The New York Times

Six young women in East Stroudsburg Area School District's U.N. Aspire group found themselves part of a real-life "Pay it Forward" after reading the award-winning book "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, a former Times foreign correspondent.

They will be featured in a documentary to air on PBS for their work fundraising on behalf of HEAL Africa, an organization providing medical care to people living in the Congo.

Ten NBC-owned television stations across the nation will team with nonprofit news outlets in an attempt to beef up their enterprise and analytical reporting, the network announced Monday. NBC affiliates in Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia will work with non-commercial outfits in those cities — KPCC public radio, the Chicago Reporter and WHYY public radio and television, respectively — while all of the network's owned-and-operated stations will get early access to investigative reports from the independent, nonprofit newsroom ProPublica.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Association of Fundraising Professionals' National Philanthropy Day in New York to honor some of the fundraising sector's best and brightest — including FundRaising Success' very own editor-in-chief, Margaret Battistelli.

Fundraising consultant Nancy Schwartz shares seven steps to take to motivate your network to take the actions you need

1. Abstraction is deadly. Be concrete and specific.
2. Feature a single individual, rather than a group or - far worse - daunting stats that seem absolutely insurmountable.
3. Focus on a positive story - with specifics - of someone whose life is improved as a result of your organization's work!

Check out recent blog posts from The New York Times and The Nonprofit Quarterly.

ACTION Against Hunger, a nonprofit group that fights malnutrition, is running a public service ad campaign that uses nontraditional, abstract imagery, rather than photos of starving children, to gain support.

Instead of employing photographs of starving children, the ads take a different tack. One shows a line of seven simple paper dolls; the doll in the middle is a stick figure compared with the other six. Copy in this ad says, “3.5 million children die each year from acute malnutrition. Take action. Save a child. ActionAgainstHunger.org.”

While many Americans give generously to help people, many others make donations of a different sort: building museums to house their art collections; underwriting new wings in hospitals or halls named for them at their alma maters; using their money and influence to sway public policy and influence political campaigns; or seeking to solve problems in distant lands rather than in their own backyards.

While charitable giving rose slightly over all in 2010, gifts to organizations that address basic human needs fell 6.6 percent, according to Giving USA.

Veteran fundraising consultant Tom Gaffny provided 10 timeless keys to fundraising success that he's crafted over the past two decades during his session, "The 10 Commandments: 10 Ageless, Irrefutable, Non-Negotiable Keys to Optimizing Your Fundraising Success," at the DMA Nonprofit Federation's 2011 New York Nonprofit Conference held last month.

Wal-Mart has committed $100-million in grants to nonprofit groups that provide job training to women as part of a $20-billion campaign to boost female economic development, according to The New York Times and the Associated Press.

The grants will support development of work and financial skills for hundreds of thousands of women in the United States and abroad, including female employees at Wal-Mart’s suppliers.

If you work at a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization you might want to start reaching out to Apple employees.

Apple Chief Tim Cook sent a note to Apple employees announcing the Cupertino, Calif.-based Mac maker will match its employees contributions to nonprofit organizations up to $10,000 annually.