Expanding on a key theme of this year’s Independent Sector conference, Diana Aviv, the group’s president, called on nonprofit leaders at all organizations – regardless of size or mission – to take a broad view of their work and their responsibility to help make society better.

“We do not and cannot work in a vacuum,” she told participants at the gathering of charities and grant makers, which drew some about 1,100 attendees in all.

“If our employees and their families can’t afford medical care, it limits their productivity,” she said. “If our transportation infrastructure makes it hard to get to work, it affects people’s performance. If we don’t collectively attend to the harm inflicted on our environment, polluted air and climate change will ultimately damage everyone’s work. And if we...

Several speakers at Independent Sector’s annual meeting offered their insights about how to make wise financial decisions in these trying economic times.

Above all, they said, nonprofit leaders need to develop a sound plan that fits their organizations. Relying on hope or mounting debt to try to ride out this time of shrinking revenue simply won’t work, they said.

“Fundamentally, vulnerable organizations cannot serve vulnerable people,” Dione Alexander, vice president of the Midwest region for the Nonprofit Finance Fund, told conference participants.

“You can only do so much,” she added. “Figure out what it is.”

‘Crash-Test Dummy’

Rick Sperling, founder and chief executive officer of Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, said he feels something like “a...

Reflecting on his first year as head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jeff Raikes told participants Thursday at Independent Sector’s annual meeting in Detroit: “I love my second career.”

He added: “One day I’m learning about malaria and the next day I’m learning about U.S. high school education and the next I’m learning about rural sanitation in Tanzania.”

The former Microsoft executive said he has identified three broad goals for his foundation work as he looks five, 10, 15 years out.

“What I hope is that I can look back on the Gates Foundation and see that we, with our partners, contributed to significant impact on the problems that we were focused in on,” he said.

In addition, Mr. Raikes said he is constantly pushing to improve the internal workings at the foundation...

Detroit

With a mix of urgency, excitement — and at times, frustration — speakers here at the opening session of Independent Sector’s annual meeting called on nonprofit leaders to find new ways to work together in response to the nation’s problems.

This is an “all-hands-on-deck, walk-and-chew-gum kind of moment,” Melody Barnes, President Obama’s domestic policy adviser, told the audience.

She said the administration is committed to finding innovative ways for the federal government to support and promote nonprofit groups.

For example, through the Office of Social Innovation, officials hope to identify successful programs and help them expand to serve more people, she said. “We believe somewhere out there is the next Teach for America or Harlem Children’s Zone, and we want to find it,”...

The National Committee on Planned Giving did it when it changed its name earlier this year to the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning.

Now it may be time for charities to follow suit.

“It’s time to get away from the planned-giving phrase because apparently it is not resonating with people,” Larry Stelter, a marketing consultant in Des Moines, Iowa, told a group of, well, planned-giving officers at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s annual meeting today.

More than six out of 10 Americans in a new study said they were not familiar with the term planned giving, explained pollster J. Ann Selzer, who surveyed 800 people 30 years or older. At the same time, she said, many more people were familiar with specific ways to make planned gifts, such as by leaving money to a charity in a will.

“The jargon of planned...

Robert F. Sharpe, a Memphis fund-raising consultant, came to the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s annual meeting Friday to assure planned-giving officers frustrated by the economy that history does, in fact, repeat itself.

Armed with financial and tax data going back more than 100 years, and old newspaper accounts of donations, Mr. Sharpe demonstrated the ups and down — and ups — of philanthropy over time. Perhaps most heartening: His research shows that by 1937, charitable giving had returned to pre-Depression levels, and had continued to grow from there.

“What I was trying to do is give people confidence that we’ve been through it before and will get through it again,” Mr. Sharpe said in an interview.

He told his audience that during the Depression, like now, outright major gifts had dropped at many...

More charities are actively promoting bequests and other planned gifts now than 10 years ago and they are making their pitch to even younger donors, according to research presented today at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s annual meeting.

In 1999, Michael Kateman, executive director of development at Columbia College, in Columbia, Mo., asked the country’s top 40 fund-raising organizations, based on The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400, about how they encourage people to make planned gifts. This year, Mr. Kateman’s colleague at the college, Brendon Steenbergen, did the same thing.

Comparing the groups, the researchers found that 91 percent were actively promoting planned gifts, up from 82 percent 10 years ago. And while organizations in both years said the bulk of their marketing efforts were designed to reach potential donors age...

By 2020, America will have far more millionaires than today and they will be motivated by even greater tax incentives to give to charity, a leading expert on planned giving told an audience of fund raisers at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s national conference today.

Charles Schultz, chief executive of Crescendo Interactive, a planned-giving software and consulting company, in Camarillo, Calif., said every charity today has at least 700 potential supporters with estates worth at least $1-million. By 2020, he said, that number will rise to 1,000.

And, he said, at the same time wealth will have grown, taxes will have gone up, too –with rates up to 50 percent, he predicted, plus additional taxes to pay for Social Security and Medicare . As a result, many donors may want to give to charity as a way to save money on their taxes.

For many of the planned-giving officials in the audience at the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning’s national conference, in Washington, Dan Pallotta’s message may have seemed personal.

Mr. Pallotta, a former fund raiser and author of Uncharitable, said that donors unfairly judge charities by the share of money they spend on programs versus administration and fund raising.

“There’s a notion that overhead somehow steals from the cause,” Mr. Pallotta said.

After the presentation, Brian Overcast, a planned-giving officer at the University of Tampa, let out a deep sigh.

“We are that overhead he is talking about,” Mr. Overcast said. “This was a reminder that too many people think that we are the ones ‘eating up’ the resources instead of the ones asking for, generating, the...

While philanthropy is a difficult endeavor to speak broadly about, there are several ways that donors can be highly effective in their giving, Thomas J. Tierney, a nonprofit consultant, told members of the Philanthropy Roundtable during its annual meeting last week.

Mr. Tierney, who is chairman of the Bridgespan Group, in Boston, said his organization is working on an article about the common traits of successful foundations that will likely be published in the November issue of The Harvard Business Review.

The shared qualities include:

Be clear about the mission.

Mr. Tierney suggested that donors state in simple terms what their goals are and how they will measure them. He encouraged foundations to require grant recipients do the same, helping charities define their geographic focus, the population they want to assist, a...