On his personal blog, Sasha Dichter, director of business development for the Acumen Fund, made an unusual request to friends, family, and other people last week: donate to his charity for his 36th birthday. His goal was to raise $720 either through direct gifts to Acumen or through Facebook Causes.

Five days later, he exceeded his target amount, garnering $968.72.

Mr. Dichter writes that his effort produced some unexpected results, like “seeing what does and doesn’t work with direct fund-raising appeals; being touched and moved by old friends, readers, and family who chose to participate in ways large and small.”

For example, in a blog item before he reached his goal, he explained how his original pitch HAD failed to draw a connection between Acumen’s work and the concerns of the potential donors.

What do you think? Have other fund raisers used their personal blogs to make...

As America continues to struggle with a sour economy, fund raisers are likely to be having a difficult time raising money from corporations. A new report says that about half of the companies responding to a recent survey are decreasing their giving.

Despite the news, there may be other ways for charities to work with companies. The businesses say they plan to step up other charitable efforts, like encouraging their employees to volunteer, says the report from LBG Research Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Stamford, Conn.

According to the survey, which polled 100 corporations or their grant-making funds nationwide, 52 percent of companies and 47 percent of corporate foundations say they are reducing their giving in 2009.

As dollars dwindle, the corporate grant makers say they are receiving more requests for money from charities. Seventy-two percent of the...

Charley Miller has a twofold mission for his new business: Raise money for charity and reduce the stigma around online dating.

The coupling of these two very different objectives led to GiveandDate.com, a Web site Mr. Miller and three others created for socially conscious singles. The dating site, in beta form since late May, will be officially unveiled in six weeks or so.

Here’s how it will work: Users will purchase monthly subscriptions for $12, half of which will go to charity and the other half to GiveandDate.com.

Money also will go to charity, even with the beta version, each time someone contacts one of the “featured users” on the Web site. It costs $1 to send a message to those users, 50 cents of which goes to charity.

Mr. Miller, 31, got the idea for the site as a graduate student in interactive game design at New York University. He hopes it might appeal to those squeamish ...

Charities worldwide are invited to compete in a new competition to find the best online fund-raising video.

The Gold Star Award for Nonprofit Video Advertising will be presented by the Resource Alliance, organizers of an international conference on fund raising held in the Netherlands each year, and RAPP, a brand-marketing consulting firm. Both organizations are based in London.

Videos must be submitted by September 25. Entries must be under three minutes long, be uploaded onto YouTube, and have premiered in the previous 18 months. More rules and an online entry form are available on the contest Web site.

The winning video will be selected by a live audience vote at the International Fundraising Conference in October. In years past, the gathering has drawn more than 900 participants from some 50 countries.

Finalists will receive a discount on this year’s conference fee, while...

Charities are trying to restore donor confidence in Muslim organizations and encourage giving this Ramadan, which began on Friday.

Muslim Advocates, a nonprofit legal and civic-education group in San Francisco, announced today that three charities had completed an accreditation program it started last year with the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.

The charities are Islamic Networks Group, a San Francisco charity that promotes cross-cultural understanding; UMMA Community Clinic, started by American-Muslim doctors in Los Angeles; and Inner-City Muslim Action Network, which fights poverty on the South Side of Chicago.

Some donors have been hesitant to give to Muslim charities because of intensified government scrutiny and increased regulations following the 2001 terrorist attacks. A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that some Muslim donors gave ...

The recession appears to be cutting significantly into giving at the peak of the fund-raising pyramid.

Only two individuals have announced gifts of $100-million or more in 2009, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of America’s top donors.

Both of those contributions — William P. Clements Jr.‘s gift to the Southwestern Medical Foundation in Dallas and J. Ronald Terwilliger’s donation to Habitat for Humanity International in Americus, Ga. — were for $100-million.

By comparison, The Chronicle documented 21 gifts of $100-million or more in 2008. And 10 of those gifts exceeded $200-million.

The largest was the late Leona M. Helmsley’s controversial $5.2-billion bequest.

While it is likely that some other megagifts will be announced before the calendar hits December 31, it now appears unlikely that 2009 will produce nearly as many contributions of $100-million as...

An online matching-grant challenge brought in $3.75-million for Detroit-area cultural groups — but not without technical difficulties and some angry donors, reports the Detroit Free Press.

The Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan put up $1-million for Tuesday’s Community Foundation Challenge, during which it agreed to match every dollar donated through its Web site to roughly 75 local arts groups with 50 cents from the foundation.

For weeks, participating groups had been using e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media sites to let supporters know about the matching challenge, but their outreach efforts proved to be too successful. The large number of donors trying to make gifts overwhelmed the Web site. Some people spent hours trying unsuccessfully to make a gift, while others had their credit cards charged multiple times.

Amy LaBarge, of Dearborn, Mich., tried to...

A survey conducted by the City University of London takes a look at why British donors give to arts and culture.

Conducted in behalf of Arts & Business, a group in London that encourages philanthropy to the arts, the survey finds that 90 percent of donors to the arts in the United Kingdom give relatively small amounts (less than $1,000).

Donors tend to be frequent visitors to the institutions they support. Ninety percent of people in the study said they attended three or more events at the organizations they gave to in the past two years, while many said they had visited “a lot more.”

The vast majority said that having to purchase tickets to see events at the organizations they supported did not affect their charitable contributions.

Ninety-six percent contributed to other causes, according to the survey, which was based on interviews with 51 donors and information from...

Grant seekers should make a point of calling foundations and other grant makers — before submitting a grant proposal, advises Arlene Spencer, a grant-proposal writer in her blog, The Grant Plant.

First, however, grant seekers should make a point of finding out if the grant maker accepts calls, she says. If so, they should call the fund and think of it as “simply a phone call to initiate the application process,” she writes.

After briefly describing their plan for spending the money, grant seekers should ask whether there are any preferences or other things the grant maker looks for that are not listed in the organization’s giving guidelines, says Ms. Spencer. She also suggests asking whether there are any staff or board members who have a personal interest in the grant seeker’s work.

Ms. Spencer also recommends that grant seekers prepare for such calls by jotting down several...

The recession is keeping the fund raisers who conduct research on potential donors busy.

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, researchers have had to go back and redo the majority of the profiles they had compiled before the economy went into a tailspin last fall, says Susan Paresky, a senior vice president at the institute.

Profiles are based on information about potential donors, such as the value of their homes, their stock holdings, and their charitable giving, all of which are likely to be down, says Ms. Paresky.

“If someone is rated as having $10-million in assets, and maybe being a $1-million prospect, now all of a sudden, they don’t have $10-million in assets,” she says. “They might have half of that.”

In that case, she says, fund raisers might decide to wait until the economy rebounds and the potential donor’s wealth increases to ask for a gift, or they...