Hangover headache: plain folks are becoming foundations. (Out On a Limb).

The party's over. Many nonprofit pundits have been breaking out the bubbly for the ever-rising donation levels for the past 10 years. Well, the cold splash of reality has hit them.

The Giving USA numbers show that for the first time in almost a decade, giving went down when adjusted for inflation. In real numbers, giving went up a miniscule 0.5 percent, which is saying it was flat. This flat growth was also the first since the early 1990s.

More alarming is that while nonprofit executives celebrated more and more giving, they were ignoring more guileless problems: giving numbers already were-shaky and had been for the past five or six years.

The public support numbers, the real bellwether of giving in this country; has been tepid. Public support is the real essence of giving, the roll up your sleeves and do the hard work of cultivating and motivating donors every day. It is blue collar work, some opine, but it is the bread and butter of development.

Those public giving numbers were muffled by the double digit increases in gifts of appreciated stock, art and non-cash gifts. When the stock market shot up in value, particularly during the three years when the dot-com craze was like a narcotic, giving went up proportionately. It was all major gifts and dot-com millionaires to the rescue.

Interestingly, you can see how the skyrocketing market affected giving by sources of contributions. For the past 25 years, foundation and corporate giving hovered around 10 percent of total gifts to charities.

The proportion between the two was almost equal, though some years they traded places with foundation giving surging ahead, for example, but both categories remained in the 10 to 11 percent number.

Now, in the most recent past two years, foundation and corporate giving combined has surged to almost 20 percent of the total. In fact, foundation giving, for example in 2000, accounted for 12 percent of total gifts made to nonprofits. Corporate giving (more depressed because of pressure on bottom lines) still managed to provide more than 5 percent of gifts.

One of the reasons foundation giving has gone up and will be expected to continue is that there are simply a lot more foundations. Much of this new foundation formation has come from individuals who set up private foundations as a channel for their philanthropy and wealth. More research needs to be done to understand their impact on giving and the grantees they support.

So, as these sources of contributions expanded, contributing to the double digit increases, the real bulwark of giving fell. Public support, still the lion's share of giving in this country, dropped to 75 percent of all gifts. How significant is this? In 1995 (1994 numbers), individual giving was 81 percent of the total. And, in the 1980s, individual giving, including bequests, was 90 percent.

If you want more evidence of this global warming for giving, look at be-quest giving. For the past decade, experts pontificated about the "intergenerational" transfer of wealth. The American Association of Fund Raising Counsel (AAFRC) even publicized the $4 trillion in wealth that was awaiting nonprofits as parents and grandparents were set to leave greatly enhanced real estate and portfolios to their children and charities.

Despite the increasing wealth and higher percentage of people leaving wills, bequest giving in 2000 was 7.8 percent of total gifts to nonprofits. In 1995 (1994 data), bequest giving was 7 percent and in inflation adjusted dollars, that 7 percent number was a drop from the prior year. That means that bequest gifts, the supposed pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you believe all the hype, has not materialized. And there is no indication, based on the effort of nonprofits, that this number is going to go up anytime soon.

Too, public support has seen a quantum change in its composition. The Urban Institute has pointed out that more organizations are deriving their income from fees and memberships. Product sales are booming and boards love them. They make fundraising less costly. But, they also jeopardize the organization by placing it in the mainstream of retail economics. Nonprofits were almost insulated from recessions and downturns as the public rallied around those in greatest need. But as more fee and service-based charities increase their products, the more susceptible they become to general economic relapses.

Recently, one development director from a major Texas-based charity called to say they received letters from two separate foundations announcing that they will not be making any further grants this year.

So, as you peruse the Giving USA numbers this year, remind yourself that much work needs to be done in development. Public support is a real measure of nonprofits' investment in itself.