News/Stats/Studies

Thanks to a record donation of $10,569,002 to the Ressler-Gertz Foundation, actress Jami Gertz and her husband, Anthony Ressler, top the list of the 30 Most Generous Celebrities compiled by The Giving Back Fund, a nonprofit organization that tracks philanthropic giving worldwide. Although not exactly a mainstream actress, Gertz’s deep-pocketed donation has much to do with the fact that Ressler is the co-founder of Ares Capital, a Los Angeles investment firm that controls more than $40 billion in assets, which has also recently expressed interest in buying the Dodgers.

Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone.

And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors by The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project — which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake — finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks.

President Obama appointed a former nonprofit leader, Cecilia Muñoz, to be his top domestic-policy adviser.

Muñoz is an immigration expert who worked for 20 years at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. She left that position in 2009 to become Obama’s director for intergovernmental affairs.

In her new position, Muñoz will oversee the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, the White House unit that has the most contact with nonprofit leaders.

A growing number of idealistic students are taking it upon themselves to fix problems they see in society and are starting their own nonprofits to do it.

A study by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement shows that 80% to 85% of incoming college freshmen have community-service experience prior to starting their higher education. Today's teens also plan to be generous when they get older. More than 75% say they will give regularly to charity, according to the Girl Scout Research Institute.

Donated income to charities remained strong in the U.K. last year despite growing unemployment and shrinking household incomes, according to the biennial State of the Sector survey by Third Sector and the sector consultancy nfpSynergy.

Forty-three percent of respondents said donated income at their organizations rose or stayed the same in 2011, with 32 percent saying it went down. Four percent said donations went up a lot, while 18 percent said they went up a bit.

The Resource Alliance has launched its two flagship events, Fundraising Online and the International Fundraising Congress, as well as a new website for 2012.

Convio announced its key predictions and expected trends that will have the biggest impact on the nonprofit sector in 2012: social and mobile continuing to mature; peer-to-peer engagement having greater influence; and donors dictating terms of interaction.

View Convio founder Vinay Bhagat's five predictions for the nonprofit sector in 2012 here.

It's been two years since the Nonprofit Technology Network released the first Nonprofit Data Ecosystems Survey report. NTEN revisted this topic this summer for the 2011 Nonprofit Data Ecosystems survey, and released the report this week.

The report provides a look at not only what particular technology tools and vendors the NTEN community uses for the different data management functions across their organizations, but also the grades they assign to those tools and vendors on criteria such as after-sale support and usability.

Few Americans are seeing relief from the nation’s economic slump, but the finances of some nonprofits are much rosier as the nation’s wealthy stepped up their multimillion dollar gifts in 2011.

The biggest gifts announced by Americans totaled more than $2.6-billion, compared with $1.3-billion in 2010. (Twelve donations were included in the list because of two ties for the 10 biggest donations of the year.)

Nonprofits are stepping up their grantseeking efforts, and although a majority see no rise in grant awards, there is collective optimism that the outlook will improve over the next six months, a new study says.

Seventy-eight percent of the 928 nonprofits responding to an online survey say they applied for more grants in the first six months of 2011 than in the same period last year, says the report from GrantStation and PhilanTECH.