Real giving in New Zealand hasn't grown since 2018. Inflation ate it.

Here's a number that should worry anyone running a charity in New Zealand: according to JBWere's Outlook for Giving 2026, nominal charitable donations have gone up since 2018. In dollar terms, on paper, Kiwis are giving more than they used to. But once you strip out inflation, real giving is back to roughly where it was in 2018. Seven years, and no actual ground gained.

This matters because most charities plan their year around donations going up, at least a little, at least in line with everything else getting more expensive. That assumption doesn't hold anymore. Costs have risen. Wages have risen. The number of people needing help has risen. And the pool of real, inflation-adjusted donor generosity has stayed flat.

It's not that New Zealanders have stopped caring. It's that giving is a discretionary spend, and discretionary spend is the first thing to get squeezed when the cost of living goes up. People are still writing the cheque. It's just not stretching as far as it used to, for them or for the charity on the other end.

This is why relying on donations alone is an increasingly fragile strategy. Grants get more competitive as more charities chase the same static or shrinking pool. Street and door-to-door collections cost more to run than they raise in a lot of cases. And donor fatigue is real: people can only be asked so many times before they tune out.

What doesn't erode the same way

What doesn't erode the same way is a funding model that gives people something back. A lottery ticket isn't a donation in the traditional sense. It's an exchange: a small, discretionary purchase that happens to fund a cause, backed by the appeal of a genuinely life-changing prize. That's a different kind of spending decision than "please give us money," and it taps into a part of household budgets that hasn't been shrinking the way pure giving has.

If the last seven years have taught the sector anything, it's that charities can't out-inflate their donors. They need funding models that don't depend on people simply giving more. That's the problem Swell exists to solve.