The Council on Foundations is making a mistake by pushing a proposal to encourage foundations to give more to socially oriented businesses, writes Kelly Kleiman, a lawyer and fund-raising consultant who writes The Nonprofiteer.

The Council on Foundations wants grant makers to be able to count their support for a certain kind of business — low-profit limited liability companies, dubbed L3Cs — as part of the federally required 5 percent of assets they must give for charitable purposes each year. Such companies earn small profits while conducting a business with a charitable purpose, the council notes on its Web site.

Last year a group of lawyers and nonprofit experts proposed a similar idea in a Worth magazine article.

But Ms. Kleiman, of NFP Consulting, in Chicago, says allowing spending to count toward the payout requirement is not the way to “increase philanthropic capital.”...

More than 500 bloggers from around the world have signed up to participate in a 24-hour Blogathon to raise money for charity starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday.

The participants will raise money for a charity of their choice, promising donors they will update their blogs every 30 minutes during the 24-hour period. (Update: The pledges totaled more than $120,000, according to the Blogathon site.)

The annual event was started in 2001 by Cat Connor, a blogger in Portland, Ore. That year, more than 100 bloggers raised more than $20,000 for 77 charities, according to the Blogathon’s Web site. Participation has gone up and down since then. This year, more than $70,000 has been pledged so far, it says.

The rules for bloggers are strict. “Don’t use an update script or other trick so you can go to bed and still blog,” the site warns. “You must be awake and participating in...

Ever wondered what happens at a philanthropy’s board meetings? Now you can eavesdrop on one.

The Clear Fund, a new project that bills itself as the “world’s first transparent grant maker,” has just posted a recording of a June meeting of its board.

“I was late to the meeting and out of breath, and I say many stupid things in the meeting, and those materials were for our use rather than public disclosure, but we’re publishing it all anyway,” says Holden Karnofsky, a co-founder of GiveWell, a group that analyzes the effectiveness of charities for donors and operates the Clear Fund.

“We’ll see what horrible things come of showing such weakness,” he writes on The GiveWell Blog. “I’m willing to take the risk; I figure that we’re taxpayer-subsidized to operate in the public interest, so everything we do should be public. Foundations, I am looking suggestively at you and coughing and ...

Trent Stamp, president of the Charity Navigator watchdog group, is not impressed by the proposal on nonprofit hospitals article released on Thursday by Republican staff members of the Senate Finance Committee, calling it “political posturing and preening” with no chance to become law.

“I’ll walk to D.C. and apologize to Sen. Charles Grassley in person when this becomes law, and not just a press release,” he writes on Trent Stamp’s Take.

The staff members proposed that nonprofit hospitals be required to allocate at least 5 percent of their annual budgets to providing charity care or lose their tax-exempt status.

Mr. Stamp says the proposal makes good sense, and shouldn’t even be the subject of debate. But he says Senator Grassley, Republican of Iowa, chaired the Senate Finance Committee for almost a decade, and never got serious about proposing new rules to cover hospitals....

The author of a philanthropy blog for the Palm Beach Post in Florida wonders why the board of directors of a local charity that has filed for bankruptcy did not do a better job of managing the group’s fiscal affairs.

Susan R. Miller, who writes What Gives?, names some of the board members of the Center for Child Development, in West Palm Beach, and asks: “Who among this highly credentialed group was reviewing the financial statements? Where were the internal controls? Who was reviewing expense reimbursements? Shouldn’t board member have noticed something was out of order?”

She notes that the board was waiting for $30-million that had been set aside for local health-care needs after a Catholic health group sold off two medical centers, money that has been held up. “That’s like hoping you’ll have this week’s lottery ticket,” she writes.

Are you aware of any other blogs that cover...

Trent Stamp says he liked listening to Bon Jovi at the Live Earth concert he attended at Giants Stadium in New Jersey—one of many events held worldwide over the weekend to promote awareness of global warming.

But he’s not sure he got much more out of it than some “fun.”

“I never felt like I was part of a global movement,” the president of Charity Navigator writes on Trent Stamp’s Take. “The ‘cause’ was always second to the performance.”

Furthermore, he says, the organizers inside the concert were short on details. “Where did our money go? What were they going to do with it? Was there another way I could help financially? Sadly, for sustainability at a donor level, no answers to any of these questions were provided.”

He says the concert did raise awareness of global warming, adding that to defenders of charity special events, “that’s all that matters, right?”

(Live Earth or...

The development of HD Radio, or digital radio, could provide a golden opportunity for charities to promote their work in a new way, writes Paul Jones on his Cause-Related Marketing blog.

Radio stations nationwide are starting dozens of new radio channels as they convert from analog to digital signals. That allows them to compress their signal into a smaller portion of their allotted radio spectrum and use the leftover spectrum to add additional channels.

The stations are still trying to figure out exactly what to put on the new channels, which offer high-quality sound, and how to make money from them. None yet carry commercials and audiences remain small. So chances are stations would be open to ideas from outsiders, says Mr. Jones, a consultant at Alden Keene & Associates.

“If you have a cause with a lot of appeal, you could approach stations with some ideas, a radiothon, for ...

If you want money from a new grant maker called the Clear Fund, don’t be afraid to speak your mind. The donors say they want to change the power imbalance between “funders and funded.”

“In private, personal conversations, I hear all kinds of horrible things about large foundations—yet public criticism of them is unbelievably rare considering that they are (a) huge (b) constantly making controversial and debatable decisions that affect us all,” writes Holden Karnofsky, executive director of the new fund—a project of GiveWell, a group that reviews the effectiveness of charities.

“I’m already brainstorming about all the ways I can induce our applicants to give constant, totally honest feedback about how we’re running the process and how we can do better,” he adds on The GiveWell Blog.

Mr. Karnofsky in an earlier post spells out his vision for a new, more open kind of charity:...

The proposed new version of the Form 990 informational tax return that was released last week relies too heavily on lengthy instructions, writes Jack Siegel of Charity Governance.

“The evidence will bear out my observation that people don’t read instructions,” he said in a letter has he sent to the Internal Revenue Service. “This is true for preparing a tax return, setting up a new computer, or using a cellphone”. Mr. Siegel, a Chicago lawyer, said he had hoped for a “self-contained form.”

Mr. Siegel says he is also disappointed that the new form would not allow attachments like PDF files.

“The laudable goals of full disclosure and transparency are best served by permitting organizations to freely attach documents containing supplemental information and disclosures,” he says.

Mr. Siegel would also like the IRS to collect information on cash flow, financial fraud, and the...

An article in The New York Times about a Congressional earmark that went awry shows why charities should continue to be barred from contributing to political campaigns, says Jack Siegel on his Charity Governance blog.

The article reports that the U.S. Coast Guard, instead of following the normal auction procedure, transferred two decommissioned ships to Canvasback Missions, a religious group that was supposed to use them to provide medical services to some South Pacific islands. Instead, the group sold the ships.

Congress authorized the gifts as earmarks, which bypass normal review, bidding, and monitoring procedures. “Earmarks are a sign of the corrupting influence of money on politics,” Mr. Siegel writes, adding that they are often “hidden paybacks to a politician’s supporters.”

Mr. Siegel, a Chicago lawyer, takes Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen, to task for...