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it’s worth noting that the vast majority of charitable giving doesn’t go to things like homeless shelters and soup kitchens. According to the Giving USA report, which tracks charitable giving patterns, the biggest category of recipient is religious organizations. Note that that just includes donations to churches, synagogues, mosques, etc, and not donations to religiously inspired service groups like the Salvation Army or Episcopal Relief and Development.

Next up is education — including donations to universities and private secondary schools — and only then do you get to human services, where groups like the Red Cross fall. So what share of charitable giving actually goes to poor people? Unfortunately, we don’t have up-to-date data on that, but in 2007 Google and Indiana University’s Center for Philanthropy tried to find out the answer for 2005's donations. That’s not as recent as one would like, but it does give a sense of what the breakdown was prior to the financial crisis, which really battered the nonprofit sector.

The assumptions of the report are quite generous to givers. For example, when faced with donations that partially benefited poor people but also helped the non-poor (for example, donations to hotlines that get calls from people across the income spectrum), they counted half the donations as donations to the poor. But even so, the report found that only about a third of donations in 2005 were targeted at helping the poor

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