Covenant House

Announcing the 2011 Fundraising Professionals of the Year Rising Stars.

The Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF) New York division awarded grants to eight not-for-profit organizations at its year 2010 benefit dinner.

It chose organizations that focus on education, children at risk, the environment, and disaster preparedness.

The grant recipients are Boys & Girls Clubs of America; Boys Hope Girls Hope of New York; Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation; Community Mainstreaming Associates; Covenant House of New Jersey; Hudson River Sloop Clearwater; Starlight Children’s Foundation NY•NJ•CT; and World Cares Center.

Charity Navigator, perhaps the largest online source for evaluating nonprofit groups, recently embarked on an overhaul to offer a wider, more nuanced array of information to donors who are deciding which organizations they might help.

Its reinvention coincides with the growing need of nonprofits to provide more — and broader — information about themselves and their impact in an effort to wean donors off a reliance on administrative-cost ratios and other financial metrics that have traditionally been used to assess charities.

A dollar a month may not seem like much, but it can go a long way to improving literacy skills in communities across New Jersey while also giving people the opportunity to succeed. Thanks to the generosity of Verizon customers in New Jersey who participated in the company's Check Into Literacy program, 51 nonprofit organizations throughout the state received $250,000 in grants to support literacy programs.

A growing number of charities across the USA are taking a nickel-and-dime approach to encourage donations by mail, despite some evidence that including coins in solicitations turns off potential donors.