Charity Navigator

The bottom line is you must develop a major-gift program to increase fundraising revenue, reduce expenses and increase your ROI.

As a donor to 17 nonprofits in 2013 (and a lapsed donor to others), I decided to keep track of the mail and e-mails I received — as well as the receipts for the year-end donations I mailed on Dec. 20 — and share my observations with you.

Kivi Leroux Miller, president of Nonprofit Marketing Guide and member of the FundRaising Success Editorial Advisory Board; Sarah Durham, president of Big Duck; Alia McKee, principal at Sea Change Strategies; and Laurence Pagnoni, chairman of LAPA Fundraising and author of "The Nonprofit Fundraising Solution," share some last-minute year-end steps to take now.

Here are 10 rules to help you make the most of your special event. 1. Ask if your organization is really ready for events. 2. Set goals. 3. Don't lose sight of your mission and message. 4. Know your audience. 5. Plan for efficiency. 6. Divide and conquer. 7. Don't plan an event on Super Bowl Sunday. 8. Consider the weather. 9. Rely on sponsors and in-kind donations. 10. Let sponsors, volunteers and participants how grateful you are.

Charity Navigator recently invited donors and charities to take part in a poll about their year-end giving plans and expectations for 2013. 274 donors and 22 charities completed the survey. Below is a closer look at the results, which is an update to the 2012 poll and the 2011 more extensive survey (which tabulated responses from 565 donors and 101 charities).

Foundation Source shares key findings from a recent survey of private foundation donors. Issued earlier this month to its 1,100 private foundation clients, the survey collected feedback from donors about their beliefs and perceptions about some of philanthropy’s current “hot-button” issues.

Results were derived from 198 respondents, the majority of whom have private foundations with less than $50 million in assets. Foundations of this size account for 98 percent of the approximately 86,000 private foundations in the U.S.

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.

Here are some insights and opinions gleaned from the opening session of the FS Virtual Conference + Expo, where we talked with the head of a charity watchdog group and an outspoken nonprofit leader.

Granted, I know that a group of eight people does not represent an entire audience segment, but this is not the first time I've interviewed a group of donors and supporters to find that opinions and expectations do not always line up with what we believe within our own walls.

Those who donate to nonprofit organizations naturally want to feel their gifts will be used successfully in a way that will improve society or some part of it, like children, the sick, students, etc. But how can donors evaluate whether or not a charity will ultimately deliver on their promise or mission? In the nonprofit world, there is no common, easily understood measure of success. In fact, having a large positive bottom line may be an indicator that the organization is not doing as much as it could to fulfill its mission.