News/Stats/Studies

Fidelity Charitable, the nation's largest donor-advised fund program, reported that despite continued economic challenges, American donors surveyed this month report they remain committed to charitable giving, planning ahead for it and giving even where there is no expectation or incentive to do so. In addition, the majority of American donors (72 percent) plan to maintain or increase their level of charitable giving this year compared to last year. This number is up from 63 percent in 2010.

With the U.S. economy stuck on pause, or perhaps headed for a double-dip recession, nonprofits must plan for the possibility that public funding may never fully rebound and even may continue to shrink, a new report says.

And with the rise in unemployment, which historically has correlated to a drop in individual giving, and with flagging consumer confidence, "it is unlikely that philanthropy will be able to shoulder the decline in public finance," says the report "The Public Finance Crisis: Can Philanthropy Shoulder the Burden," by Changing Our World.

When Ellen West, director of global communications and public affairs at Google, accompanied a friend to a 2010 fundraising event at Ghetto Film School in New York, she decided to do much more than write a check. At Ms. West’s urging, Google later gave the nonprofit, which teaches New York City teenagers to become filmmakers and storytellers, a $500,000 donation.

In spite of the economy, two-thirds of America’s leading nonprofits engaged in cause marketing expect to form more business alliances in 2012, a survey by the Cause Marketing Forum reveals.

Of the nine past nonprofit winners of CMF’s highest honor, the Cause Marketing Golden Halo Award, 67 percent expect to be involved in more cause marketing campaigns in 2012, the CMF survey revealed. Twenty-two percent expect to field the same number of corporate partner programs in 2012 that they did this year.

The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks says it will be scaling back operations so that it can focus on raising money. For months, WikiLeaks has been prevented from receiving donations through Visa, MasterCard and other firms that process financial transactions. Those firms severed their relations with the organization after American officials described its release of classified documents as damaging to U.S. national security interests.

The Pew Research Center has announced a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the changing role of public libraries in the digital age.

Awarded through the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life project, the initiative seeks to determine the ways in which public library patrons' needs and expectations are shifting with the proliferation of e-books, mobile connectivity, and digital content.

Fundraising industry reports can help any nonprofit shape its strategy and sharpen its fundraising efforts. It's a matter of sorting through data and finding the nuggets that can benefit your professional learning.

Blackbaud announced the release of the 2011 Global State of the Nonprofit Industry report, featuring survey results from 2200 international respondents covering nonprofit general operations, fundraising, technology and Internet usage, and impact reporting and board performance. The results were also released today at the International Fundraising Congress (IFC) in the Netherlands.

A key finding from the report is there is a growing sense of optimism in the global nonprofit sector regarding growth in staffing and earned and charitable income in 2012.

Good journalism is not enough to sustain nonprofit online news. That is one of the key findings of a new Knight Foundation study, "Getting Local," that profiled a number of local nonprofits online.
 
Those nonprofits have to act more like for-profit businesses, the study suggests, including experimenting with different revenue models and being more entrepreneurial.

Almost all Americans made an effort to affect positive social change last year, and most say it is important to them personally to be socially engaged, a new study says.

More than nine in 10 respondents say they have taken action to create social change within the last year, and over three-quarters say such involvement is personally meaningful, according to an online survey of more than 2,100 adults conducted by Walden University and Harris Interactive.