The Giving Habit Broke — But Generosity Didn’t

In CECP’s 2025 survey of large US employers, 25% of employees take part in the volunteer program and 21% use the matching-gift program — while 94% of those companies offer a match. CECP has run this survey for 25 years, across more than 650 multi-billion-dollar companies in total, and in August it gave the pattern a name: a participation ceiling. Companies keep adding new ways to get involved. They keep reaching the same people.

There are two standard explanations for this. The first says the programs are badly designed. The second says young workers want something older programs were not built to give them.

I checked both against the evidence. Neither one holds up.

The generational explanation fails because the values gap it depends on is somewhere between 4 points and zero. The program-design explanation fails for a more uncomfortable reason: the ceiling is not really yours. It is the workplace-shaped piece of a much larger decline — in how many Americans give at all, and in the institutions that used to make giving a habit instead of a decision.

That is the bad news. The good news sits at the other end of the same evidence. As trust drained out of nearly every institution over the past decade, it collected in one place. The employer.

The near-term data says the trend continued. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project tracks about 15,000 nonprofits. It has now recorded 5 straight years of donor decline: −5.7% in 2021, −10% in 2022, −3.4% in 2023, −4.5% in 2024, −3.6% in 2025.

Donor retention bottomed at 42.6% in 2022, the lowest on record, and has barely moved since. The project's summary of the decade to 2022 is the cleanest statement of the problem: dollars rose 69% while donors fell 19%.

So where did the money come from, if not from more people? From fewer, larger donors.

In the 2023 panel, people giving $50,000 or more were 0.3% of all donors and 51.2% of all dollars. In the 2024 panel, people giving $100 or less were 50.8% of donors and about 2% of dollars — and they were leaving fastest, down 8.8% in a year. Those are 2 different years of the same panel, not one snapshot.

Sorted by size, the exits run in a perfectly straight line. Donors giving $100 or less fell 8.8% in a year. $101–500, down 4.0%. $501–5,000, down 1.2%. Above $5,000, both bands grew.

Retention runs the same way and gets to the mechanism. 32% of the smallest donors came back the following year. 68% of the largest did. Small donors are not just leaving faster. They are the ones with nothing holding them in.

Giving USA says the same thing from the top down. Individual giving has fallen from 71% of the American total in 2015 to 63.9% in 2025. Foundations and bequests took up the slack, and both of those start in wealthy households.

Two things temper this picture. The project's panel comes from CRM vendors and leans toward small and mid-size organizations, so its levels are not sector-wide even where its direction is confirmed elsewhere. And Gallup, asking a looser question — any donation at all, no minimum — finds 76% of American adults donated in 2025, down from 83% in 2013. A real decline, but a much shallower one.

The careful version: household giving through nonprofits fell sharply. Total generosity, broadly defined, did not.

One finding cuts hard against the civic-collapse story, so it belongs here rather than buried. Volunteering has essentially recovered. Gallup put it at 63% in December 2025, up from the 56% pandemic low and 1 point off the 64–65% it ran at in 2008, 2013 and 2017.

Americans give their time at close to the rate they did 15 years ago. It is money participation that fell.

That last caveat is the one worth sitting with, because it cuts both ways. Some of the collapse after 2017 is administrative. But the decline was already steep before anyone changed the rules: $282 million in 2009 to $167 million in 2016, a 41% fall with the campaign running exactly as it always had.

And the private-sector equivalent

United Way was built on the same machine: the annual workplace payroll campaign, run through employers, collected by deduction. It topped the Chronicle of Philanthropy's ranking of American charities almost every year from the list's 1991 debut until Fidelity Charitable — a donor-advised fund sponsor, which is to say a vehicle for the wealthy — took the top spot on 2015 data.

Support for its US affiliates was $3.87 billion in the year to June 2015 and $3.71 billion the year after, a 4.25% fall. Of 997 affiliates reporting comparable figures, 579 declined.

What happened next is genuinely hard to state, and that is itself the finding. United Way's 2023 annual report claims $4.4 billion raised and 5.4 million donors, with no note defining what is counted or which geography it covers. Its 2024 annual report drops network fundraising figures entirely. Meanwhile the Chronicle, reporting a departing chief executive's own numbers, puts affiliate fundraising at $3.15 billion in 2018 and $2.36 billion in 2023 — a figure the organization's own report appears to contradict by nearly a factor of two.

I am not able to reconcile those, and neither publisher states its method. What can be said is that the federation which invented American workplace giving no longer reports a consistent number for how much of it there is.

The 2017 tax law, which is the cleanest estimate

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act roughly doubled the standard deduction. The share of households itemizing fell from about 21% to about 9%.

Among middle-income households, the share claiming a charitable deduction fell from about 17% to 5.5% — a drop of roughly 67%. Even in the 90th–95th income percentile it fell from about 78% to 40%.

Three economists — Han, Hungerman and Ottoni-Wilhelm — measured the effect using the same panel data, published as NBER Working Paper 32737. Their finding: the law cut charitable giving by about $20 billion a year, having removed the tax incentive for roughly 20% of taxpayers. That is the best-identified causal estimate in this whole subject.

It is also small next to the size of the decline. And household participation had already been falling for 17 years before the law passed.

The tax law sped up a trend. It did not start one. The more important effect is who gets the incentive: the charitable deduction is now concentrated among the wealthy, which reinforces the concentration described above.

Purpose expectation is at an all-time high. Purpose connection is at an all-time low. That gap is the participation ceiling, measured from the inside.

Deloitte 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey (22,595 people, 44 countries) · Gallup, US employees, March 2020 through 2026

The manager number deserves more attention than it gets. Globally, manager engagement fell 9 points in 3 years while non-manager engagement barely moved. The sharpest declines were among managers under 35 and women managers.

Managers are the distribution channel for every voluntary program a company runs — giving campaigns, volunteer days, employee groups, wellbeing initiatives. If the layer that recruits participants has lost 9 points of engagement, a flat participation rate is a symptom. Adding an 8th program option will not fix it.