The New York Times has a fantastically interesting visual representation of what people the world around are spending their money on, and how said spending relates to their neighbours. It's a tad dated (Sept 08), but still quite insightful.
What I would love to see is a similar chart showing philanthropic activity with a breakdown of what is given to who and how it shrinks/contracts during times of recession. How does this correlate to consumer spending? Do we see people in countries who typically consume less give more when their fellow citizens are struggling? Do certain donors (health care, poverty alieviation, etc) see a relative increase when things get rough? Would there be any way to leverage this information to better drive donations?
4 comments:
As you know I did a good deal of looking into such data sets a few weeks back. The overall picture seems to be that philanthropic giving tends to match overall economic decline. It does not precipitously fall, but rather adjusts to the new economic reality with relatively stable and comparable decline.
Of course that's based on data from previous periods of economic down turn, and the best data we have at this point is very short term at best.
The most stable giving is - of course - religious/religiously motivated giving.
Great post! I'm looking forward to mining this a bit more.
And Adunare, would you mind posting some articles/visuals from your research?
Yes. Sometime... it's background research for our charitable pre-budget submission. We're going to be coming out with a good deal more on this in the next little while, so you'll actually see it crop up online/in your inbox :)
Wow, that's fascinating. Thanks for posting.
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