NonProfit Pro

I interview nonprofit donors all the time, young and old, to discover the reasons they give, get involved and spend time with the causes dear to them.

One question in particular generates a different answer each time I ask it: How involved are you with the organizations you support?

Although one might expect the responses to that question to be pretty similar, I've found they generally fall into one of three categories:

Response No. 1: I am fairly involved in the organizations I support and closely follow what they're up to on social media and through their newsletters...

A faith-based nonprofit in Wisconsin announced Tuesday that it has opened its online giving platform to a fundraising campaign for the embattled owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa.

Continue to Give founder Jesse Wellhoefer said a crowdfunding web page for Melissa and Aaron Klein went live May 5, little more than a week after GoFundMe shut down a similar account for the Oregon couple, saying it violated the company's terms of service.

"We want to help people raise money if they have gone through any trying periods where they need to raise money," Wellhoefer told The Oregonian/OregonLive."

In the nonprofit sector, there is a constant need to stand out in order to secure new, young and diverse donors. As technology continues to be a focal point in society, nonprofits are turning to social media to get missions and campaigns in front of the masses.

Twitter and Facebook have long been the most popular social media outlets. However, in April 2014, the use of Snapchat by the World Wildlife Fund for its #LastSelfie campaign proved to be a wake-up call for organizations that limit their social media presence. Snapchat's audience is mostly young women in their teens and...

You've got good cash flow and a typical mix of donors by giving-capacity. You're getting good outcomes. You've got stable financials. Giving moves toward your all-time annual high of $5 million. It's poised to go over. Then it stalls or drops.

With recent CEO turnover at large foundations, there's been much talk about an apparent trend of foundation boards appointing CEOs with some background in philanthropy. We've seen several high-profile internal promotions in the last couple of years to the top job, such as at Ford, Kellogg and MacArthur. We've also seen appointments of those with experience leading other foundations, such as at Barr and The Heinz Endowments.

Three years ago, we looked at the backgrounds of CEOs at the 100 largest foundations in the U.S., as listed by Foundation Center, and noted that the majority...

Last week, David Gunn from Salsa Labs and I presented a webinar hosted by NonProfit PRO. The title was, "Fundraising Acquisition: How to Grow Your List and Engage New Supporters." Several questions were submitted before and during the webinar. Given that if one person asks, there are probably others wondering the same thing, I'll provide my opinion on some of those questions over the next few weeks.

As social service programs scrambled to adjust to abrupt state funding cuts last month, a few received generous private donations to help plug the gap. But they are hardly in the clear.

With larger cuts looming for the 2016 fiscal year, which begins July 1, charities are ramping up advocacy and fundraising—and emphasizing that philanthropy is not enough.

"As generous as our donors are, there's no way they can make up that difference," said Dick Malone, chief executive of YMCA Chicago, referring to a $25,000 donation the nonprofit received last month to partly offset a $55,000 cut...

Blackbaud recently announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31. The company reported total revenue growth of 15.2 percent to $147 million and total subscriptions revenue growth of 24.4 percent to $72.5 million. It also reported non-GAAP organic revenue growth of 8.5 percent.

Early in April, the Washington Post ran an eye-popping article entitled “Tech Titans’ Latest Project: Defy Death.” Evidently Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, has “proclaimed his wish to live forever and [has] donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research.”

“Death has never made any sense to me,” he told his biographer. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”

So maybe we’ll soon be able to fulfill the wish of Woody Allen, who famously said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

The family of the only person to die of Ebola in the United States said a Dallas hospital's donation to combat the disease in Africa fell far short of what they hoped.

Texas Health Resources, the parent company of Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas, the hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan was treated, announced Monday that it donated $125,000 toward a scholarship fund to train doctors and nurses in Duncan's native Liberia, whose weak health care system was further battered by the latest Ebola outbreak.

More than 4,600 people died from Ebola in Liberia, and there were more than...