News/Stats/Studies

Big companies are most likely to give to charity or undertake other social-responsibility efforts because they want to fight national or global problems, according to a new study by Weber Shandwick, a public-relations firm in New York.

But business-oriented goals, such as building consumer loyalty, were the primary drivers for many corporations.

Forty-one percent of American millionaires consider charity one of their top three spending priorities, a far bigger share than wealthy people in 19 other countries, according to a new survey.

The survey of 2,000 millionaires by Barclays Wealth, in London, found substantial differences among the wealthy depending on where they live.  For example, only 20 percent of Australian millionaires considered charity one of the top three spending priorities.

Generous impulses often are described in fundraising appeals, conversation and greeting cards as coming "from the heart." In fact, the origins of giving probably are deep in the brain's circuitry.

The University of Notre Dame is leading a new research initiative that will merge economic, sociological, neurological and psychological studies to explain why some people give and some don't.

Local nonprofit organizations are feeling the heavy burden of a flailing economy, reporting another year of falling revenues.

But organizations refuse to sit idle, hatching plans for the new year to grow their fundraising efforts and stay afloat to serve as best they can. They say the problem isn’t the donors —they are feeling the financial pinch just as much as the nonprofits are — it’s simply the amount of money that is being raised.

American charities that provide health care to poor people overseas have been hit hard by the recession, according to a study released Tuesday.

Cash gifts from private donors for nonprofits’ global health work dropped by 33 percent from 2008 to 2010, according to the study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Corporate donations of medicines and equipment dropped by 59 percent in that time, although the decrease was due in part to a new method the researchers used to measure the value of products.

Convio estimates that US giving during the 2010 holiday season to nonprofit organizations will be more than $48 billion across all giving channels --including online, direct mail and  donation at checkout – as more than 174 million adult Americans plan to give money to charity between Thanksgiving and year-end. Online giving alone is estimated to account for more than $6 billion, an increase of more than 30 percent from this same period in 2009.

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.

Fundraisers are noticing slight increases in donations, but not enough to keep pace with higher demand for charitable services in today's economic environment.

U.S. nonprofit organizations are seeing a slight increase in donations — a sign they hope is the beginning of economic recovery — but the turnaround hasn’t been strong enough to keep up with higher demand for charitable services, a national report released Monday said. About a third of America’s charities reported an increase in donations during the first nine months of 2010, and they said they expect more good news in the fourth quarter, according to data collected by a coalition called the Nonprofit Research Collaborative.

If 2010 seemed like a bad year for your favorite charity, just wait for 2011.

Already struggling this year, cash-strapped nonprofits face the prospect of continued high demand with even more cuts next year, especially for those organizations heavily reliant on state and local government funding. And those signs of a slow recovery for the rest of the economy probably won't come in time to buoy the charitable sector in 2011.