News/Stats/Studies

Over the past decade, U.S. foundation support explicitly benefiting Native Americans declined from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent of total foundation giving. According to Foundation Funding for Native American Issues and Peoples, released by Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP) and the Foundation Center, total grant dollars targeting Native Americans dropped 30.8 percent in the latest year, compared to a 12.4 percent overall downturn in foundation giving.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit can still generate earned income. And plenty do. The National Center for Charitable Statistics estimates that nearly 70 percent of the $1.4 trillion generated by nonprofits in 2008 came from the sale of goods and services.

Generating income frees organizations from total dependence on philanthropic dollars. At the very least, the income is a safety net; it also means more money to invest in the mission. Unlike many grants, earned income is unrestricted and can be used however the organization chooses.

The Royal British Legion, RSA and Comic Relief are the top three U.K.-based charities with the largest “social media presence” — in terms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube engagement — according to a major briefing, Social Media League Table.

By specific social media “platform”, the Royal British Legion heads the Facebook rankings, with 1,875,926 ‘likes’; the Tate heads the Twitter rankings, with 304,987 ‘followers’; and the RSA heads the YouTube rankings, with 79,341 ‘subscribers’.

As cities and towns attempt to patch budget holes caused by shrinking state support and tax revenues, several municipalities have started a new round of campaigns targeting property-tax-exempt colleges and other nonprofits.

It is not a new idea for cities to try to seek “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT, agreements with nonprofits to help shoulder local costs. But the frequency and fervor with which municipalities have been proposing such plans recently could indicate a looming town-gown debate at a time when budgets for both are being squeezed.

Donors in the U.S. ages 20 to 35 prefer to give to organizations they trust, are motivated to give by a compelling mission or cause, and prefer to give online, a new study says.

Among nearly 3,000 "Millennial"-generation donors that age who responded to a survey by Achieve and Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates, 93 percent gave to nonprofits in 2010, with 10 percent giving $1,000 or more.

In the wake of a slumping economy, a government-wide charitable giving campaign fell just short last year of matching records set in 2009. The Combined Federal Campaign, considered the largest workplace giving campaign in the world, collected $281.5 million in 2010 from federal civilian, military and postal employees, down from the record $282.6 million collected in 2009.

Last year’s CFC included 209 giving regions across the United States and overseas, benefiting about 25,000 charities, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

The Associated Press is expanding its project to distribute content from nonprofit news organizations to newspapers through delivery technology that will make it easier for newspapers to find and use the material.

Newspapers, for the first time, will be able to request that feeds of nonprofit materials be delivered directly into their content management systems through AP's Webfeeds software. The project will begin testing with nonprofit organizations in California and will use Internet delivery feeds that have been put in place at newspapers over the past year.

American donors gave a lot less to charity in the first two years of the recession than they did in 2007, dropping their donations a total of about 20 percent from 2008 through the end of 2009, new data from the Internal Revenue Service suggest.

The decline is far sharper than experts had expected—and much more substantial than in previous downturns.

The new numbers from the IRS underscore just how big a financial hole nonprofits must climb out of as the still-fragile economy recovers.

Though religious congregations are slowly recovering from the recession, many groups are still feeling the pain, according to a new study. The study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research combined the results of 26 polls taken to show the effects of the downturn and analyzed data from more than 11,000 congregations.

It found that more than 40 percent of congregations reported that their finances stabilized in 2010. About 10 percent reported increases in revenue last year and 22 percent saw a drop in revenue during the recession but have since recovered.

Nearly two-thirds of nonprofits say they pay some type of local or state tax, user fee, or other compensation to local governments to finance services and benefits supported by tax-paying entities, according to a new study.

The survey was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, in Baltimore, as part of the Listening Post Project, a research effort to examine issues facing tax-exempt groups.