Canadians gave at least $36 million on Giving Tuesday — 65 percent more than 2019. Will this momentum continue?

Canadians blew past last year’s totals for charitable donations on Giving Tuesday in spite of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic uncertainty, a trend fundraising platforms hope will continue as the world plans its recovery from the virus. 

The U.S. based GivingTuesday organization called the fundraising day “an unprecedented showing of giving, kindness, and connection by millions of people worldwide” in a statement. Public data from GivingTuesday shows around 34.8 million people participated worldwide, up from 27 million last year. Canadian donors raised at least $36.1 million on Dec. 1, compared to $21.9 last year. “It’s a 65 percent increase,” Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday, tells Future of Good. 

These figures are significant. Many Canadian charities are struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic that severely limits their ability to raise funds, even as demands for social services skyrocket. Roughly 40 percent of all charitable donations occur during the last six weeks of the year. So far, the data suggests Canadians are remaining generous, although there have been drops in volunteering rates among U.S. donors due to the pandemic. While online donations have steadily grown since GivingTuesday began in 2012, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced more charities to switch over to online fundraising. 

“As we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic, online giving has grown significantly this year. Traditional, in-person fundraising activities have moved online and the charitable sector is continuing to adapt and evolve,” says Marina Glogovac, president and CEO of Canadian charitable giving platform CanadaHelps, in a statement earlier in December. “The GivingTuesday movement has grown steadily each year since it launched and this year it grew significantly.” 

Rosenbaum says steady increases in online donations were becoming apparent well before Giving Tuesday on Dec. 1. While tracking offline donations is a tricky process in Canada, he says online was “way, way up.”  CanadaHelps estimates around 47,000 Canadians donated $11 million on Giving Tuesday through their software — an increase of 123 percent from 2019. 

Benevity, a Canadian platform for corporate-based giving that recently reached ‘unicorn’ status with a $1.1 billion investment deal, estimated about $55.5 million in individual and corporate-matched donations this Giving Tuesday, a 61 percent increase over last year. Sona Khosla, vice president of marketing at Benevity, says companies working with their platform boosted their donation matching programs and offered new ways to volunteer. “And in response, we saw 51 percent more people donate through their employer’s corporate purpose program throughout the first ten months of 2020, with 41 percent more dollars per donations,” she says in a statement. 

Giving Tuesday is about more than just cash donations. This year, Canadian donors sold 30 custom wooden reindeer to benefit an emergency shelter in Calgary, distributed 816 pairs of new socks for people experiencing homelessness in Montreal, and gave out 1,800 bars of soap in Charlottetown. But Rosenbaum points out that the pandemic has left people with fewer opportunities to do so. GivingTuesday data shows a 7 percent decline in U.S. volunteer rates on Giving Tuesday. “There are fewer opportunities to volunteer in person, so that tends to have a suppressing effect — and events are cancelled,” he says. 

As tragic as the pandemic has been for Canada — 475,000 total infections and 13,600 deaths so far — everyone interviewed for this special report told Future of Good that it has also spurred Canadians to give. The year’s racial injustices, political tensions, and economic crash are also motivating donors. “People in the United States and Canada have been responding to fear and uncertainty and division and concerns for their community with acts of generosity,” Rosenbaum says. “That was very encouraging.” 

In fact, the pandemic prompted an impromptu Giving Tuesday — called GivingTuesday Now — in May as the first wave of the pandemic crashed across North America. Rosenbaum only had U.S. figures when he spoke with Future of Good, but says the outpouring of support on GivingTuesday Now from donors around the world at this initial showed how willing donors were to give during a crisis. With just four and a half weeks’ notice before GivingTuesday Now, donors across the U.S. gave 

$638 million Canadian, Rosenbaum says, “so roughly the same amount of money donated on that day in May as we saw on Giving Tuesday 2019, when people had a whole year to plan their campaigns.”

Data analysts are still poring through the results of Giving Tuesday 2020, but a few unsurprising conclusions about Canadian donations are already apparent. According to CanadaHelps data, 54 percent of Canadian donations went towards “social services charities”: organizations such as domestic violence centres, food banks, and seniors’ charities that provide basic or essential needs. Another 30 percent went to health charities. Roughly 24 percent went towards “public benefit charities,” a category that includes non-profits offering financial assistance, grants, and guidance to other non-profits or charitable organizations. 

Not all causes are seeing the same degree of support. Rosenbaum says arts organizations, in particular, struggled for much of 2020 because they rely so much on earned revenue. Performances have been severely restricted or cancelled outright, leaving many of these charities and non-profits out in the cold. However, he says the data from 2020 and Giving Tuesday suggests there aren’t any really clear long-term trends for giving. The ones that prevailed over the course of the year might be less prominent on Giving Tuesday, when giving is spread out across a lot of different organizations rather than concentrated on a single cause. “What really matters most is ‘are you activating?’ Rather than ‘what’s your cause?” Rosenbaum says. 

It is tempting to assume 2021 will be a banner year for Canadian generosity, given the success of Giving Tuesday 2020. Rosenbaum isn’t so sure. “Things are incredibly unpredictable,” he says. “The usual patterns don’t exist. And that includes the patterns of an economic downtown.” During the Great Recession of 2008, donations eventually fell off. Rosenbaum says Canadian giving hasn’t hit that point yet. That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, either. Canadian charities are stretched very thin at the moment, and he says the incoming donations from Giving Tuesday and other fundraising events may not be enough. Plus, of course, the need for help from charities won’t recede when the pandemic does — in many cases, it could become more prominent. 

In both Canada and the U.S., December sees more donations than any month of the year. The biggest week of the year is the very end of December. “We’re yet to hit what is traditionally the biggest point, but we’re going in really, really strong,” he says. “I think it’s a good indicator on where we’ll be in terms of individual giving in 2020.” 

He’s also hopeful about the spread of Giving Tuesday community movements around the world. The pandemic has also brought about a rise in mutual aid networks to support people in crisis, as well as a resurgence of community support. Regardless of the results, Rosenbaum believes that is here to stay. “I think that we will see a newly generous culture around the world emerging from what was a global crisis,” he says. 

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