On the fourth Monday of each month, Rufi Natarajan gathers with friends at a Houston café for a book-club meeting. The conversation begins at 6:30 and typically lasts for two hours — but last month’s discussion is continuing well beyond that.

Ms. Natarajan’s book group is one of more than 430 that are participating in a project by Mercy Corps, the international aid charity, centered on a new book by the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

The book, Half the Sky, argues that many of society’s problems can be alleviated by improving the status of women. Mercy Corps, which recently started a campaign to advance the idea that investing in women can fight global hunger, is using the book to win support for that effort.

The charity issued a challenge to book clubs around the world: Don’t just read the book, take action. Raise money for Mercy Corp’s campaign, recruit other...

Americans seem to be conflicted about the role of social networks as a way to support the causes they care about.

According to a new survey, while nearly eight in 10 people who use new media think the technology can help companies and nonprofit organizations to raise money and awareness for causes, fewer than one in five has made a donation using the tools.

In September Cone, a Boston marketing firm, asked 587 people who use new media a series of questions about how they use the technology to interact with companies and nonprofit organizations.

For the study, the company defined new media as “dialogue among individuals or groups” on social networks, blogs, Twitter, online games, mobile devices, message boards, and sites that allow people to share photos, audio, and video. In some cases, the company also included e-mail and Web sites.

Nearly three quarters of respondents agreed ...

More than 70 percent of churches nationwide raised as much or more money in the first half of this year as they did during the same period in 2008, according to a new study.

The study, based on 1,540 mostly Protestant congregations surveyed in August, found that 37 percent raised more and another 34 percent raised the same amount in the first six months of 2009 as they had in 2008. Less than a third reported a decline in donations.

However, compared with a similar survey conducted in 2008, higher percentages of the churches reported a decrease in donations, while lower percentages reported a rise. “This may indicate that the recession has had a greater impact on congregations’ fund-raising receipts in 2009 compared to 2008,” the researchers wrote in a release summarizing their key findings.

The research was a joint project of the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving at Indiana...

The recession has had a widely varying effect on charities in Europe, said speakers at this week’s International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

Among them:

• Adrian Sargeant, a British researcher at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy summarized recently released data from the United Kingdom’s annual survey by the Charities Aid Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Based on a poll of 3,316 British adults from June 2008 to February of this year, it found that donations had declined by 11.4 percent from the previous year.

• A fund-raising consultant from Greece who helps organizations obtain corporate sponsorships said such payments have declined by 10 percent this year.

• Amanda Seller of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that currency exchange rates have proved to be a “nightmare” for...

The Australian Fred Hollows Foundation won the third annual Gold Star Award for Nonprofit Video Advertising for its fund-raising video Help Fred’s Work Shine On.

The winning video was chosen by a popular vote among nearly 950 attendees from 61 countries who gathered at this week’s International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

The competition is sponsored by Rapp, an international communications and marketing company.

European charities express varying degrees of optimism that donations will rise next year, according to a new survey of nearly 650 nonprofit organizations in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The survey, presented at the 29th International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, was released by the Resource Alliance, the London nonprofit group that organized the conference, and Blackbaud, the Charleston, S.C., software company.

Eighty percent of French charities in the survey — more than in any other nation — said they believe contributions will increase next year.

More than 50 percent of Dutch charities and about 48 percent of Italian organizations said donations will rise in 2010, but only 40 percent of charities in both the U.K. and Germany expected an increase.

If the past is any judge, Americans will not give as much as they did in 2007 until three years after the recession ends, according to a report released by the Giving USA Foundation.

Foundation grant making could take longer to rebound than giving by individuals, researchers at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University write in the latest issue of Giving USA Spotlight.

For clues, they examined the effects on giving of the Great Depression and of recessions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Itemized charitable deductions, when adjusted for inflation, did not recover to pre-1929 levels until 1937, then fell again in 1938 but rebounded the next year. Giving took three or four years to recover after the recession in the 1970s.

But the researchers say there are some signs that giving may rebound more quickly after this recession.

For example, there are more foundations today and...

Seismic cultural changes have fundamentally altered donors’ motivations and will shape their giving decisions in the years ahead, says Alan Clayton, a senior executive at the Good Agency, a London consulting company that specializes in nonprofit communications.

Speaking at the International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, Mr. Clayton offered views in a session entitled “The Changing 21st Century Donor.”

Propelled by a tripling of the world’s population in the last 85 years, the spread of wealth, and the explosion of online communications, society has made a “digital leap,” he said. Since the mid- 1990s, he said, “people hungry for communication and knowledge suddenly got access to communication channels” that are flattening traditional social hierarchies among entire populations.

In the past few decades, Mr. Clayton said, marketing research has shown ...

Efforts to attract big gifts work differently in India than they do in North America said Tony Myers, a Canadian fund-raising consultant, one of the speakers at the 29th annual International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

In an interview, Mr. Myers spoke about some initial findings in his research to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary; his dissertation will compare efforts to seek major gifts by universities in India and Canada that specialize in technology training.

In India, Mr. Myers says, the largest donations in higher education come from alumni who have accumulated wealth in India and from “diaspora” donors who have left the country in pursuit of business opportunities.

Large gifts to Indian institutions typically come from alumni who themselves decide to make a collective donation along with others who graduated in the same year—not in...

Money and education, not geography, influence why people give to charity, says a new study by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

The study, based on data from 10,000 households, found that people who make at least $100,000 a year are more likely to give because of an obligation to help others less fortunate, or a desire to improve the towns and cities in which they live.

Donors who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 are motivated more by a wish to “make the world better,” while those who make less than $50,000 give to “help basic needs” or to “help the poor help themselves.”

People without a college education more often cite a desire to meet basic needs as a reason for giving than do their more-educated peers.

Researchers who conducted the study tested whether people from southern states were motivated by “collectivist” values, such as helping those most like...