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Most Americans aren’t making end-of-year charitable giving plans, according to the results of a new AP-NORC poll, despite the many fundraising appeals made by nonprofits that rely on donation surges in the calendar’s final month to reach budget targets.
The survey, which was conducted in early December by The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research, found that about half U.S. adults say they’ve already made their charitable contributions for 2025. Just 18 per cent say they’ve donated and will donate again before the year is over. Only 6.0 per cent report they haven’t given yet but will do so by December’s end. The rest, 30 per cent, haven’t donated and don’t plan to.
Everyday donors faced competing priorities this year. President Donald Trump’s social services grant cuts, severe foreign aid rollbacks and November SNAP benefits freeze — plus natural disasters like Los Angeles’ historically destructive wildfires — left no shortage of urgent causes in need of heightened support.
But weaker income gains and steep price inflation meant that lower-income households had less money to redistribute. December is a critical fundraising month for charitable organisations. In a typical year, nonprofits raise about 30 per cent of their annual donations in the final weeks of December, according to data from the fundraising software company Classy.
Chuck Dietrick, a 75-year-old retiree in Anna, Texas, is amongst the half of U.S. adults who said they’d already donated to charity in 2025 but don’t plan to give more this month.
“We don’t really participate in this rush in December to give money away,” said Dietrick, who made his donations earlier in the year. “We’ve done our bit for the year.”
Dietrick estimates their household donated somewhere between US$501 and US$2,500. The Dallas-Fort Worth area couple mostly contributes to organisations that have touched their lives or those of their friends. There’s the Florida hospice that Dietrick said did a “super job” caring for his mother. He has relatives and friends who served in the military, so he also gives to the Disabled American Veterans and the Wounded Warrior Project.
“I would rather give a smaller amount of money to a variety of institutions that I care about rather than giving a big chunk of money to one,” he explained.
Most 2025 donors say the amount they gave wasn’t affected much by this year’s federal funding cuts or the government shutdown, according to the AP-NORC poll, although about 3 in 10 say those situations did impact the charities they chose to support.
The survey suggests that, whilst private donors mobilised millions to fill funding gaps and hunger relief groups saw donation totals spike last month, many Americans did not respond with their pocketbooks to the nonprofit sector’s newfound pressures this year.
Jeannine Disviscour, a 63-year-old Baltimore teacher, is amongst 2025 donors who say the cuts prompted them to give more.
“I did not donate on GivingTuesday,” she said. “But I did donate that week because I was feeling the need to support organisations that I felt might not continue to get the support they needed to get to be successful.”
She estimates her household gave between US$501 and US$2,500. That included support for National Public Radio. Congress eliminated US$1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting this summer, leaving hundreds of NPR stations with some sort of budget hole.
She said she wanted to ensure journalism reached news deserts where residents have few media options.
Living in an area that is home to many refugees, Disviscour also donated her time and money to the Asylee Women Enterprise. She said the local nonprofit helps asylum-seekers and other forced migrants find food, shelter, clothing, transportation and language classes.
“There is a gap in funding and there’s more need than ever,” she said. “And I wanted to step up. And it’s in my community.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,146 adults was conducted December 4 through 8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
AP
English (US) ·