The Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation's recent involvement in the Pepsi Refresh Contest has drawn criticism from supporters of an Illinois elementary school who claim Kanzius gathered votes in a way that defied the contest's rules.

After voting closes at midnight tonight, Pepsi will choose two top contestants that come up with the best ideas on how to improve their neighborhoods, towns, or cities, and award them each a $250,000 grant.

Benld Elementary School was in the top two slots for about a month. But now at the top is the Erie cancer charity Kanzius, which came from its ranking at 100th place to land in first, creating suspicion among competitors.

Mark Cunningham, a Benld parent, said in an article by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that some people gathering votes for Kanzius have asked supporters to set up 100 or more e-mail addresses and to vote from each of them daily. He noted the...

As part of The Christian Science Monitor's conversion from a daily printed newspaper to a weekly online one, the publication is also working to wean itself from its publisher -- the Church of Christ, Scientist -- over the next five years. And the lessons it is learning may have value for other nonprofit organizations seeking to evolve in a rapidly changing landscape.

During an interview with Jim Barnett, a former newspaper reporter, John Yemma, the Monitor's editor, says the first order of business has to be to move toward sustainability. He adds that when newsrooms rely too heavily on their parent organizations for subsidies, the news operation is put in jeopardy. 

The Monitor received $12.6-million in subsidies this past fiscal year and is projecting a subsidy of $10.7-million in the upcoming fiscal year. The publication's revenue is also generated from subscriptions, advertising,...

• On her Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog, Saundra Schimmelpfennig writes about the problem of donating goods overseas, and about the "1 Million Shirts" campaign. She has gathered blog posts on the impact of the debate about the campaign going viral on the Web, as well as posts from professional aid workers who are weighing in on what they think about the campaign and about donating goods for relief efforts. Ms. Schimmelpfennig has worked on tsunami recovery efforts in Thailand.

• On her blog, Katya Andresen, chief operating officer at Network for Good, discusses a recent study by M+R that offers suggestions on how to deploy and evaluate online campaigns.

• Charities owe it to their supporters to think very carefully about what personal information they collect from donors, how long they keep the data, and how best to protect it, Jake Marcinko, information security...

• "Brand gone bust!" is how Nancy Schwartz, a marketing expert, describes the fallout from Susan G. Komen for the Cure's partnership with Kentucky Fried Chicken. She says Komen messed up by betraying supporters' trust and by remaining too quiet in the face of the controversy.

• Mike Burns, a nonprofit consultant, writes on his blog that New York's proposal to centralize competitive contracts and grants for nonprofit groups is an opportunity for municipalities to set standards as financiers of nonprofit groups and to become, along with nonprofit boards, more focused on results.
  

• Writing in Frogloop, Randy Paynter, founder of Care2, a social-networking site about nonprofit causes, criticizes an online post equating online petitions with "slacktivism"—a negative term indicating that they are less worthy than other forms of activism. Mr. Paynter offers a lengthy defense of ...

If the Council on Foundations wants its annual meeting be a must-attend event, it needs to "blow up the conference model and start experimenting with new approaches," writes Sean Stannard-Stockton.

Mr. Stannard-Stockton was among a group of conference bloggers assembled by Kris Putnam-Walkerly, a consultant who writes the blog Philanthropy 411.

A donor adviser and Chronicle contributor, Mr. Stannard-Stockton praised the council's emphasis on social media but had several pieces of advice for how the membership group could improve its annual gathering.

They include the addition of moderated debates of specific topics between nonprofit leaders; 20-minute presentations on important topics from energetic and inspiring people; three-hour working groups on tough topics that the nonprofit field needs to confront; and 15-minute presentations by grantees nominated by council members.

Lee...

• Starbucks uses its "passion panel," a group of its best customers who answer questions online in return for special perks, to help develop new products. Charities could adopt the practice by asking questions of a group of donors and using the responses to improve their fund raising, Tom Belford, a veteran fund raiser, suggests on The Agitator.

• Thinking of joining the board of a nonprofit group? Alice Korngold, a consultant who works with charities, says regardless of how passionate you may be about an organization's mission, it is important to make sure you and the board are a good match. To help determine compatibility, she offers tips on the 10 things you should know before you join a nonprofit board. Her views appear on Fast Company magazine's FC Expert Blog.

• On the blog, Neuromarketing, Roger Dooley, a consultant, discusses an experiment in Edinburgh, Scotland...

• To be effective, discussions about nonprofit collaboration need to move beyond "communicating and coordinating or creating harmony" to a nuts-and-bolts conversation about the people and resources that groups are willing to contribute to a joint effort, John Brothers, a management consultant, writes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog.

• Beth Kanter, who writes a blog about social media, summarizes several recent reports that discuss how organizations can measure the impact of their social-media efforts.

• Lawrence Harmon, of the Boston Globe, reviews the new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, in which the author and historian Diane Ravitch criticizes the education philanthropy of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other so-called venture capitalists as thoughtless experimentation.

• On The New York Times's DealBook blog, the...

• Applying competitive business practices to charitable operations makes sense, but many nonprofit officials and donors still fail to recognize this, says Dan Elitzer, a management consultant writing on the Full Contact Philanthropy blog. He uses Dan Pallotta’s book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential as a jumping off point for his discussion.

• Robert Egger, executive director of D.C. Central Kitchen, a food bank in Washington, writes on his blog about his visit to Denver, where he spoke to members of the Young Nonprofit Professional Network. He lists 10 tips he suggested to the group’s members about ways to change and “ripen” the nonprofit sector.

• On his Gifthub blog, Phil Cubeta, a wealth adviser, writes about ways wealth advisers and nonprofit groups can form partnerships with what he calls “board-level wealth.”

• On Bread for the World's ...

Mobile text giving, if used improperly, could result in the loss of committed donors for anonymous, one-time, low-dollar gifts, Jeff Brooks, a nonprofit consultant, writes in a column for this month's FundRaising Success magazine.

The American Red Cross raised around $30-million in text-message gifts in the aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, prompting a surge of nonprofit groups, large and small, to quickly begin text-to-give fund-raising efforts.

Mr. Brooks says that, although text giving has its benefits in that it is a quick way to raise funds, those funds are being given by young people who are not yet donors and unlikely to make future contributions.

"If you pushed just one person to give via mobile who otherwise would have given by any other medium, you lost a rather large bunch of money," says Mr. Brooks. "I have to wonder how many of those 300,000-some text donations that went to...

• The chief executive of Boys & Girls Clubs of America will probably need to take a pay cut if the charity hopes to see the $425-million federal appropriation that has been held up by four senators who have criticized Roxanne Spillett's nearly $1-million compensation package, Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, writes in a Washington Post blog, On Leadership.

• Allison Fine, a social-media expert and a Chronicle contributor, questions whether nonprofit groups have been missing an opportunity to use donations as a measure of civic involvement. She says that many experts wrongly assume that writing a check is too passive to be considered a measure of strong civic ties.

• "In fund raising, nonprofit groups should focus on what they can give their donors rather than what they can extract from them," writes Katya Andresen, chief operating...