Doctors Without Borders

What we write is designed to generate strong emotions. And it's why we have to be certain that what we write takes readers into the world we want them to be in.

Doctors Without Borders uses new marketing best practices to extend its reach with "remarketing" and "retargeting" ads.

This summer, three major charity watchdogs launched the "Pledge to End the Overhead Myth" aimed at urging donors to look at more than administrative costs when giving to nonprofits. Now, that talk has turned to action. Charity Navigator, an 11-year-old leading nonprofit watchdog, currently determines the health of a nonprofit by comparing how much money an organization spends on its programs with how much it doles out for overhead. But soon it's going to include another criteria in its rating system: how nonprofits' results stack up against one another.

It took regular judging, two additional polls of the judges and then a special guest judge to get the final decision in 2007 — and it was still just too close to call.

I am so impressed with the power of a monthly giving program. Here’s why: It creates ongoing predictable cash flow. It’s low-cost and returns a high ROI. It takes your current donor base and pulls twice (or more!) as much funding from your wonderful donors. It’s relatively cheap — and painless. It’s how you create reliable, sustainable fundraising cash flow. It creates a wonderful prospect pool for planned gifts.

The 2013 FundRaising Success Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence are right around the corner. With that, here's a look back at our 2007 awards, in which two appeals tied for Package of the Year.

Though misunderstood at first, Doctors Without Borders’ bold decision to stop accepting tsunami-relief donations in 2005 helped revive public trust in nonprofits.

Thanks to a record donation of $10,569,002 to the Ressler-Gertz Foundation, actress Jami Gertz and her husband, Anthony Ressler, top the list of the 30 Most Generous Celebrities compiled by The Giving Back Fund, a nonprofit organization that tracks philanthropic giving worldwide. Although not exactly a mainstream actress, Gertz’s deep-pocketed donation has much to do with the fact that Ressler is the co-founder of Ares Capital, a Los Angeles investment firm that controls more than $40 billion in assets, which has also recently expressed interest in buying the Dodgers.

A hacking movement calling itself Anonymous said yesterday that it stole thousands of credit card numbers and other client information from a U.S. security think tank with customers including the Air Force, defense contractors, police agencies, technology companies and banks. One hacker said the goal of the attack on Stratfor Global Intelligence was to pilfer funds from individuals’ accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed that unauthorized transactions were made using their credit cards.

Atheist bloggers have shown their charitable side by swarming to donate money to Doctors Without Borders, in what turned into the humanitarian agency's biggest online fundraiser.

Doctors Without Borders gets about 4,000 hits on its U.S. website on an average Sunday. Last Sunday that number ballooned to 50,000 as a horde of redditors, subscribers to the social media site reddit.com, thundered across the DWB homepage.

Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000.