Charities can enhance their relationships with donors by applying the same principles corporations have used to improve their ties to customers, according to London executives who spoke at the 29th annual International Fundraising Congress, which started today in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

Too often, organizations focus on creating a brand image “from the inside out,” without taking the time to ensure that the image they project is consistent with what clients, donors, and others see, said Steven Walden and Qaalfa Dibeehi of Beyond Philosophy, a company that helps businesses improve profits by enhancing customer satisfaction. They spoke with Paul Farthing, a senior fund raiser at Cancer Research UK.

To illustrate their point, Paul Farthing, a senior fund raiser at Cancer Research UK, pointed to the disconnect between the image of the American Red Cross, which bills itself as...

Colleges that win the most contributions — in terms of dollars raised per student — have done so in part by spending more money than other institutions to hire full-time staff members to conduct research on alumni and other potential donors, according to a new survey.

The survey, conducted by WealthEngine, a Bethesda, Md., company that offers online donor-research tools, was based on responses from 61 educational institutions. All but three were colleges and universities.

The institutions were divided into two groups, 17 of which were designated as “high performing” fund-raising organizations. Those institutions raised $2,234 to $25,712 in contributed income for each enrolled student; those that were private raised more per student.

The high-performing organizations had two or three full-time prospect researchers, as they are called, for every one researcher reported by the...

Most people who give to street or face-to-face fund-raising campaigns — in which paid solicitors sign up pedestrians who agree to make automatic monthly gifts from their credit card or bank account — are in their 20s. But charities that do this type of fund raising should instead be pursuing “the perfect donor demographic,” a 38.5-year-old professional woman.

That’s the conclusion of Daryl Upsall, who heads a Madrid fund-raising consulting firm that specializes in face-to-face fund raising, and Owen Watkins, an international face-to-face fund-raising specialist for Unicef Switzerland. The two men will present their findings next month at the International Fundraising Conference in the Netherlands.

Based on an analyis of the records on the millions of donors recruited by face-to-face fund raising in the Britain and Spain over the last five years, Mr. Upsall said, the 38- to...

The economic downturn has caused direct mail and other mass fund-raising methods to decline, intensifying a slump that began a few years ago, according to a new survey of several dozen of the nation’s largest charities.

In the six months ending in June, every measure of the health of direct-marketing appeals declined: total contributions raised, total number of donors, number of new donors recruited, amount contributed per donor, number of donors who made repeat gifts, and number of donors who had stopped giving but were persuaded to renew their support.

This year’s across-the-board decreases are medians, meaning that half of the 77 charities in the survey did better and half did worse. Median declines in all the direct-marketing measures have never before been found in the study, which was started in 2002.

Conducted quarterly by Target Analytics, the research arm of the...

Kevin Wu, a 19-year-old college student, is arguably more popular than Michael Jackson: His KevJumba channel on YouTube, featuring dozens of humorous homemade videos by Mr. Wu, has more than 660,000 subscribers who’ve signed up to receive notification whenever he posts new material.

(Michael Jackson’s YouTube channel, produced by Sony, has only 423,000 subscribers.)

Now Mr. Wu is using YouTube to channel some of his online fame to raise money for charity.

Here’s how: Mr. Wu’s online channel is so popular that he became a YouTube user partner, agreeing to let advertisers selected by YouTube place messages alongside his videos. In return, he receives half of the monthly fees each advertiser pays YouTube; the fees vary according to how many times each video is viewed. To benefit charity, Mr. Wu has created a second user partner channel on YouTube and is donating all the ad fees he ...

Michael Adams, executive director of a charity that provides services to elderly gay residents in New York City, says that an advertising campaign helped his organization raise more money at the end of last year—even as other area charities suffered steep declines due to the recession.

Sage—as the charity is called to show its mission of providing services and advocacy for older gay New Yorkers—placed a series of ads in 1,500 city buses and subway stations in October, November, and December. Each had a simple message, such as “SAGE is caring” and “SAGE is creative,” and featured a photograph of one of the organization’s clients.

The ad campaign, produced by Double Platinum, a New York advertising agency, at a cost of $125,000, caused donations to Sage to grow by 12 percent in the last three months of 2008—over what the charity raised over the same period during the previous year. ...

In a move that will undoubtedly delight some grant seekers and disappoint others, the Boston Foundation announced today a massive shift in how it will distribute some $17-million annually in grants.

Over the next two years, the foundation will greatly increase the number and size of its general operating-support grants. Such grants are highly sought after by fund raisers because they are not tied to specific projects and may be spent on whatever the charity chooses, including salaries and other administrative expenses.

However, with its new grant-making approach, the foundation will limit the recipients of general operating support to charities that work to improve education, health, neighborhoods, arts and culture, and the economic competitiveness of the Greater Boston region. It said that, based on eight years of research to gauge conditions in the region, it will identify...

Half of nonprofit organizations around the world have seen declines in donations and other income in the past year, while a third have experienced an increase, according to a new survey that seeks to assess the impact of the global economic downturn.

The annual Global Fundraising Confidence Survey, the second of its kind, polled 126 leading fund-raising experts in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America from May to August. The survey was conducted by the Management Centre, an international fund-raising training and consulting firm in London.

Survey participants answered questions about the global economic recession’s impact on the fund-raising climate in the preceding year and how they felt about their ability to raise funds in the year ahead. The largest declines were reported in Asia; the smallest were reported in Europe.

Among the third of respondents who reported a...

Michael Hoffman, of See3 Communications, in Chicago, is using his See What’s Out There blog to spread the word about a new feature YouTube has created for charities in its YouTube Nonprofit Program.

Nonprofit video makers can currently use the “annotations” feature in YouTube to create a written message that can be embedded into their video. Links to other Web pages can be included in the message, but they have — until now — been limited to links that are part of the YouTube site.

As Mr. Hoffman notes, charities in the company’s nonprofit program can now embed links to pages on their own or another Web site of their choosing into their YouTube videos.

“Make no mistake, this is a game-changer,” Mr. Hoffman writes. Charities can have “Donate Now” or “Sign the Petition” buttons in their videos that, when clicked, take people back to those pages on the groups’ own Web sites.

“With...

Many nonprofit groups do not have the resources to offer their donors gift annuities, which provide donors with regular earnings in exchange for making a large gift that is invested. When the donor dies, the charity gets all the money left in the annuity.

Now there may be a way for such charities to offer gift annuities, too, according to Frank Minton, a senior adviser at PG Calc, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm.

Mr. Minton, a former chair of the American Council on Gift Annuities, said that he has been in discussions with a large nonprofit organization that is considering managing gift annuities for charities nationwide. (Until the organization decides to offer the service, he said, it has requested that he not name it.)

The organization, Mr. Minton said, could begin offering the service early next year and is now seeking to determine charities’ interest by asking them to...