Learning from another’s mistakes is surely less painful than learning from one’s own. Alanna Shaikh, a global-health expert, tries to save readers of her blog from some regrettable on-the-job missteps by describing five mistakes says she made in pursuit of her dream job.

What decisions does she rue?

For starters, not paying adequate attention “to who I worked for.” She says: “I once took a job solely on the basis of the big title, without paying enough attention to the corporate culture or the quality of the project we were implementing.”

She also says she set her career sights too low. “It was once my career goal to be a country director, and once I got that job, at 27, I had no idea what to aim for next,” recalls Ms. Shaikh. “Now my career goals are based on ideas, not titles,” she says. “I want work that has meaning for me, at an organization that values innovation. Beyond...

To educate donors, charities often share stories about people served by their organizations. But Holden Karnofsky writes on the GiveWell blog that those stories rarely provide much insight into whether or not the organizations are doing good work.

“Charities share a small number of stories without being clear about how these stories were selected, which implies to me that charities select the best and most favorable stories they could be telling,” says Mr. Karnofsky.

One “semi-exception,” he says, is the group Interplast’s blog, which “has such a constant flow of stories that I feel it has assisted my understanding of Interplast’s activities.”

Mr. Karnofsky asks: Why aren’t there more charity blogs like this one?

“A charity that was clear, systematic, and transparent before the fact about which videos, pictures, and stories it intended to capture (or that simply posted so...

Google.org, the charitable arm of the technology company, is trying to help track the spread of swine flu in Mexico.

Using a program that tracks Google searches for flu-related topics, the group is providing an “experimental” snapshot of how swine flu is spreading in Mexico, say Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, software engineers at the Mountain View, Calif., company.

“While we would prefer to validate this data and improve its accuracy, we decided to release an early version today so that it might help public-health officials and concerned individuals get an up-to-date picture of the ongoing swine flu outbreak,” they write on Google.org’s blog.

While cases of the new flu are relatively low in the United States, the engineers say they are keeping an eye on flu-related Internet searches for any “spike in activity.”

What are other charitable groups doing in response to swine...

As the recession and the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff force donors to Jewish causes to cut back their giving, they should support small, innovative charities that have been established in recent years, argue two grant makers.

On The Fundermentalist blog, Felicia Herman, executive director of the Natan Fund, in New York, and Dana Raucher, executive director of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, in New York, write, “We’ve been hearing calls for greater consolidation and a return to the more centralized infrastructure of yesteryear. Drawing upon our experience in two foundations that have prioritized innovation in their grant making, we respectfully disagree with this view.”

A recent editorial in The Jerusalem Post, for example, called on Jewish donors to give priority to supporting efforts that help many people and suggested that the number of Jewish charities needed to be...

As the recession dampens giving from private sources and local governments, more charities are looking to the federal stimulus package as a possible source of desperately needed support. But before sticking their hands in the federal cookie jar, grass-roots group should make sure they are not reaching for more than they can chew, writes Ken Goldstein on his Nonprofit Consultant Blog.

Mr. Goldstein urges charities to weigh not only the short-term but the long-term impact on their revenue, and whether they are big enough to handle the project they propose.

“Most of these stimulus programs are not designed for grass-roots organizations; they pretty much require large structures, with already large budgets, and the capacity to take on new projects without much additional overhead,” he write. “Seriously, if you have an annual budget of only $500,000 you should not be looking at a grant...

“As someone with an interest in both the domestic and international dimensions of poverty, I’m struck by the sometimes limited crossover and dialogue between people working on the issue here and those working abroad,” writes Tony Pipa, a consultant to nonprofit groups, on the PhilanTopic blog.

He says it’s painful to hear politicians say there’s no comparison and to watch the leaders of international charities agree.

Mr. Pipa says he’s worried about the growth of “a sort of development protectionism,” where pressure builds to send money to local, rather than international, causes. At the same time, the nonprofit consultant says he’s bothered by a “moral high-handedness” on the part of some people who work in international development. They may sometimes suggest that living in a refugee camp or on less than a dollar a day is fundamentally different than being poor in the United...

As the economic recession continues, a growing number of nonprofit and business leaders say that microfinance efforts will thrive during the downturn.

Microfinance, which includes providing small loans to poor people and other financial services, “has proved not only that the poor are credit-worthy, but that banking institutions serving the poor are investment-worthy,” writes Michael Chu, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, in an opinion article in Forbes magazine.

Mr. Chu, who is also the former chief executive of Accion International, a nonprofit microfinance organization, says he is also optimistic about microfinance’s potential to fight global poverty because it “is tapping into a technological revolution that enables areas with deficient land-phone service to leapfrog ahead to cellphones and broadband. And, as this takes place, both philanthropy and capital markets...

What happens if Sudan’s government allows aid groups back into Darfur, but only if they accept new restrictions on their work?

So asks Michael Kleinman on his Change.org blog about humanitarian relief.

Should aid organizations allow the government to have say over whom they hire and fire? How much they pay? How they design and carry out their programs?

Humanitarian charities have an imperative to help needy people, writes Mr. Kleinman, but they also strive to be neutral and impartial. And it’s pretty difficult to be impartial, he says, if a government demands near-total control over a group’s operations.

To a large extent, of course, the Sudanese government already does demand control over charities’ work in Darfur. Mr. Kleinman points readers to an anonymous aid worker blogging for Reuters Alertnet, who recounts how Sudan has seized all the group’s assets and required that...

What will global warming mean for relief and development groups?

A lot more work, according to a new report from Oxfam.

Each year, nearly 250 million people are affected by natural disasters, Oxfam says. Of those, 98 percent are victims of climate-related disasters, such as droughts or floods, as opposed to earthquakes. By 2015, that number could grow to 375 million people per year.

While those numbers certainly aren’t exact, they do suggest that climate change and environmental mismanagement will leave more people vulnerable to disasters. Environmental changes could also increase the potential for new conflicts over resources, which could also mean that more people will be displaced and need aid, says Oxfam.

So, what can be done to try to reduce climate change’s wallop?

David Waskow, climate-change program director at Oxfam America, writes on the Grist magazine blog:...

It’s time to play guess the mystery donor!

Nine universities have received a collective $45-million in recent weeks from an anonymous philanthropist or philanthropists who stipulated that the recipients not investigate the source of the funds. Purdue University received the largest gift, $8-million, while the smallest contribution, $1.5-million, went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

On The Wealth Report, a Wall Street Journal blog, Robert Frank, a senior writer at the newspaper, parses the clues to decipher the identify of this shadowy giver.

“The fact that the schools are mostly in the South suggests southern roots, so we likely can rule out most of the New York financial crowd and Silicon Valley chiefs,” he writes. “The fact that the identity is so closely guarded suggests a person or group that by nature avoids publicity, so we can cross out most of the...