Factary Phi now tracking £9.4 billion in donations
Howard Lake | 21 June 2010 | News
Prospect research specialists Factary now have data on £9,488,310,271 in donations made to UK organisations. The donations are listed in Factary Phi, the database of 155,276 publicly recorded gifts to UK charities and not-for-profit organisations. This figure is up by more than £3 billion from last month’s total of £6.2 billion, following new research into UK donors.
Factary Phi is a subscription-based database available to any UK not-for-profit organisation. Users can search for specific gifts, or gifts to causes, and access records showing the donor’s name, the URL or website where researchers found the information, and the name and registration number of the recipient organisation. Around half of the gifts show either an actual amount donated, or a range within which the gift falls (e.g. £10,000-£25,000.)
The total amount donated for which Factary currently shows an actual amount donated is £9.3 billion (£9,314,557,955), and a further £173 million (£173,752,316) where they show a range of gift value, taking the sum of the lower end of the donation ranges.
Factary acknowledges that it might look surprising for its figure for only donations recorded in the public domain to tally so closely to the approximately £9.9 billion donated by individuals in the UK that is reported in Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving 2009.
The company gives three reasons. First, Factary Phi records donations over a number of years: its database goes back to 2007, so it has more than three years of giving in the data set. Secondly, it is reporting on the largest gifts; UK Giving 2009 estimates that high-value gifts represent 49% of the total amount given to charity, and it is to these that the database is “biased”. Thirdly, Factary takes a broad definition of gifts, so includes donations to universities, museums, libraries, theatres, schools and political parties, as well as to charities.
Factary was founded in 1990 and is based in Bristol, with consultants based in Barcelona, Brussels and Boston.
www.factary.com/Phi.html
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.