News/Stats/Studies

The Fundraising Standards Board released its annual report, Confident About Fundraising, June 1, and reports that 18,442 fundraising complaints were received in the U.K. during 2010.

• Direct mail (addressed and unaddressed) accounts for 53 percent of all complaints.
• 'Poor' data and data protection lead to one-sixth of all complaints.
• Street fundraising incurs the highest proportion of complaints against volume at 0.17 percent.

Drug companies helped drive an almost 18 percent increase in corporate philanthropy last year as they gave away medicine to poor Americans still struggling in a rough economy, a survey found on Thursday.

The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy poll of 110 companies found they gave $13 billion in cash and products last year as the United States began to emerge from recession.

While 40 percent of the 110 companies — polled annually for the past four years — boosted their giving last year by more than 10 percent, another 17 percent decreased their giving by more than 10 percent compared to 2009.

The wave of destructive tornadoes throughout the United States this spring has resulted in an outpouring of charitable donations. PGA Charities auctioned a broken Charles Barkley golf club on eBay to raise money for tornado relief. Ellen DeGeneres is auctioning sports memorabilia. Bruno Mars auctioned signed items.

While all donations help the cause, raising funds through eBay auctions can be particularly effective, both for consumers and sellers, according to research by a strategy professor at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis.

The answers as to why people give and h ow do fundraisers get them to give more come down to several essential fundraising truths.

A new Congressional Budget Office study looks into how changes in the way donors calculate their tax deductions for charitable donations would affect giving — and the federal budget.

The study examines options such as offering deductions to those who don’t itemize their tax returns, converting tax deductions for gifts into tax credits, and offering tax breaks only to people who donate a minimum amount of money.

It found, for example, that if all taxpayers had been allowed to claim deductions for charitable contributions in 2006, rather than just those who itemized expenses, charities would've received $2-billion more in gifts.

Blackbaud announced the publication of the 2011 donorCentrics Internet and Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report, which features research on nonprofit online giving in the context of an integrated direct marketing program. The report also includes an extended analysis on the value of multichannel giving.

The report finds that although multichannel giving has become a popular objective of nonprofits as a way to build constituent support, it is not widely practiced. The large majority of donors give through only one channel and use only direct mail as their vehicle for donations.

While most nonprofit leaders view knowledge sharing as a critical means to advance their organizations' missions, many organizations struggle to do it effectively, a new report from the Bridgespan Group finds.

Based on a survey of 116 nonprofits, the report, The Challenges of Organizational Learning, found that most nonprofits struggled to develop clear, measurable goals that connect knowledge sharing to improvements in performance; provided insufficient incentives for individuals and/or teams to participate in organizational learning; and lacked appropriate processes for capturing and sharing learning that fit the way people work.

The average cost of attending a four-year for-profit college surpassed expenses at both U.S. state and private nonprofit universities, a government report found.

Full-time students paid an average of $30,900 annually at the for-profit schools in the 2007-2008 academic year, almost double the $15,600 average paid at public universities, according to U.S. Education Department data released and included in The Condition of Education report. The average cost of attending a private nonprofit college was $26,600, the study said.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), through its ethics committees and board, announced it has modified and updated its Guidelines for Ethical Business Practices. The guidelines now include new provisions for social-media marketers, changes reflecting the passage of new laws and updated material addressing consumers’ recent concerns.

The guidelines provide individuals and organizations involved in the full spectrum of direct-marketing channels with generally accepted principles of conduct.

Endowments fared well last year, achieving investment returns of about 12 percent, but that is far less than what they achieved in 2009, when returns topped 20 percent, according to two studies — one of foundations and the other of charities — released by the Commonfund Institute.

While returns were smaller compared with last year, they were a marked improvement over 2008, when returns on investment portfolios dropped 26 percent.