Charity Navigator

At the 2014 Bridge Conference, Wounded Warrior Project's Steve Nardizzi took on the charity watchdogs and media, saying nonprofits should manage to their missions, not to misguided assumptions about overhead ratios.

No matter your take on them, donor-advised funds are a funding source fundraisers of all sizes and missions cannot afford to ignore.

Blackbaud unveiled its Most Generous Online Cities report, which analyzed more than $822 million in online giving to 265 of the largest cities in America, with Seattle topping the list.

Excerpted from his new book, "The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving," Jeff Brooks shares four ways to improve your fundraising ask: 1. Have credentials to show donors. 2. Let donors speak for you. 3. Be open about your fundraising and governance. 4. Ignore your lawyers.

St. Louis' nonprofit sector is the tops in performance in the nation, according to a new study by charity evaluator Charity Navigator. The study reports on the performance — both financial health and accountability/transparency — of the 30 largest philanthropic marketplaces in America. In its study, Charity Navigator compared the median performance and size of the largest nonprofits in the 30 largest metropolitan markets in the U.S.

For at least a decade, movers and shakers in philanthropy have been trying to persuade donors to behave more like data-driven investors. But the so-called effective-philanthropy movement suffered a significant setback last month when the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a prominent champion of the idea, announced that it was ending an eight-year, $12 million effort to get donors to rely as much on their heads as their hearts.

A strong stock market helped boost the assets last year of big foundations to their highest levels since the Great Recession gutted endowments six years ago, according to a new Chronicle of Philanthropy survey. Yet grant makers still aren’t as well off as they were before the downturn, and that continues to put a damper on their giving. What it’s not doing, though: crimping ambitious new grant-making efforts to deal with vexing problems.

I recently viewed the DVD of a panel discussion, "Charity Watchdogs, Donor Perceptions and the Overhead Myth," a program held Jan. 30 by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (D.C.). Since I haven't read much about the content of this discussion, I want to share with you comments from the panelists that I found interesting, insightful and, yes, at times, challenging. Don't expect to agree with them all, but "listen" and then decide what else you can do today to give your donors confidence that you are worthy of their support.

Will we ever be rid of the idea that nonprofits can somehow achieve a nirvana where very little (or no) money goes to boring things like salaries, technology, infrastructure, fundraising, leadership development, planning, R&D? I wonder if we could gain more traction by talking less about the negatives of an overhead myth and talking more about the positives of nonprofit organization building.

Crowdfunding raises questions. If young people give to these single-issue causes, is there less likelihood they will donate to the legacy charities such as the Red Cross, United Way and Save the Children? Does the individual and direct nature of crowdfunding act as a spur or a drain to such longtime nonprofits?