How can you capitalize on a sporting event like the World Cup to focus global attention on your cause?

That was the question posed to business students one day last week as part of the fourth annual Sports MBA Case Competition, held in partnership with the nonprofit Malaria No More. The students, from institutions such as the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Oxford University, in England, were given 24 hours to come up with a way to use the 2010 FIFA World Cup, in South Africa, to raise awareness about malaria.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Business team took the top prize for their idea of a partnership with youth soccer in the United States to raise money for malaria nets in Africa. They envisioned a “Soccer Without a Net Day,” an event in which all youth soccer teams in the U.S. would play a game without a net in each goal.

Students from...

Ken Gordon, editor of nonprofit JBooks.com, did not exactly take to the experience of writing his first appeal letter. “It was excruciating,” he says.

Other words he uses to describe the task of asking readers of his charity’s books for money? “Humiliating,” “horrible,” and “painful.”

But from pain comes, well, inspiration. While mired in the December appeal-letter doldrums, Mr. Gordon got an idea for how to poke fun at the process of writing solicitations, and himself, in dramatic style.

He enlisted the help of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (one of JBooks.com’s authors), another friend who was involved with improv, and a former producer at WGBH who’d worked with JBooks.com’s parent organization Jewish Family and Life Media.

Together, they produced a video (“The Spiel, or Send Money”) that Mr. Gordon hopes will raise funds for his charity — and save him from writing too...

In a sign that some pockets of the economy and the U.S. workforce have been relatively unaffected by the recession, a new report has found that federal employees in the Washington metropolitan area gave nearly $62.6-milllion to charities last year, an increase of about 3 percent over 2007.

More than 156,000 civil, military, and postal employees gave an average gift of $399, mostly through automatic deductions from their paychecks, to the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area.

The number of Washington-area donors who participated in the 2008 annual campaign grew by 9,000 federal employees; those donors accounted for more than 44 percent of federal employees in the region.

The Washington branch of the federal drive typically raises more than any other domestic or overseas unit representing government employees who give to the campaign, which has been held since 19...

Charitable gifts of $1-million or more from individual donors fell by 33 percent in the last half of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007, according to a new analysis of big gifts by researchers at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy.

A total of 333 gifts of at least $1-million were made in final six months of last year, down from a record of 495 gifts of that size in the same months of 2007. It was the largest half-year drop in individual gifts of $1-million or more since the center began tracking donations of that size in 2001, another recessionary year. Such gfits declined by 35 percent in 2001.

“I was surprised that the decrease was not larger” last year, said Melissa Brown, the center’s associate director of research who analyzed the data.

The drop in individual gifts of $1-million or more, she noted, lags the start of the recession, not showing up as a...

Despite the bite of the recession, most evangelical churches and other religious organizations came close to meeting or exceeding their fund-raising goals in the final quarter of 2008, according to newly released survey of more than 300 such organizations.

The survey found that 72 percent of the evangelical groups met, surpassed, or came within 10 percent of meeting their fund-raising goals in the critical year-end period. The remaining 28 percent fell short of their final-quarter goals by more than 10 percent.

The survey was conducted last month with members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, which seeks to improve the financial reporting and other practices of Christian organizations. The council represents 1,360 churches and other Christian groups, such as Jews for Jesus and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; their combined annual revenues total $18....

The acclaimed film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” which won an Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, has spawned a campaign to raise money and visibility for diseases that afflict the world’s poor — and can be easily treated.

The Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit group that develops drugs for poor people in developing nations, ran a full-page advertisement in today’s New York Times that directs people to the group’s Web site.

The ad uses the “it is written” line from the movie to entice people to click on a link to the organization’s Web site and donate online. The charity focuses its efforts on fighting what it calls “neglected diseases,” meaning illnesses that are treated and prevented in wealthier nations.

What do you think? Is using a popular film a good way for a nonprofit group to raise money for its cause?

A letter from a donor posted at Charity Navigator Blog echoes a commonly heard complaint from direct-mail recipients: Stop the incessant and costly mailings.

Don’t send gifts of T-shirts and address labels or a barrage of multiple appeals, pleads the unnamed donor.

“I give to several charities and it really makes me uncomfortable that they are wasting my money on sending me items that I do not want,” the donor writes. Particularly obnoxious are the appeals that include coins or dollar bills, continues the writer, who says charities should give donors an “opt-out” option.

As for the multiple mailings, the donor recommends that charities stop at three. After that, the donor writes, “if there’s no response, then they should take you off the list.”

What is your organization’s direct-mail policy for how...

Judy Moyer-Spencer started giving to the Wounded Warrior Project a few years ago, after hearing from her son, an Iraq war veteran, about some of the challenges his friends faced in returning to civilian life. But, like most Americans, Ms. Moyer-Spencer’s budget has been tighter recently, and she hasn’t been able to contribute as much.

So she was pleased to learn this fall about a new way for her to donate: through a Web site she uses to play word games. The “casual gaming” site, Iwon.com, this fall started to allow people to compete to give money to charities of their choice.

Ms. Moyer-Spencer and more than 2,000 others who have signed up as part of Wounded Warrior Project’s online “team” have so far directed $32,000 to the group. They have beaten several hundred teams competing in behalf of other nonprofit groups, winning the company’s top prize ($10,000) three months in a row...

The Humane Society has raised more than $377,000 so far with its second annual online pet photo contest, which ends March 6. The Spay Day contest raises money to pay for pet-sterilization services across the country.

The competition allows pet owners to download a photo of their animal onto the contest Web site in one of two categories. The first, the ‘Judged” category, costs nothing to enter; winners are selected by a panel of judges.

But with the second so-called “Fundraisers” category, pet owners enter their companion animal in the contest by making an online donation of $5 or more. Then they solicit friends and family members to cast votes, each costing $1. A minimum $5 is required from each voter, and the pet receiving the most votes wins.

The Humane Society this year used a tool on Facebook, the social networking site, to make it easy for contest entrants to seek votes. ...

Facebook’s recent revisions to its online user agreement to assert ownership of all content posted by users to the social networking site—even after it has been deleted—has prompted some discussion of whether the Web site’s policies might compromise the anonymity of donors who give to nonprofit groups through Facebook’s “Causes” pages.

“I am not a Facebook aficionado,” admitted Jack B. Siegel, a Chicago lawyer and author of the Charity Governance blog, who raised the question on a nonprofit discussion list. But, he says, “if the language is plain and says that Facebook has an ownership interest, whether they intend to enforce that or not today is irrelevant. You don’t know what will happen a year from now, or if Facebook is sold to another company.”

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it would rescind the changes to its terms of ...