Should South Asian Americans give more money to American charities?

Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, has posed that question — and others — to three prominent South Asian Americans as part of a week-long feature on The South Asian Philanthropy Project, a blog that focuses on promoting philanthropy among Asian Americans.

The answer was a resounding yes.

While many South Asian Americans donate to cultural causes such as South Asian Youth Action in New York and South Asian Americans Leading Together in Takoma Park, Md., South Asian Youth Action founder Sayu Bhojwani writes their philanthropy should also include institutions that are not tied to South Asian American culture.

“Only as donors and board members of organizations as diverse as the New York City Opera, Lincoln Center, Catholic Charities and United Neighborhood Houses, can South Asians...

Nonprofit groups are facing some easy-to-identify challenges with the recession — decreases in donations from individuals, dwindling endowments, and declines in government support.

But Kelly Kleiman, a former nonprofit consultant and author of The Nonprofiteer, notes that charities are facing some other, less visible, losses.

Ms. Kleiman notes that declines in retail sales are likely to cut into the money some charities earn from corporate marketing arrangements in which they receive a portion of the revenues from the sale of products.

She also points to a recent New York Times article that some nonprofit groups that organizations that rely on the interest earned from lawyers’ trust accounts to pay for legal services for low-income clients are facing revenue shortfalls. With interest rates sagging, the amount of money generated from these accounts has dwindled.

“Eventually...

Several nonprofit organizations, including the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, and AARP, are showcasing their photos from the inauguration and service events the previous day on the Chronicle‘s new Flickr group.

The Chronicle invites readers to take a look, tag the images, and submit their own photos from this week’s events.

The blog Have Fun, Do Good offers a list of iPhone tools that benefit nonprofit groups.

The list, while short, highlights some of the possibilities for nonprofit groups that are looking for ways to use mobile devices like the iPhone to further their causes, Britt Bravo writes.

“This month’s Net2ThinkTank question on NetSquared is, ‘What do you think will be the big changes, new technologies, hot applications, or successful campaigns of 2009?’” Ms. Bravo writes. “I predict that one of them will be iPhone apps for nonprofits.”

Among the current uses:

• The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California offers a tool that allows people to choose environmentally sustainable seafood when they are eating at restaurants.

• People Against a Violent Environment in Beaver Dam, Wisc., offers a way to use the iPhone to call attention to domestic violence.

• The Salvation Army received a do...

Many charities are using the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday as an opportunity to publicize efforts to increase volunteerism.

The Web site VolunteerMatch, for example, used the National Day of Service to unveil a new online service that allows people to find volunteer opportunities with help from Google Earth.

People can use the service to browse volunteer opportunities at more than 62,000 nonprofit organizations.

The Google Earth mapping service is an online tool that allows prospective volunteers to enter in the name of a city, street, or zip code and see the closest available opportunities on an interactive map.

To show how the Google Earth tool works, VolunteerMatch has produced a video demonstration, which is available on YouTube.

For more on how organizations are marking the King holiday with service activities, many at the urging of...

Many people in the nonprofit world plan to travel to Washington next week to call attention to their causes as Barack Obama is inaugurated to the presidency.

To document what charity and foundation workers are doing, both in Washington and elsewhere, we have created an easy way for readers to share photographs and videos of events related to the inauguration.

To participate, join the The Chronicle of Philanthropy group on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com and upload your photos and videos.

We also welcome news about what your organization is doing as the new president takes office. To share your thoughts, send an e-mail message to editor@philanthropy.com

Allison Fine, a nonprofit leader and expert on technology and communications, says the recession is adding pressure on nonprofit groups to use online tools to spread their message.

Ms. Fine, in her most recent episode of the Social Good podcast, tells listeners that organizations that are seeing a decline in financial support should use the recession as an opportunity to become more creative in their online fund-raising and advocacy efforts.

By doing so, they can help buttress support during the downturn — and better position themselves for growth when the economy rebounds.

“We need to move away from the model from doing most of the heavy lifting ourselves organizationally and work with larger groups of our volunteers through our networks to find new supporters,” Ms. Fine says.

“[The downturn is] an opportunity to broaden our networks of supporters to make up for our loss of...

Paul Shoemaker has a simple piece of advice for philanthropists who have new ideas for helping to improve the world — find an existing charity to do the work.

Mr. Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners in Seattle, writes on PhilanthroMedia too many philanthropists create new organizations when they want to make a difference.

But, in many cases, they would be better able to accomplish their goals if they found an existing group to help take up their ideas for new programs.

“It is much easier to start a non-profit than a for-profit company, but it is much harder to effectively sustain a non-profit over the long-term,” Mr. Shoemaker writes. “When you have a new idea, please be sure to look around to see if anyone is already doing the work you care about; or if there is someone to partner with or someone that might want to take on a new ‘line of business.’”

Does...

What were Chronicle readers’ favorite Give & Take posts of the year?

Here are the items that the most readers viewed, in order of their popularity:

1. Donors List Their Charity Pet Peeves — Fund-raising consultant Marc A. Pitman was on a mission in August to find out what irks nonprofit donors the most. Readers then chimed in with their complaints from donors. Among the most common: the failure of many fund raisers to thank those who contribute to their causes.

2. Philadelphia Charities Protest United Way — New priorities set forth this year by the United Way prompted a group of charities in the Philadelphia area to pay for a full-page ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer to ask donors to make contributions directly to them.

3. Nonprofit Tag Line Winners Announced — The marketing consultant Nancy Schwartz reviewed the tag lines of more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations and picked...

KyNam Doan wants a job.

And he’s taking some unique steps to find one.

Mr. Doan, a San Francisco native and 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, has launched a blog that will chronicle his efforts to find a job in marketing at a nonprofit group in the Bay Area.

But he’s not stopping there.

Mr. Doan has pledged to donate five hours as a volunteer to any nonprofit group that offers him a job interview. He’s also planning to volunteer an additional hour per job interview at the San Francisco Food Bank and is donating a minute of his time for every unique visitor who comes to his Web site.

The effort is already paying off for Mr. Doan — and for San Francisco nonprofit groups.

His blog says that he has already received four job interviews, which means that he will donate 20 volunteer hours to those groups and another four hours to the San Francisco Food Bank.

Mr...