News/Stats/Studies

Eight social entrepreneurs got a chance to pitch their nonprofits to a crowd at the Pitch Some Good event during South By Southwest Interactive. StartSomeGood.com, a crowd-sourcing platform for social entrepreneurs, teamed up on the event with Center61, a co-working space for nonprofits.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. provided a $1,000 grand prize for the event’s crowd-sourced winner. The honor was given to Austin, Texas-based HourSchool, a socially driven school that gives people the opportunity to teach classes, such as sewing or motorcycle maintenance, for a fee.

Online fundraising, marketing and CRM specialist Convio has announced its first delivery partners ahead of the full launch of its Common Ground® product in the U.K. later this year. Purple Vision, Westbrook International and Third Sector IT are becoming certified Convio Solution Providers to ensure U.K. charities get the maximum return on their Convio investment. All three partners will consult around and deploy Convio Common Ground.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) released its Quarterly Business Review for the fourth quarter of 2011. For the first time in at least half a decade, a majority of U.S. marketers said their quarterly direct and digital marketing expenditures grew compared to the same period last year — suggesting that the slow, uneven recovery that has followed the crippling recession of 2008-2009 may have reached an effective tipping point, with both marketers and the supply chain that supports them firmly back in “growth mode” after a period of prolonged caution and uncertainty.

The Water4 Foundation, a 501(c)3 public charity based out of Oklahoma City, announced the launch of its campaign for World Water Day, the United Nations-designated international day held annually on March 22.

Grantmakers that have strategies in place for listening to and learning with grantees are more likely to provide the types of support that grantmakers and grantees agree are essential to boosting nonprofit success, according to a new field study of grantmaker practice commissioned by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?: A National Study of Philanthropic Practice, conducted by TCC Group, is a comprehensive study of the attitudes and practices of staffed grantmaking foundations in the U.S.

The New York Times has eliminated its philanthropy beat, a move that could make it harder for nonprofits to get their stories told to a national audience.

The newspaper was one of the last daily newspapers to employ a reporter to cover national nonprofits on a full-time basis. That reporter, Stephanie Strom, is now writing about business.

Stephanie Yera, a spokeswoman for the New York Times Co., said the newspaper would still cover philanthropy-related stories “across news desks.”

Charities that want to evaluate how well they’re carrying out their missions have a new tool at their disposal.

PerformWell, a website more than two years in the making, is designed to help social-service groups collect and analyze real-time data to help them improve programs and measure their impact. The site provides a detailed introduction to performance management and offers performance indicators, questionnaires and other tools charities can use in their measurement efforts.

Charities are looking for ways to visualize data to explain complex issues succinctly, spur advocacy, support their fundraising, and show donors where their money is going. Some, like the World Wildlife Fund, are creating infographics that can be shared easily via social media, while others are creating interactive Web tools that allow users to slice and dice the data on their own.

Good visualizations can also help charities better understand their own data and use those insights to improve their programs, says Jake Porway, founder of Data Without Borders.

Most Americans appear to be shaking off some of the post-recession gloom and say they will either give the same amount or more to charity this year as they did in 2011, a new survey says.

Sixty-eight percent of the 1,000 people who participated in a January phone survey say they will donate the same amount, while 18 percent plan to give more and 13 percent expect to give less, says the report from Dunham+Company.

Exercising for a good cause continued to grow in popularity and in the sums it raises for charity in 2011, according to figures revealed at the annual conference of the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council.     The top 30 “thon” fundraising programs generated $1.69 billion in gross revenue for charity last year, up $40.8 million or 2.46 percent from 2010 levels and the second straight year of fundraising growth, the council’s sixth annual “Run Walk Ride Thirty” study reports.