The public-radio station in New York City faced a difficult decision last week following news of the assassination of the Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto.

The station, WNYC, had planned to broadcast a day-long pledge drive to encourage listeners to donate money before the end of the year.

With a major news story breaking, the station ran the risk of alienating some of its listeners by running its pledge drive. At the same time, it ran the risk of losing important revenue by postponing the campaign.

What did WNYC decide?

It went ahead with the pledge drive.

Now, it is fielding criticism from some of its listeners through its Web site.

“The WNYC I used to know was the one that suspended a pledge drive when Leonard Bernstein passed away,” Evan Robinson wrote on the station’s Web site. “The management at that time recognized the importance of the event to the culture, the city a...

Mark Petersen is a fan of the Canadian magazine Comment, particularly because it runs a regular feature called “50 things”.

In it, contributors write funny and sometimes inspiring lists of 50 things they love about a particular topic, such as politics or city living.

Mr. Petersen, who works for the Bridgeway Foundation — a family foundation in Cambridge, Ontario — recently used the magazine’s feature as inspiration for his own list of 50 things that he has loved about philanthropy during the past year.

The list is published on his blog, Open Hands.

Among the items on Mr. Petersen’s list:

What are some of the things you’ve loved about philanthropy during the past year? Click on the comments link below this post to share your thoughts.

How do fund raisers stand out from the crowd during the holiday giving crush?

Katya Andresen, vice president of marketing at Network for Good, a Bethesda, Md., organization that encourages online giving, offers two important suggestions on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog.

And both suggestions have to do with clutter:

“1. Not adding to the clutter. Don’t crowd people with your message. Don’t stuff in a lot of inconsequential detail that gets in the way of your point. Don’t be yet another appeal jamming their inbox. Show great economy in expressing why someone should care and what you can achieve together.”

“2. Clearing out the clutter. Help people remember what’s more important than the details distracting them from what matters most. Don’t criticize their clutter. But cut through it with the amazing stories that remind us of what it is to be human.”

Do you agree?...

The Salvation Army is getting a flurry of extra exposure today for its holiday fund-raising efforts.

And it can thank an unlikely source for all the free attention.

The Dallas Cowboys have long placed an oversized version of the Salvation Army’s red holiday kettle on its sideline to remind fans of the organization’s annual holiday campaign.

The kettle is usually seen briefly in the background during telecasts of Cowboys’ games, providing subtle advertising for the charity.

But in Sunday’s NFL game between the Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles, the huge kettle became the center of the action.

While running out of bounds after attempting to chase down an incomplete pass, Reggie Brown, the Eagles’s wide receiver, decided to jump into the kettle.

A replay of Mr. Brown’s impromptu move was shown repeatedly during Fox Sports’ telecast of the game — and showed up across the...

A new fund-raising effort that links credit-card purchases to donations to the United Way of America is being hailed by some as “one of the simplest giving programs ever created.”

But Jack Siegel, a Chicago lawyer and watchdog, says the effort is a poor idea that sends the wrong message to donors and could actually hurt the United Way’s future fund-raising efforts.

Through the new effort, called Pennies for Change, people who use cards from the 13 banks in the program can opt to be charged an additional penny for every transaction they make. The banks and credit unions will pass the donations to United Way of America every month.

Mr. Siegel, writing on the blog Charity Governance, predicts that the program will become a popular one for charities and he expects other organizations to attempt to create similar partnerships with banks and credit-card companies.

But Mr. Siegel does...

Holden Karnofsky isn’t afraid to challenge nonprofit groups and foundations through The GiveWell Blog.

On Tuesday, the 26-year-old former who worked in the hedge-fund world is offering Chronicle of Philanthropy readers the opportunity to challenge him.

Mr. Karnofsky is the founder of GiveWell, an organization devoted to evaluating charities, as well as the Clear Fund — a philanthropy he calls “the world’s first transparent grant maker” — to demonstrate how he and his colleagues think foundations should operate.

The Clear Fund, now in the process of awarding about $140,000 in grants, asks its grant applicants to provide hard evidence that they are effective. It publishes its assessment of that evidence on the GiveWell Web site, whether it decides the group is worthy of support or not.

On Tuesday at noon Eastern time, Mr. Karnofsky will answer readers’ questions during a live...

What has 10,231 members, consumes 349,760 kilowatts of electricity daily, and has generated $669,000 in retail sales this year?

The answer is the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which puts these somewhat obscure facts (and many others, too) on its Web site on a page called the IMA Dashboard.

And the museum is earning praise from Jeff Brooks, creative director at Merkle Direct, on his Donor Power Blog.

Mr. Brooks writes that the museum is sending a great message to potential donors and patrons by openly providing statistical information about its operations.

“The very fact that they’re sharing it makes people respect the museum more,” Mr. Brooks writes. “And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?”

Do most nonprofit organizations do enough to share key information with the public? Is it risky to provide statistics ...

Crissy Weeks relies on good volunteers.

Without them, her organization, the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, wouldn’t operate.

But Ms. Weeks has a major complaint about the state of volunteering — namely that too many people do not have the courtesy of showing up to help after they have made a commitment.

Ms. Weeks, in a guest post for the blog Tactical Philanthropy, says that flaky volunteers cause problems for her organization and make her look bad.

She writes of one volunteer who told her that she didn’t show up for a scheduled event because she was not sure if she was needed.

“How confusing is: be at this address at 10am. This same ‘volunteer; then proceeded to tell me that I was not coordinating things very well,” Ms. Weeks writes. “Good Lord! People! Butter my butt and call me a biscuit. I do not know what else to do but pick you up and take you to things myself.”...

Do people outside of philanthropy understand what a family foundation does?

Elizabeth R. Miller, a program associate at the Overbrook Foundation in New York, writes on Future Leaders in Philanthropy that, for most, the answer to that question is no.

In fact, most of Ms. Miller’s friends and family simply assume that she spends most of her time handing out grant money to deserving charities.

But, in truth, her job is much more complex.

“[I] have ‘chores’ whether it’s drafting minutes from committee or board meetings, responding to letters of inquiry that the foundation is unable to fund, cleaning out grant files or setting up for meetings; I search for missing pieces of grant proposals; I even make trips downtown to the flower district to pick up orchids before our quarterly board meetings,” Ms. Miller writes.

And it’s that diversity of functions — mixed with the fact that she ...

Lawmakers such as Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa are joining philanthropists such as the billionaire investor Warren Buffett in asking whether endowment-rich charities should be required to spend a portion of their reserves.

They argue that institutions such as Harvard University are stashing away billions of dollars tax-free — money that they could be using to help fulfill their missions.

But Jack Siegel, a Chicago lawyer, writes on his blog that the debate is nothing more than an effort by government to mask its own inefficiency in solving society’s problems.

“The call for minimum payouts/spending rates is really a call to tax the endowments of charitable institutions,” Mr. Siegel writes on Charity Governance. “Unable for whatever reason to raise taxes to meet the public’s unabated demand for services, government officials and those who support government solutions to problems...