News/Stats/Studies

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation — which operates Wikipedia and related websites solely on donations — raked in a record-breaking $20 million during its just-concluded 2011-12 fundraising campaign. The San Francisco-based foundation has been conducting annual fundraisers since 2003.

The just-finished fundraising campaign collected money from more than 1 million donors around the world.

According to comScore, Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property worldwide, attracting more than 470 million unique visitors every month.

Meet the 2012 FundRaising Success Editorial Advisors.

Nancy Schwartz shares three free Getting Attention guides published this year — on messaging that resonates, marketing wisdom from your peers and books that can lift and energize you.

• Nonprofit Tagline Database & Report — Get inspired by 4,800+ nonprofit taglines and the guide to making yours great.
• The Nonprofit Marketing Wisdom Guide — Use these 127 lessons learned to strengthen your org’s marketing impact!
• The Book that Changed My Life: 129 book recommendations from nonprofit leaders around the world.

Americans gave about $290 billion to charity last year. That was $10 billion more than the amount of charitable giving in 2009. The estimates are from the Giving USA Foundation and its research partner, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

The largest share of charitable giving goes to religious groups. Giving USA says the received 35 percent of all donations in 2010. Schools and other education-related organizations were second on the list. They received an estimated 14 percent of all charitable giving last year.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that private donors have committed $18 million to the 23 highest-rated projects in the 2011 Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund competition, ensuring that they have met the i3 matching requirement and qualifying them to receive $150 million from the i3 program.

Earlier this fall, the U.S. Department of Education announced 23 applicants as the finalists to receive part of the $150 million available in fiscal 2011 i3 funding.

The United States now ranks the highest in terms of charity in a massive global survey that put the nation in fifth place in 2010, according to CAFAmerica, a member organization of the United Kingdom based Charities Aid Foundation International Network of Offices, providing charitable financial services to individuals, global corporations, charities, and foundations.

According to those surveyed, two out of three Americans said they donated money to charity (65 percent), more than two out of five volunteered their time (43 percent) and roughly three out of four helped a stranger (73 percent).

After collecting data over the past year, the National Philanthropic Trust released its 2011 Donor-Advised Fund Report.
 
One of the highlights in this year’s report includes a marked increase in contributions to donor-advised funds. National charities received nearly $4 billion, which was an increase of 42.3% from the previous year and more than half of contributions to all sponsoring charities.

With less than two weeks left before the holiday giving seasons ends, many charities have already raised more compared with 2010 — and some are even expecting a windfall, a new Chronicle of Philanthropy poll finds.

Fifty-four percent told The Chronicle that they raised more money in November and the first part of December than they had at this point last year. One out of five of the 152 organizations in the survey said contributions are outpacing last year’s donations by 20 percent or more.

Tax-exempt organizations with January and February filing due dates will have until March 30, 2012, to file their annual returns, the Internal Revenue Service announced.

The IRS is granting this extension of time to file because the part of the e-file system that processes electronically filed returns of tax-exempt organizations will be off-line during January and February. The agency stressed that the rest of the e-file system will continue to operate normally and urged all individuals and businesses to choose the accuracy, speed and convenience of electronic filing.

Colleges and universities in the U.S. earned an average of 19.8 percent on their endowments in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, continuing a post-recession rebound that began in fiscal 2010, preliminary data from 284 schools show.

But that strong posting was not enough to push endowments to their pre-recession levels and barely lifted five- and 10-year average returns above the average effective spending rate of 4.3 percent, says the report from Communfund Institute and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.