind. We have the IRS publishing delayed PDFs. We have competing private platforms with paywalls. We have no unified standard for how charities should report their impact. The infrastructure exists elsewhere. We just haven’t built it here.

Why hasn’t the US built this? The honest answer: it’s not a sexy problem. Nonprofit transparency isn’t a multi-billion dollar market that attracts Silicon Valley attention. It’s not politically charged enough to drive legislative action. The people most harmed—small charities and thoughtful donors—don’t have lobbyists.

The Real Gap: Understanding Impact

Financial data was never the whole picture anyway.

When someone donates to “childhood education in developing countries,” they’re not really buying a percentage of a 990 line item. They’re hoping to help a specific child learn to read, or a school get built, or a teacher get trained. The emotional connection that drives giving is about impact, not overhead ratios.

But impact is exactly what’s hardest to communicate at scale. A large organization might have the resources to produce polished annual reports with outcome metrics. A small local nonprofit—the kind that often does the most direct, tangible work—might struggle to update their website once a quarter.

The current system accidentally advantages large charities with marketing budgets over small charities with ground-level impact. Not because donors prefer bureaucracy, but because bureaucracy is visible and impact isn’t.

What Could Change

The IRS isn’t going to solve this. Their job is tax compliance, not sector transparency. Stricter deadlines might help at the margins, but the fundamental delay is baked into annual reporting cycles.

The opportunity is in the space between official filings and scattered social posts—and it’s a technical problem as much as a nonprofit problem.

What if the updates charities already publish could be aggregated, structured, and made searchable? What if AI could turn a Facebook post about a food distribution into a data point that donors could find and compare? What if small organizations could share progress in a format that’s easy to produce and easy to consume?

This isn’t science fiction. The building blocks exist. Social media APIs, natural language processing, structured data standards—the technical infrastructure is there. What’s missing is the connective tissue: platforms that pull this information together and present it in ways that help donors make better decisions.

This is what we’re building toward at Givespark. But the opportunity is larger than any single company. The sector needs multiple approaches, competing ideas, and continuous experimentation.

What’s At Stake

Here’s what gets me excited about solving this problem: it could fundamentally change which charities thrive.

Right now, donor attention concentrates around the largest, most visible organizations. Not because they’re more effective, but because they’re more findable. When research is hard, people default to names they recognize. Better data infrastructure could flip that dynamic—letting small organizations with strong impact compete on merit rather than marketing budget.

Remember those millions of Americans who stopped giving? They didn’t stop caring. They stopped trusting a system that couldn’t show them what they needed to see.

The charities doing the most good shouldn’t be invisible just because they’re small. The donors who want to help shouldn’t have to become investigative journalists. The data exists. The technology exists. What’s missing is the will to connect them.

We can build something better. The question is whether we will.

Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, “The Giving Environment” research series (2021, 2024). https://philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu/news-events/news/_news/2021/latest-data-shows-new-low-in-share-of-americans-who-donated-to-charity.html ↩
Give.org Donor Trust Report 2023. https://give.org/donor-trust-report ↩
Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), UK Giving Report 2024. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/charitable-giving-reached-15-4bn-last-year-despite-drop-in-donors-caf-reports.html ↩
360Giving, “UK government 360Giving publication adds 1 millionth grant to GrantNav,” April 2024. https://www.360giving.org/2024/04/02/1million-grants/ ↩