Insights About Our Local Nonprofit Sector

While the 2024 Giving Challenge is behind us, the outpouring of support for nonprofits during that 24-hour online giving event still feels so compelling. Clearly, our community believes in the power of nonprofits to enhance and sustain our quality of life.

Yet, in the aftermath of an exciting and emotional experience—who wasn’t enthralled by that ticker as it “clicked” away throughout the 24 hours? —it is important to calculate more definitively the importance of our local nonprofit sector. Our Community Foundation strives to provide a clearer view of our community, its projections, its bright spots, and its needs through ever-evolving tools that support this intention. This further emphasis on data has led us to a robust examination of our nonprofit sector, and I’m proud to share with you our State of the Nonprofit Sector Report.

Drawn in large part from The Giving Partner, our area’s relied upon nonprofit database, the report offers a comprehensive view of the nonprofit sector in our four-county region, with details on the number of organizations and scope of causes, along with indicators of its overall health, gleaned through organizational size, staffing, and leadership. It gauges nonprofits’ stability and long-term plans through an accounting of endowments and capital campaigns and offers a comparison of our service area to the State of Florida and the nation to give us a fuller idea of the well-being of our region’s nonprofit sector.

The report’s findings about the challenges that face this sector are helpful—while it illustrates the vital work of our nonprofit organizations, it also highlights areas that inhibit their ability to carry out these vital and important missions.

This report complements our Community Indicators Dashboard, affording the opportunity to see where needs and nonprofit abilities align, where gaps exist, and how these factors might create larger gaps—or more stable support—as time goes by.

We are excited to share the report. We hope it will provide necessary context and information as nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and donors make decisions about how to sustain our region’s support for these organizations. Just as our Community Indicators Dashboard is a free resource that we encourage the public to use, the State of the Nonprofit Sector report represents our service to our stakeholders through the provision of a free and useful tool.

As we can surmise through nine successful Giving Challenges, which have raised $92 million for area nonprofits since 2012, our community enthusiastically supports nonprofits. We see their incredible value—they are largely responsible for providing services and resources that lift those in need, offer quality experiences to vulnerable populations, safeguard community assets, and maintain our longstanding reputation as a desirable destination with world-class arts and culture along pristine coastline.

We support nonprofits in the flurry of excitement over 24 hours every other year. This report offers us the insight to fully appreciate them and continue supporting nonprofits as a strategic and worthwhile investment all year, every year.