News/Stats/Studies

Private philanthropy and remittances from the developed to the developing world in 2008 totaled nearly twice the amount of government aid, a new report says.

Private giving and remittances - money sent by immigrants in the U.S. back to their home countries -- totaled $233 billion in 2008, compared to $121 billion in government aid, says the 2010 Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances published by the Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

The vast majority of the nation's nonprofits are engaging in efforts to innovate and measure program effectiveness, a new report from the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project finds.

Based on a survey of more than four hundred nonprofits working in the fields of children and family services, elderly housing and services, community and economic development, and the arts, the report, Nonprofits, Innovation, and Performance Measurement: Separating Fact From Fiction (26 pages, PDF), found that 82 percent of respondents reported implementing an innovative program or service within the past five years. This was particularly true among larger organizations, challenging the common assumption that organizations become less innovative as they grow in size. The report also found that more than two-thirds of respondents reported having at least one innovation in the past two years that they wanted to adopt but were unable to, with 86 percent of those respondents blaming a lack of funding for their inability to do so.

Donations to the nation’s biggest charities are growing rapidly in the first quarter of 2010, compared with the same time in 2009, a sign that many nonprofit groups are making a strong recovery from the fund-raising troubles they suffered last year, according to a new Chronicle survey.

Giving grew by a median of 11 percent in the first three months of 2010, compared with 2009, meaning that donations to half of the charities grew faster while the other half were faring less well.

April 26, 2010, Philanthropy Journal — Contrary to conventional wisdom, donors in the "millennial" generation ages 20 to 40, while connected by technology and social media, are more motivated to give and volunteer as a result of personal engagement and human connections, a new study says.

Many millennials will respond to the chance to connect with a nonprofit's leadership and have a voice in the organization's direction, the study says.

So nonprofits that want to tap those donors should redesign their processes for engaging and asking, and should treat millennial givers more like established donors and volunteers, says the 2010 Millennial Donor Study, a joint project of Achieve and Johnson Grossnickle Associates.

Lynn Edmonds, president, L.W. Robbins Associates
Loyal donors are being conservative but holding on. Since the spring, we have seen a slight increase in giving in some audiences but not all. And in certain cases, we have been able to reactivate lapsed donors by decreasing the gift asks.