News/Stats/Studies

Donations to victims of the worst oil spill in U.S. history pale in comparison to other recent disasters, a development some philanthropy experts attribute to the blame factor.

While there are no up-to-date authoritative figures on the total amount of corporate and individual donations to Gulf victims and restoration projects, observers say it's clear that giving is significantly less than the charitable response to disasters like the Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the Sept. 11 attacks and the Asian tsunami.

The economy continues to cause the biggest donors to cut back on giving, a new study finds. The study of nearly 7,000 donors found a split between typical donors — those whose smallest gift was $81 — and more affluent donors, whose smallest gift was $135.

Only 8 percent of typical donors said they plan to give less in 2010, down from 17.5 percent last year. But among affluent donors, 11 percent said they'll give less this year overall and 17 percent of the top 10 percent of donors who gave the most money to charity.

The average FY2009 total return on investable assets for 85 nonprofit health care organizations participating in the 2010 Commonfund Benchmarks Study of Healthcare Organizations was 18.8 percent (net of fees), a dramatic improvement over the -21.2 percent return reported for FY2008. The FY2009 return was the highest in the eight years the study has been conducted and came in the year following the poorest return of the eight Studies.

Among 76 organizations responding to a survey of the 200 largest U.S. charities based on a listed compiled annually by Forbes magazine, 65 percent are blogging and 42 percent report social media are very important to their fundraising strategy.

The share of charities using some form of social media, known as Web 2.0, is up 8 percentage points and 22 percentage points, respectively, from similar studies in 2008 and 2007.

Eighty-seven percent of financial advisers expect income taxes will rise for most of their clients over the next 12 to 18 months, and one in four expect their clients will increase their charitable giving to offset tax hikes, a new survey says.

Another 48 percent of advisers expect their clients to maintain their level of giving, despite ongoing uncertainty about the financial markets and an overall decline in charitable giving in 2009, says the 2010 Advice & Giving survey by the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.

After a year of steep drops in private giving to higher education, college fund raisers expect the amount of money raised in the fiscal year that just ended on most campuses to be 4.3 percent higher than the year before, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's Fundraising Index. The index, an online survey of senior fund raisers at the council's 2,000 member institutions, had a 7.5-percent response rate. The index was released on Monday, during the association's annual conference here for top fund raisers.

At nonprofit groups in the New York metropolitan area, more chief executive officers than other senior staff members took pay cuts in the 2010 fiscal year, according to a new survey of compensation trends by the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York. However, austerity wasn’t universal for top leaders, and signs point to bigger paychecks ahead for more of them in 2011.

Thirty-one percent of organizations reported a pay increase to their top executives in 2010 compared with the previous fiscal year, and 42 percent expected another increase next year.

Nearly 40 percent of American charities say they have too few staff members to effectively deliver their programs or services, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

The survey also found that about one out of every three nonprofit groups had cut staff size in recent months and that many more had taken a variety of steps, including increasing employee workloads, that usually strain a work force.

Blackbaud announced the launch of The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving, an online fundraising index that reports revenue trends of 1,787 nonprofit organizations, representing $399 million in 12-month online revenue on a monthly basis. The index reports that online revenue increased by 23 percent for the three months ending May 2010 as compared to the same period in 2009.

Foundations, donors, and others involved in giving away money need to change quickly to keep up with the world around them, argues a new report by the Monitor Institute.