Jeremy Gregg, director of development at Central Dallas Ministries, has helped almost double his social-service group’s revenue since 2005 — an accomplishment that at times brings him to the verge of crying.

“I will confess, I have occasionally left my office in tears because of our ‘success,’” he writes on his blog, the Raiser’s Razor.

Mr. Gregg must collect more gifts each year because of the large number of needy people in the Dallas area; therefore the revenue growth is “no achievement,” he writes. “This is a testament to our failure as a community.”

“Every gift I secure for my organization helps us to feed more families, but these gifts alone will never solve the problems faced by my neighbors who rely on Central Dallas Ministries for support,” he writes.

“Our success can only be measured in our ability to put ourselves out of business.”

What do you think? How can fund ...

The social-networking Web site Facebook is playing a greater role in philanthropic efforts — and the company may be set to do more with its charity work.

On Monday, a nonprofit group, Take All Types, announced an effort to organize Facebook members to donate blood. And in May Facebook created Project Agape, a service that will enable its users to highlight charities and raise money for them.

What’s more, last week the company announced it had hired Sheryl Sandberg, formerly Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, as its chief operating officer. At Google, Ms. Sandberg played a big role in setting up the Internet search company’s philanthropic arm.

In a press statement, Facebook said Ms. Sandberg will be in charge of helping it “scale its operations and expand its presence globally” and noted among her accomplishments that she had helped shape Google’s...

Jim Wales, the founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is fighting accusations by a former employee that he misused funds from the nonprofit group that oversees the Web site.

On his personal blog, All’s Wool that Ends Wool, the former Wikipedia employee, Danny Wool, wrote that Mr. Wales often asked the Wikimedia Foundation to pay for personal expenses.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Mr. Wales and the foundation’s executive director, Sue Gardner, denied any wrongdoing.

“Jimmy has never been reimbursed by the foundation for personal expenses, nor has he ever asked to be,” Ms. Gardner said in a statement. “The expenses he incurs on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation are modest and in no way unseemly. Jimmy has consistently put the foundation’s interests ahead of his own, and has erred on the side of personally paying for his own Wikimedia-related expenditures,...

While many people are cheering Bill Gates’s embrace of international aid, others warn that there could be drawbacks to his approach.

David Dickson, director of the Science and Development Network, a Web site that writes about efforts to assist poor nations, says that Mr. Gates is too focused on technology’s ability to solve poverty.

“The reasons to be cautious include the ease with which a belief in the powers of science-based technology can easily fall victim to the mythology of the ‘technical fix’ — ignoring the extent to which problems have deep-rooted social causes, such as the inequitable distribution of resources, that technology is unable to address,” he writes.

Kevin Dean, a graduate student in international relations, agrees with Mr. Dickson’s concerns but wonders if they “are just shouting to stop the sun from coming up.”

And there may be benefits to Mr. Gates’s...

As members of Congress question how Harvard, Yale, and other wealthy universities are using their assets, Mike Burns, a nonprofit consultant, has a suggestion for how they can spend their billions of dollars in reserves.

On his blog, Nonprofit Board Crisis, Mr. Burns suggests Ivy League universities provide zero-interest loans to support historically black colleges and other schools that primarily serve minorities. “After all, the Ivy Leagues weren’t really that available to give equal opportunities to the black and Latino communities over the years,” he writes.

Yet not everyone agrees that lawmakers should be scrutinizing the higher-education institutions.

“Even if Harvard or Princeton are public fixtures, they remain private institutions, and, for better or worse, under our legal system they can charge whatever the market will bear,” writes Nathaniel Peters on a blog by First...

Bill Gates’s call for a new form of capitalism to assist the world’s poor drew plenty of attention on nonprofit and political blogs.

Larry Kudlow, economics editor at National Review, chides Mr. Gates and his fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett as sounding like Karl Marx.

“Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn’t noticed, it was a miserable failure,” Mr. Kudlow writes on the magazine’s blog, The Corner.

Bill Gates, a closet socialist?

Not so, says Blake Hounshell, Web editor at Foreign Policy magazine, on the publication’s blog, Passport.

Mr. Hounshell points out that the software tycoon said he still firmly believes capitalism is the best economic system. And he writes that Mr. Gates’s ideas are not brand new but that he adopted them from several scholars and antipoverty advocates.

One...

In its first list of the 40 richest people in Hong Kong, Forbes magazine reports that personal wealth continues to increase in the Chinese territory. The growth will probably mean more money for universities and other nonprofit groups in the region and around the world.

For example, the assets of Li Ka-Shing, Asia’s wealthiest man, rose from $23-billion to $32-billion. Mr. Li has pledged to distribute one-third of his fortune to charitable causes, such as higher education, medical programs, and palliative care.

Read The Chronicle’s article on giving in Hong Kong and China.

What do you think? How can American fund raisers tap into Hong Kong philanthropy?

Oxfam is trying to clear its name after a human-rights organization and several blogs questioned its relationship with a controversial Jewish philanthropist, Lev Leviev. Spokespeople for Oxfam Great Britain and Oxfam America have said the organization has not received contributions from Mr. Leviev, despite press reports.

According to magazine articles published last year, Mr. Leviev, an Israeli billionaire, has donated to Oxfam’s humanitarian efforts.

After the articles appeared, Adalah-NY, a human-rights group in New York, wrote a letter asking Oxfam not to accept money from Mr. Leviev.

Adalah and other advocacy groups have protested Mr. Leviev’s diamond business for supporting illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, among other things. A spokesperson for Mr. Leviev told The New York Post last month that the protests were “inaccurate.”

Once Oxfam cleared up the confusion,...

Two fund-raising experts are discussing how to make pitches “relevant” to the lives of donors.

Jeff Brooks, creative director at Merkle, a fund-raising consulting company, writes that there are seven elements that make an offer connect with a potential contributor.

They include asking him or her to help with a specific problem, showing how a gift would help solve that problem, and explaining why the money is needed urgently.

“Relevance is the secret to fund raising. That’s all. If your message fits in with your donor’s life, the chance that she’ll give is very high,” he writes on his Donor Power blog.

Jeremy Gregg, director of development for the Central Dallas Ministries, praises Mr. Brooks’ observations.

On his blog, The Raiser’s Razor, he offers his thoughts on the seven elements and suggests that fund raisers should not forget to add a human touch.

“Don’t be afraid to...

As a growing number of charities are creating blogs, is it time they try Twitter or other so-called micro-blog services?

Twitter allows users to write frequent messages of less than 140 characters and send them to people by e-mail, cell-phone text messages, or via other electronic communications.

Christian Kreutz, a communications specialist at a German antipoverty group, writes on his blog Crisscrossed that there are pluses and minuses to the service for charities.

He writes that the short length of the messages is less than ideal for discussing complex topics. “What could be explained in 140 characters? Is that seriously enough for a campaign or advocacy?” he asks.

But he adds that Twitter may be useful for organizing protests or sending messages about breaking news related to a charity’s mission.

What do you think? Could Twitter be a help or a hindrance to nonprofit groups?...