News/Stats/Studies

Despite continued economic woes, a majority of the nation's millionaires aren't cinching their purse strings when it comes to charitable giving.

Fifty-nine percent of millionaires agree they feel they have an obligation to give back to their community, according to a survey released Jan. 17 by PNC Wealth Management . The percentage remains the same as it was in 2008.

The study also revealed that 21 percent plan of these wealthy donors plan to increase their giving, while 22 percent of millionaires plan on cutting back the amount they give to charity. Forty-six percent plan no change.

A late surge of contributions in the last weeks of 2011 has made many charities hopeful of continued fundraising growth this year. But the picture is mixed.

A Chronicle of Philanthropy survey of 153 charities found that 55 percent raised more last year than in 2010, while one-third took in less and 12 percent stayed even. What worries many organizations is that nearly 40 percent of nonprofits say contributions have not bounced back to the amount they raised before the recession started in 2007.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation released a new report, “Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color” with support from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. This new report shows how the face of philanthropy is changing rapidly to become as ethnically, culturally and socioeconomically diverse as our country’s population, with some of the most significant growth stemming from identity-based philanthropy — a growing movement to spark philanthropic giving from a community on behalf of a community, where “community” is defined by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

Ted Hart speaks speaks with Rob Mitchell, CEO of Atlas of Giving and Philanthromax, for the official public release of the Atlas of Giving 2011 Annual Giving Data Report and the 2012 Forecast of Giving on his Nonprofit Coach radio show.

FundRaising Success is proud to announce the members of its 2012 Editorial Advisory Board.

To help nonprofit employers better understand their employees’ engagement, Opportunity Knocks, the national nonprofit job board and HR resource, conducted a landmark national study and released the OK Research project, Engaging the Nonprofit Workforce: Mission, Management and Emotion.

This report is the only of its kind on employee engagement specifically focused on the nonprofit sector. The goal of this project is to better understand the ways in which nonprofit employees are engaged and the impact of employee engagement and disengagement upon employees, nonprofit organizations and communities.

In recognition of Ernst & Young’s more than 8,000 Entrepreneur Of The Year Award® winners and the organization’s commitment to support future market leaders everywhere, Ernst & Young LLP has established the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® Alumni Fund to reward top Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) students with college scholarships as well as aid NFTE’s Adopt-a-Class initiative. This fund represents a $300,000 commitment toward matching donations by Ernst & Young LLP partners and Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni over the next three years.

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.

Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone.

And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors by The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project — which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake — finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks.

President Obama appointed a former nonprofit leader, Cecilia Muñoz, to be his top domestic-policy adviser.

Muñoz is an immigration expert who worked for 20 years at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. She left that position in 2009 to become Obama’s director for intergovernmental affairs.

In her new position, Muñoz will oversee the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, the White House unit that has the most contact with nonprofit leaders.