News/Stats/Studies

Ted Hart speaks speaks with Rob Mitchell, CEO of Atlas of Giving and Philanthromax, for the official public release of the Atlas of Giving 2011 Annual Giving Data Report and the 2012 Forecast of Giving on his Nonprofit Coach radio show.

To help nonprofit employers better understand their employees’ engagement, Opportunity Knocks, the national nonprofit job board and HR resource, conducted a landmark national study and released the OK Research project, Engaging the Nonprofit Workforce: Mission, Management and Emotion.

This report is the only of its kind on employee engagement specifically focused on the nonprofit sector. The goal of this project is to better understand the ways in which nonprofit employees are engaged and the impact of employee engagement and disengagement upon employees, nonprofit organizations and communities.

FundRaising Success is proud to announce the members of its 2012 Editorial Advisory Board.

In recognition of Ernst & Young’s more than 8,000 Entrepreneur Of The Year Award® winners and the organization’s commitment to support future market leaders everywhere, Ernst & Young LLP has established the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® Alumni Fund to reward top Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) students with college scholarships as well as aid NFTE’s Adopt-a-Class initiative. This fund represents a $300,000 commitment toward matching donations by Ernst & Young LLP partners and Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni over the next three years.

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.