A free, easy-to-read, five-step guideline is now available for nonprofits to develop a cybersecurity plan and to manage cyber risks. The Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience | Centre canadien pour la résilience numérique recently released A Cybersecurity On-Ramp for the Settlement Sector (Oct. 2024). It’s for the settlement sector (organizations that provide services and support to immigrants and refugees), but any organization can use this well written guideline.
Navigating New Horizons: The Contributions and Perspectives of Multicultural Canadians 2024, by CulturaliQ and Imagine Canada, examines levels of giving among multicultural Canadians, the causes they support, their motivations for donating, and the factors that may limit their contributions. The 50-page study focuses on the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants in Canada, including South Asian, Chinese, Afro-Caribbean/African, Filipino, Arab and West Asian. Findings include:
– The amounts donated by immigrants generally increase the longer they have been in Canada. Immigrants who have been in the country for ten years or more give more than multicultural Canadians who were born in Canada.
– Nearly a quarter of multicultural immigrant Canadians surveyed express regret about their decision to come, with many citing challenges, such as increased racism, limited opportunities, and feelings of not belonging. Despite these difficulties, many immigrants continue to donate, although they tend to contribute less than those who have been in Canada longer.
“Report #4 of the Advisory Committee on the Charitable Sector – October 2024” is titled Towards a federal regulatory environment that enables and strengthens the charitable and nonprofit sector. The recommendations are grouped by four working groups:
1) Definition of charity and charitable purpose working group;
2) National Inherent Risk Assessment working group;
3) Transparency and data related to other qualified donees and non-profit organizations working group; and
4) Relationship between the CRA and the charitable sector working group.
GivingTuesday issued a few reports in 2024 that are relevant to Canadians, including:
1) The Giving Bridge: A Lookback at 2023 Trends in Global Generosity. It’s from GivingTuesday Data Commons and investigates the nature of generosity globally using quantitative and qualitative methods. Among key findings: “Despite philanthropic pessimism resulting from downward donor trends in money raised and participation rates, most people remain open and ready to help those most in need. In other words, the giving ecosystem is as robust as ever, and it appears increasingly clear that it is nonprofits who must adapt and redesign their relationship with givers to overcome the steady declines in donors and dollars.”
2) Civic Intent: A Deeper Dive on Civic Engagement Using the U.S. GivingPulse Survey. This special report looks at trends in giving behaviour and perspectives in the US, including the finding that “people in the US who are surrounded by prompts and reminders to participate in generosity-related activities are more likely to participate in them.”
The Ontario Nonprofit Network released its 2024 State of the Sector – Policy Report, called Built on Hope: Nonprofit Sector Seeking Stability. The 23-page report focuses on the fact that the nonprofit sector in the province is still experiencing financial struggles, even as demand for services increase. The report lists policy recommendations for government and calls to action for the public and the sector, including: build diverse networks; engage in collective advocacy; socialize the Nonprofit Business Model; and encourage local community engagement and support.
Evaluating Advocacy for Developing, Adopting and Implementing Public Policy: A Collection of Resources, by Mark Cabaj (Oct. 2024), is for the Max Bell Foundation and its prospective and actual grantees — and is useful for anyone interested in planning and assessing public policy advocacy efforts. The document provides links and resources for methods and techniques to assist organizations and networks to monitor and evaluate their efforts to influence public policy decisions and implementation.
A new report from US-based GivingTuesday, AI Readiness and Adoption in the Nonprofit Sector in 2024: Results from GivingTuesday’s AI Readiness Survey, contains a few, great insights. As with many other reports about artificial intelligence (AI), this one focuses mainly on people who use ChatGPT, DALL-E 3 and other generative AI services that create text or images — services that have already saturated the market and have minimal relevance to nonprofit work. Interestingly, the report contains a few mentions about newer AI tools that might be useful to the sector, such as tools related to data interpretation and task management. An example: “Our comparison of current and future use of AI suggests that the greatest unmet needs are apps that help in organizing and restructuring data, followed by virtual AI assistants, data interpretation/analysis, and predictive models (which require large amounts of this structured data as a key input). Generative AI and chatbot-use have already saturated the market; anyone who wants this has tried it.”
Under Pressure: 2024 State of BC’s Non-Profit Sector Report (from Vantage Point, Vancouver Foundation, Victoria Foundation, City of Vancouver, United Way British Columbia and Vancity Community Foundation) surveyed 558 nonprofit organizations and found: (1) expenses soared and all revenue sources decreased, except for government revenue; and (2) demand for services for clients and communities skyrocketed, while capacity to deliver those services remained the same. Read the full report, which includes recommendations to government, funders, sector stakeholders and partners.
The Canadian Knowledge Hub for Giving and Volunteering is an online centre for data about giving and volunteering. It accesses a lot of data from a variety of sources, including a huge amount of data from Statistics Canada, such as data in the General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating (GSS-GVP). The hub contains reports, resources, infographics and links to StatCan data about our sector. It was launched by Volunteer Canada in partnership with Imagine Canada, Ajah, Association of Fundraising Professionals of Canada, and Volunteer Management Professionals of Canada.
The 2024 Landscape Report: Reflecting Canada’s Philanthropic Foundations (from Philanthropic Foundations Canada and PhiLab) brings together previous literature and new information to provide an overview of foundations, such as “What do we know” (Chapter 1) and “What are the purposes, approaches, and roles of Canadian foundations” (Chapter 2). Regulation, asset investment and grantmaking are highlighted. PFC and PhiLab aim to release one report annually, starting with this 2024 Landscape report, which builds on PFC’s past research on foundation assets and giving trends.
CanadaHelps collaborated with Environics Analytics and Imagine Canada to release The Giving Report 2024: From Disconnection to Collective Action. Aside from the usual data (the number of Canadians making donations has fallen again and more than half of charities can’t meet demands for their services), this Giving Report contains new information. For example, 32% of Canadians say climate change or protecting our environment is a top cause, but only 3.9% of donations are made to environmental charities or climate-driven crises, such as wildfires (see pages 26-31 of the 51-page pdf). Also, online giving is now stagnating (which, for years, has grown even as overall donations have fallen), but there are still bright spots in online activity (see pages 11-14). And, of course, the Supplemental Data Tables are full of thousands of searchable insights (pages 41-50).
Funded by the Edmonton Community Foundation and supported by PolicyWise for Children & Families, the eight-page Championing the Power of Data in Challenging Times: 2023-2024 Alberta Nonprofit Data Strategy combines previous information and current analyses to provide a basic overview about the nonprofit sector’s impact in Alberta, as well as challenges and priorities.
The State of the Canadian Charitable Sector 2023 Mid-Year Report, from the Charity Insights Canada Project (CICP) / Projet Canada Perspectives des Organismes de Bienfaisance (PCPOB), summarizes two dozen weekly surveys of approximately 1,000 registered charities between December 2022 and June 2023. Findings include: (1) charities are seeing rises in demand and increases in costs associated with their services, impacting organizations’ abilities to support and retain personnel; (2) charities are embracing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI initiatives, striving to realize representative demographics within their workplaces; and (3) certain disparities, particularly in gender representation, underscore the necessity for heightened awareness and targeted action in specific leadership roles. Click here for the CICP-PCPOB’s State of the Canadian Charitable Sector 2023 Mid-Year Report.
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Banner photo is courtesy of Jeremy Bishop.