The year in numbers
Rees Calder · 23 April 2026 · 6 min read
Companies publish annual reports. Foundations publish grant summaries. Individual donors publish nothing. That means the most important financial decision most households make about the world outside their walls gets zero structured reflection.
Here's a template. One page. Seven numbers. Enough to tell you whether your year of giving was deliberate or accidental.
The seven numbers
1. Total given (absolute). Everything you donated in the calendar year. Include: direct charity donations, payroll giving, sponsored events, GoFundMe contributions, mutual aid, political donations if you count them. Exclude: buying raffle tickets, charity shop purchases (those are consumption, not giving).
Pull this from bank statements, not memory. As the Fidelity Charitable study (2023) showed, the median donor overestimates their giving by 42%. If you tracked throughout the year using a giving tracker, this step takes two minutes. If you didn't, budget an hour to go through 12 months of transactions.
2. Total given as a percentage of gross income. This is the number that matters for comparison. £500 means something different on a £30,000 salary than on a £150,000 salary. The percentage normalises.
UK median: roughly 0.5% of gross household income (ONS Family Spending Survey, 2024). US median for donating households: roughly 1-2% (Giving USA 2024). Giving What We Can pledgers: 10%+. Your number sits somewhere on this spectrum. Knowing where is the point.
3. Planned vs. reactive split. Of your total giving, what percentage was planned in advance (standing orders, annual budget, deliberate decisions) vs. reactive (responded to an appeal, sponsored someone, gave after a disaster)?
The CAF UK Giving Report (2024) shows 58% of UK donations are reactive. The effective giving literature consistently finds that planned giving is 3-8x more cost-effective per pound, because planned giving goes to evaluated charities while reactive giving goes to whatever prompted the ask.
This number tells you how much of your giving was driven by your priorities vs. other people's.
4. Number of recipients. How many distinct organisations or causes received your money this year?
GiveWell recommends concentrating giving on a small number of high-impact charities (their top recommendations typically number 4-8). The reasoning: due diligence is expensive, and spreading donations across 20+ charities means each one gets too little for the evaluation effort to be worthwhile, and too little to feel meaningful to the recipient.
If your count is under 5, you're concentrated. If it's over 15, you're probably spreading too thin. Between 5 and 15 is the zone where most deliberate givers land.
5. Largest single donation as a percentage of total. This reveals your concentration pattern. If your largest donation was 60% of your total, you have a core cause with satellites. If no single donation exceeded 15%, you're a diversifier.
Neither is wrong. But knowing which you are helps you decide whether to consolidate (if you want more impact per evaluation hour) or maintain breadth (if you value supporting multiple causes for non-impact reasons).
6. Tax efficiency captured. Of your eligible donations, what percentage were Gift Aided (UK) or itemised (US)?
HMRC estimates that £400-600 million in Gift Aid goes unclaimed annually. If you're a UK taxpayer and any of your donations weren't Gift Aided, you left money on the table. If you're a higher-rate taxpayer and didn't claim the additional relief on your self-assessment, you left more.
This number is the easiest to improve year-on-year, because it's pure mechanics with no value judgements.
7. Year-on-year change. How does this year compare to last year? Both in absolute terms and as a percentage of income.
If you don't have last year's numbers, this year becomes your baseline. The point of tracking is compounding: small improvements in giving strategy, repeated annually, produce large differences over a decade.
What to compare against
Three benchmarks worth knowing.
National average. UK: £240/year (ONS), roughly 0.5% of gross income. US: ~$2,000/year for donating households (Giving USA), roughly 1-2%. If you're above the national average, you're already in a small minority. Most people are below and don't know it.
The 1% floor. The case for 1% of gross income as a minimum floor is made in detail in "The one percent shift." For most households, 1% is achievable without lifestyle change and represents a meaningful commitment.
The GWWC pledge. 10% of income. This is aspirational for most people and standard for the effective altruism community. If your number is 2-3% and rising, you're on a trajectory that may reach this naturally over years. If it's under 1%, the 10% target is counterproductively distant.
The narrative layer
Numbers alone don't tell the full story. Three narrative questions complete the picture.
What was your most impactful donation this year, and how do you know? If you can't answer this, you probably can't assess the impact of any of your donations. That's worth acknowledging. The honest answer for most people is: "I don't know, because I haven't evaluated the outcomes." That's fine as a starting point. It's not fine as a permanent state.
What would you change? Looking at your seven numbers, what's the single change that would improve your giving most next year? For most people it's one of: increase the planned percentage, consolidate recipients, or capture tax efficiency. Pick one. Implement it in January.
What did you learn? The Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats study (2014, Harvard Business School) found that structured reflection on performance improves future performance by 20-25%, even when the total time spent on the activity stays constant. The annual giving review isn't just record-keeping. It's a performance intervention.
How to do this in practice
Block 90 minutes in late December or early January. Not more. This is a focused exercise, not a retreat.
Pull bank statements for the full year. Search for charity names, direct debit references, and common payment platforms (JustGiving, GoFundMe, PayPal donations). Build a simple spreadsheet: date, amount, recipient, planned/reactive.
Calculate the seven numbers. The spreadsheet does the maths. Write a one-paragraph summary of what you see.
Set one goal for next year. Not seven. One. The habit literature (BJ Fogg, Stanford, 2019) is clear that single-goal commitments stick at roughly 3x the rate of multi-goal ones.
Store it somewhere you'll find it next December. A Google Doc, a note on your phone, a page in a journal. The format doesn't matter. Persistence does.
One sentence
Seven numbers, 90 minutes, once a year. That's enough to turn giving from something that happens to you into something you choose.
Sources used: Fidelity Charitable Giving Report (2023), ONS Family Spending Survey (2024), CAF UK Giving Report (2024), Giving USA Annual Report (2024), GiveWell recommendation methodology and concentration guidance (2024), HMRC Gift Aid Statistics (2024-25), Giving What We Can pledge data (2024), Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats "Learning by Thinking" (Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2014), BJ Fogg "Tiny Habits" research Stanford Behaviour Design Lab (2019). Full links in the planning doc.