While there are many ways of looking at the average size of a Canadian charity, typically, size is measured in terms of revenue or assets.

This is probably quite unfair as some charities have a huge amount of assets and do very little and some charities have very high revenue, but spend very little money or have little impact.

There are many charities with very small budgets and a large number of volunteers who have a tremendous impact on our communities. These groups are often invisible. I often hear people saying that a small charity is like $500k in revenue or $1 million in revenue. Actually, a small charity is probably $100k in revenue.  However, from the vantage point of some, the charity sector is a much smaller number of high-profile organizations with extensive communications departments.

Unfortunately, the T3010 annual return asks for about the same information today than was asked for 20 years ago.  A lot has happened in the last few decades and the T3010 is not keeping up.   So yes, it is hard to get a nuanced view of the Canadian charity sector with the T3010.  Even worse is Statistics Canada’s dabbling in the NPO and charity sector.

That being said, we thought we would look at the average and median size of Canadian charities.

The mean/average is interesting.  It is calculated by adding up the total revenue of all the registered charities and dividing by the number of charities. It provides an overall sense of the average revenue. However, the mean can be influenced by extreme values (very high or very low revenues). For example, a few large charities with extremely high revenues could skew the mean, making it seem higher than what most charities actually earn.

The median, on the other hand, is probably more useful.  The median is the middle value when the revenues are arranged in ascending order.  The median is useful because it is not affected by outliers or extreme values. For example, Alberta Health Services has billions in revenue.    It shows the “typical” revenue level that splits the group of charities into two equal halves: half earning more and half earning less.

 

https://www.canadiancharitylaw.ca/blog/what-is-the-average-revenue-of-a-canadian-registered-charity/