Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Forty-four gifts supplied 30% of the dollars on the rebuilt Million Dollar List
The Lilly School's new three-year count gives fundraisers a number to plan against, though the shape of the distribution matters more than the total. Most of the money sits in a few hundred gifts.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy's new report counts 6,002 publicly announced gifts of $1 million or more from 2021 to 2023, worth $106.22 billion, a window covering the pandemic's widespread effects.
- Individual donors were the largest single source of those gifts, accounting for 2,641 of them, or 44% of the count.
- The 44 gifts of $200 million or more, 0.7% of the list, carried $31.64 billion, 30% of all dollars, while the 1,521 gifts between $1 million and $2 million, a quarter of the count, carried 1.7%.
- Human services led on both measures, with 1,273 gifts and $23.16 billion, ahead of public and societal benefit and higher education.
- The school says this release uses an improved methodology powered by artificial intelligence to capture, categorize and process publicly announced gifts above $1 million.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint With 419 gifts at $50 million or more carrying 58.8% of the dollars, a three-year campaign total turns on a few dozen conversations, and one principal gift that does not close outweighs hundreds of small ones.
- decision A shop optimizing for number of closes and one optimizing for total raised should not work from the same prospect list: local prospecting looks right on gift count and wrong on dollars.
- constraint Because the report says the list is not exhaustive, any institution benchmarking itself against these totals is comparing against announced giving, which sets a floor rather than a measured population.
Divide $106.22 billion by 6,002 gifts and the average comes to about $17.7 million [1]. Almost nothing in the dataset looks like that. The 44 gifts of $200 million or more average roughly $719 million each [2]. The most crowded band, the 1,521 gifts between $1 million and $2 million, averages about $1.2 million [3].
The 44% credited to individual donors is a share of the gift count [3]. Measured in dollars, individuals supplied $48.50 billion of the $106.22 billion, or 45.7% [4]. Their average gift works out to about $18.4 million, against about $17.2 million for everything else in the list [11][12].
Entries in the Million Dollar List come from media reports and other publicly available sources, so a gift has to be announced before it can be counted [9]. A pipeline that finds more of those announcements raises the count without any donor giving more. Comparing this release with earlier vintages of the list therefore mixes a change in method with a change in behaviour, and the announcement does not say whether the earlier years were reprocessed the same way.
Add public and societal benefit at $20.5 billion and higher education at $16.4 billion to the human services figure, and three subsectors hold $60.06 billion of the three-year total, or 56.5% [6][9].
Among the 419 gifts of $50 million or more, about 176 went to organizations in the donor's own state and 71 went out of state, but the out-of-state gifts carried more money, $22.30 billion against $17.60 billion [8]. Per gift, that is roughly $314 million out of state and $100 million in state [6]. The two groups together cover 247 of the 419 gifts and $39.90 billion of the tier's $62.54 billion [5][8].
What to watch
- Whether the 2024 Million Dollar List data shows the same concentration once pandemic-era conditions had passed, which the school flags as the open question.
- Whether the school republishes earlier years under the AI-assisted method, which would make comparison across vintages possible.
- Whether later analysis measures private million-dollar giving against reductions in government funding.