News/Stats/Studies

As many charities suffered a decline of 10 percent or more in annual giving, donations to religious organizations fared relatively well from 2007 to 2009, according to a new study released on Tuesday by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

Charitable contributions declined by just 0.1 percent among 1,148 religious organizations whose financial statements were examined by the council. Sharper decreases have been found in other surveys

Gifts to charities from wealthy Americans plummeted by an average of nearly 35 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to a new study released on the giving habits of the rich.

Affluent donors who had donated an average of more than $83,000 in 2007 gave only about $54,000 on average two years later during the heart of the economic downturn, according to the study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

BoardSource, the premier voice in nonprofit governance, released the Nonprofit Governance Index 2010 at the annual BoardSource Leadership Forum in San Francisco.

According to the Index, 71 percent of chief executives believe racial/ethnic diversity on their board has value to their organization's mission, and 55 percent consider it to be a priority of their organization.  However, just 28 percent of the chief executives surveyed reported being satisfied with the degree of racial/ethnic diversity on their board.

According to the recently released 2010 Global State of the Nonprofit Industry survey by Blackbaud, four global fundraising trends emerged from the data. Here are those four trends shared in the press release.

More and more Americans have stopped donating to charities because of the bad economy, and many do not feel any personal responsibility to be involved with efforts to make the world a better place, a new survey has found.

The percentage of people who said they are not making any charitable donations doubled to 12 percent this year, up from 6 percent in 2009, according to an online survey by Harris Interactive of 2,620 adults conducted in September.

The country's top think tank said private-run enterprises were the major driving force for China's charity donations in 2009.

Private-run enterprises donated around 5.43 billion yuan ($812 million) in 2009, which accounted for about 41.35 percent of total donations from enterprises in 2009, according to an annual report on China's philanthropy development released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on Tuesday.

A new US study finds that Direct Mail is a more important driver to online giving than online communications.

More than twice as many online donors say they were prompted to give an online gift in response to a direct mail appeal compared to when they received an e-appeal, according to a national US study Dunham+Company recently conducted through research firm Campbell Rinker.

The survey says that in a surprising finding, 14% said that a direct mail letter prompted them to give online versus only 6% who said an email prompted their online gift.

Seven in ten Americans trust nonprofit organizations more than they trust the government or businesses to solve society’s problems, according to a new poll. But nearly nine out of ten Americans say that nonprofit groups face financial problems of their own and that getting sufficient money is one of the biggest concerns for charities.

The survey, sponsored by American Express, was conducted online over two days last month. More than 1,000 adults responded to the five-question poll.

Hawaii’s people and businesses are as generous as ever, despite the economic slump.

But how local people and businesses give is rapidly changing and that transformation has some nonprofit leaders heartened, while others are worried. Optimists welcome the decay of what they saw as paternalistic philanthropy. These optimists see the rise of a new philanthropy in which individual donors are more empowered, and nonprofit success is rewarded with recognition and more donations.

Agencies that serve individuals with developmental disabilities continue to bring millions of dollars into the region’s economy, with four organizations achieving combined revenues of nearly $280 million last year.

Those four organizations, led by the $109.3 million People Inc., are among 248 organizations with combined revenues of $1.94 billion, according to the Business First 2010 Million Dollar Nonprofits research report.