Generosity set a record in Southwest Washington on Thursday.
In its fourth year of striving, the annual festival of fun surrounding online giving to charity called Give More 24! smashed the $1 million ceiling.
After the round-the-clock Thursday campaign ended at midnight, the final tally of gifts to local charities and nonprofit agencies stood at $1,033,825. That’s $113,126 greater than the 2016 total of $920,699.
But the real success may be the total number of individual people donating: 3,422 in all. That’s 360 more than last year. Those donors made 5,118 individual donations to 131 separate groups — all funneled through the interactive website Give-More-24.org, which was created by the event host, the Community Foundation of Southwest Washington.
That website allowed potential donors to browse all 131 groups by name, by size, by county or by field of endeavor.
The field that drew the top dollars and the most clicks was education (everything from the Hough Foundation to Pomeroy Living History Farm), with $204,751 given by 1,119 different donors; next was health, with $182,614 given by 999 donors; followed by youth development, with $148,700 given by 794 donors.
Housing and shelter was a close fourth, with $142,452 give by 506 donors.
The top single beneficiary of Give More 24! was Share, which serves the hungry and homeless with a network of shelters, soup kitchens and other services; Share gained $47,901 from 134 different donors. Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School was right behind Share, with $46,330 from 135 donors.
All this online giving was leveraged by live in-person deals at cafes and restaurants, dunk-the-celebrity and other fun games and outings, children’s art projects, meetups, tours, musical entertainment and much more.
It’s tempting to draw easy conclusions about donor demographics, but they don’t necessarily add up. The minimum donation required to participate was $10. The average donation to Black Lives Matter Vancouver was $58.49, amassed from 73 donors, for a total of $4,270; the average donation to Boys and Girls Clubs of Southwest Washington was $101.50 per donation, from 125 different donors, for a total of $12,688; the average donation to Battle Ground Health Care, which provides free service for the poor, was $256.77, from 79 different donors, for a total of $20,285.
But it’s also telling that the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra gained $7,600 from 21 donors, an average of $361.90 each; and Opera Quest Northwest, introducing opera to children, took in $5,242 from 10 donors — an average of $524.20 each.
