• Tim Ogden, editor in chief of the online journal Philanthropy Action raises some questions about Kiva.org, the Web site that connects donors with entrepreneurs in poor countries. Meanwhile, Matt Flannery, the co-founder of Kiva, responds to charges that his group is not clear about how its services work. His response appears on the blog for the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.

• To facilitate a broader discussion about the issues that affect them, several young nonprofit blog writers have formed the Nonprofit Millennial Bloggers Alliance.

• The government should look to rebuild and strengthen a network of tax-exempt health insurers and nonprofit health centers as a way to solve the nation’s health-care problems, writes John E. Girouard in Forbes magazine.

• For too long, symphonies and other cultural institutions in San Diego and elsewhere have...

• Todd Cohen, writing for the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, in Raleigh, N.C., examines why fund raisers should emphasize personal meetings with potential donors on Inside Philanthropy.

• Richard Walden, president of the relief group Operation USA, discusses how the economic crisis has cut into support for recent disasters in the Asia-Pacific region on the Huffington Post.

• Microfinance — efforts to provide small loans to entrepreneurs in impoverished countries — has been somewhat over hyped in its ability to fight poverty, says Josh Ruxin, director of RwandaWorks, on the video blog Big Think.

• While natural disasters often spark an outpouring of generosity, if more people provided donations to the American Red Cross and other aid groups to mitigate the effect of earthquakes and such, more lives might be saved, says Sandy Stonesifer in her Slate column about charitable giving.

• To counter “founder’s syndrome,” when a person starts a charity but won’t step aside when it needs new management, the nonprofit world should develop serial entrepreneurs, people who are appreciated for their ability to start businesses and move on, writes Caryn Capriccioso, a nonprofit consultant, on the InsideGood blog.

• As natural disasters in Asia attract global attention, fund raising to assist the famine and water shortage in East Africa has run into problems, says Jane Beesley, a communications officer with Oxfam U.K., on the organization’s blog.

• Praising a new ad campaign that promotes aid efforts for women and girls in impoverished countries, Nicholas D. Kristof, a New York Times columnist, wonders how well charitable groups are using social media to market their causes. The article appears on his newspaper blog.

• Jeff Brooks, the former author of the...

• The Case Foundation kicks off its second annual America’s Giving Challenge today. From now until November 6, participants will compete to see who can raise the largest number of donations for their favorite charity using the Causes application on Facebook. Daily and overall cash awards total $170,000.

• Nonprofit groups that oppose a reduction in the charitable deduction for wealthy Americans as a way to pay for a health-care overhaul “lack the vision to see the big picture,” argues Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, in Minneapolis, on the New Voices of Philanthropy blog.

• David Roodman writes on his Center for Global Development blog that Kiva.org, the Web site that connects donors with entrepreneurs in poor countries, doesn’t work the way many people think it does. Mr. Roodman, a research fellow with the think tank, says that few ...

• While social media are becoming more popular, Jewish organizations and other charities need to craft a communications strategy before using Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, writes Gail Hyman, a charity consultant, on the eJewish Philanthropy blog.

• Nonprofit “dashboards” — documents that summarize the financial health of an organization and whether it is meeting its charitable goals — are valuable tools as long as charities and foundations think creatively about them and acknowledge their limitations, writes Anne Marie Burgoyne, portfolio director for the Draper Richards Foundation, in San Francisco. Her views appear on a Good magazine blog.

• Since the X Prize Foundation awarded $10-million to stimulate human spaceflight five years ago, philanthropic prizes have grown dramatically in number, writes Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, on his organization’s blog. He says X Prize plans to offer new prizes in health care, tuberculosis diagnosis, and ocean conservation.

• Home loans brokered by nonprofit groups contributed to the nation’s housing crisis, write Jeff Horwitz and Dave Jamieson in the Huffington Post. Mr. Horwitz and Mr. Jamieson, both freelance writers, say that arrangements made by charities — by which home builders provide donations to nonprofit groups that are then given to low-income people as a down payment — resulted in unusually high default rates.

• Patrick Corvington, an official at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who is President Obama’s pick to lead the Corporation for...

Dan Gilmore, who runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, questions what he calls the “princely” salaries of the top two editors leading ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that was established more than a year ago.

The item points to a report that Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor in chief, earned $570,000 last year. Stephen Engelberg, the managing editor, made $325,000.

“They can spin it any way they want, but they can’t really justify this kind of pay for people at a relatively small nonprofit,” Mr. Gilmore writes. “In the end, this will hurt ProPublica, not help.”

How do their salaries compare with other nonprofit executives? Read The Chronicle of Philanthropy ‘s recent report on executive compensation at nonprofit organizations to find out more.

• The Nonprofit Quarterly’s Rick Cohen provides an overview of how the health-care overhaul could affect nonprofit groups on his blog.

• Mitch Nauffts, publisher of the Foundation Center’s Philanthropy News Digest, asks on the Philantopic blog whether the current period of financial strain is the right time for charities to be thinking about better ways to measure their performance.

• Also on the Philantopic blog, Adele Waugman of the United Nations Foundation discusses recent natural disasters in the Pacific and how philanthropy is responding.

• How do you determine when it makes sense to spend a significant chunk of money on a new fund-raising approach? Tom Belford, a fund raiser, has some answers on his blog The Agitator.

• Jack Shafer, a writer for Slate, discusses the downsides of nonprofit journalism in his regular column about the press. He explores, among other arguments, one made by a writer for the East Bay Express newspaper in San Francisco. The writer, Robert Gamm, says that if nonprofit journalism efforts like the Bay Area News Project, which will rely on student interns, cause for-profit ventures to shrink or disappear, Americans will end up relying on “inexperienced, unpaid students” for their news.

• Sean Stannard-Stockton, a philanthropy consultant, explains on his Tactical Philanthropy blog the differences between what some in the nonprofit world refer to as Philanthropy 1.0 — a top-down,...