Nonprofit organizations are continually faced with the challenge of increasing donations, but often do not have the access or tools which enable them to better understand individual giving trends. In an effort to bridge this information gap, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth has released the third edition of Donation Insights and added new insights such as top giving days and channel preference, by day of week for each category. This latest edition also offers new insights on the Environmental and Animal-Related category, which has outperformed total donation growth since 2011.

Donation Insights uses anonymized and aggregated Mastercard transaction data to provide an analysis of current and historical donation trends. An open-source dataset consists of monthly data for total donations with a breakout for nine categories, such as education, environmental, health and human services, to name a few. Key insights include:

Growth in giving moderated: Total donation growth was 4.3 percent year-to-date through June compared to 5.9 percent in 2016. The strongest categories were Housing, Public Safety and Disaster Relief and Environmental and Animal-Related.

Strong support for Environmental and Animal-Related causes: Donations grew 6.6 percent year-to-date through June, with significant strength in recurring and online donations, as people shift how they donate.

Read the full article about insights into the charitable landscape at mastercardcenter.org.