Universities in Factary Phi

Factary Phi, our database of donors and supporters to UK nonprofits, is beginning to reveal an interesting picture of philanthropy in the UK. The database only covers donations that are recorded in the public domain, so it is emphatically not a sample of all philanthropy.

But working within that limitation, the Factary team has been analysing donations to Universities and education, and we’ve come up with some surprising, and some reassuring, results.

Reassuring, for example, is the fact that over 95% of publicly acknowledged donations come from individual people – that means a good wide base of philanthropic support for UK universities. Surprising was the fact that we have found trusts and foundations to be particularly keen to list their donation value on University websites.

We have also demonstrated, we think for the first time in the UK, that academics are an important group of donors to UK Universities – representing around 12% of donors and 17% by value of publicly recorded donations.

We have written a brief report on these statistics as an aid to development teams in universities and the education sector. You can download the report here.

There is more about Factary Phi at here. If you would like to talk to a human being about Factary Phi, call us in Bristol on 0117 916 6740, or email at research@factary.com.

Download the report.

Thanks from the Arts

More than 36,500 supporters are acknowledged publicly by arts organisations in the UK, according to new research by Factary. And most of the donated income is from people (not from companies or trusts, as you might have expected.)

A summary research note is available for download here.

The research is based on data from Factary Phi, the database of donations and donors reported in the public domain. Factary Phi currently contains more than 160,000 records of donors and supporters to UK nonprofits who have been publicly thanked or reported.

Factary’s research shows that while only one in three publicly-acknowledged donors is an individual, almost three-quarters of publicly-acknowledged donated £s are from people as donors.

Our research seems to show that grant-making trusts and foundations are shy of public acknowledgement – with few arts organisations listing the donation value of their trust supporters. By contrast, companies seem more willing to allow their arts organisation partners to report donation values on arts websites.

To build Factary Phi, Factary researched donors by name from public domain sources, and Factary Phi shows the organisation they donated to with that organisation’s location and the web address of the source we used to find this data. Almost half of the records show either the amount of the donation or a gift band, and we are currently reporting on more than £13 billion in known donations to UK nonprofits, from 161,896 donors and supporters.

For further information contact David Hughes, Editor of Factary Phi.

Download the research summary.