Last Friday, Doctors Without Borders began asking donors to make contributions to its general emergency relief fund rather than earmarking them for Haiti - and it appears that many contributors have heeded the group's call.

Since the January 12 earthquake, Doctors Without Borders has received $34-million for its relief efforts in Haiti and an additional $11.9-million for its Emergency Relief Fund.

"Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck," the organization wrote in a statement on its donation page last week.

The group added: "These types of funds ensure that our medical teams can react to the Haiti emergency and humanitarian crises all over the world, particularly neglected crises that remain outside the media spotlight."

The move...

Haiti Telethon Could Lead to a Spike in Fund Raising

Tonight's telethon for Haiti - which will air on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MTV, and more than 30 other stations - could bring another windfall for a handful of charities operating in the earthquake-devastated nation. (See The Chronicle's tally of gifts to the earthquake relief effort.)

A 2004 telethon on NBC for tsunami relief raised $18.3-million, while one held in the wake of September 11 brought in more than $150-million.

"We wouldn't want to speculate," said Mark Jafar, a spokesperson for MTV, which is sponsoring the event. "But we're expecting a good audience and some awesome performances."

Money raised will first go to the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a nonprofit group that works with the entertainment industry to encourage giving. The organization will then distribute it among seven charities.

They are: the Clinton Bush...

Supporters of Mercy Corps have sprung into action since the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, raising more than $500,000 through their personal fund-raising pages - a significant portion of the $7.1-million the Portland, Ore., group has received for relief efforts.

Once someone has set up a fund-raising page on the Mercy Corps Web site, they can use e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook to ask their friends and family members to donate.

"It's been tremendously effective to have dedicated donors appealing directly to their social circles," Jeremy Barnicle, a vice president at Mercy Corps, said in written statement.

Very few donors who have made text-message gifts to the American Red Cross's Haiti relief efforts have chosen to receive follow-up messages from the group.

As of Thursday, the American Red Cross had received more than $26-million in text donations for the disaster in Haiti. Of the people who made those gifts, a little more than 5 percent gave the Red Cross permission to send them additional text messages.

After donors make a mobile contribution, they receive another message that asks if they would like to receive additional messages from the charity. If the donor says yes, the only piece of information that the organization receives is their cellphone number.

The percentage of text donors who give charities permission to follow up with them is "pretty low across the board" and varies widely from campaign to campaign, says Tony Aiello, chief executive of mGive, the Denver company that ...

Two charities that provide information about nonprofit groups to donors — Great Nonprofits and GuideStar — have create a Web site for people to rate and post reviews of relief organizations responding to last week’s devastating earthquake in Haiti.

“Charity reviews help donors find the nonprofits that are doing the best jobs in Haiti,” Bob Ottenhoff, chief executive of GuideStar, said in a written statement. “At this time in the crisis, when lives are still at risk and suffering is widespread, it’s vital to support effective organizations that can get aid to the people who need it.”

Great Nonprofits and GuideStar say that the review process is ongoing, and the organizations encourage anyone who has firsthand knowledge of the relief groups working in Haiti — as a donor, board member, volunteer, or recipient of the group’s services — to write a review.

The unprecedented success of text-message giving after last week’s earthquake in Haiti is not without potential drawbacks, according to a leading proponent of cellphone fund raising.

“The upside is that it lets people respond very quickly,” says Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org. “That’s great because it allows organizations to develop a donor base of people who they wouldn’t necessarily otherwise get.”

But she says, there’s a danger that some of those $5 and $10 gifts might be coming at the expense of donations that would have been larger had the donor gone to the charity’s Web site.

“For something like Haiti, which is so catastrophic and so massive in size and need, it might have the effect of people feeling like, ‘Oh, but I already gave,’” says Ms. Verclas.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, relief organizations need to look at a text-message gift as the first step in ...

Because of the scale of the catastrophe in Haiti, cellphone carriers are speeding up the delivery of text-message donations to the American Red Cross — but not necessarily to other relief organizations.

Typically when a donor makes a contribution by text message, it’s 60 to 90 days until the charity actually receives the money. The reason for the lag: Cellphone companies wait until after they have received the money from their customers before sending on the gifts.

On Friday, Verizon announced that it had advanced nearly $3-million to the American Red Cross. The company — whose customers had donated more than $9-million to the Red Cross by Friday — plans to make another advance later this week. But a spokesman for the company says that it does not plan to advance text-message donations to other groups providing aid in Haiti.

AT&T plans to advance payment of the money donated by it...

Doctors Without Borders is now asking donors to make contributions to its general Emergency Relief Fund, rather than specifically for Haiti relief efforts.

“Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck,” the organization wrote in a statement on its donation page.

The group adds: “These types of funds ensure that our medical teams can react to the Haiti emergency and humanitarian crises all over the world, particularly neglected crises that remain outside the media spotlight.”

The move mirrors a decision Doctors Without Borders made a week after the Asian tsunami in 2004 when the organization announced that the organization had raised as much money as it could use for its operations in South Asia.

The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund had a strong fourth quarter, which pushed its fund-raising tally for 2009 ahead of the previous year’s total.

Donors contributed $1.1-billion to the organization’s donor-advised funds in 2009, up from $1.05-billion in 2008, a 4.8 percent increase.

For the third year in a row, the fund’s donors directed more than $1-billion in gifts to charity. The more than 298,000 gifts made represented a 1.8 percent increase over 2008.

The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund is ranked No. 3 on the Philanthropy 400, The Chronicle’s list of the charities that raise the most money from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Fidelity had a lot of ground to make up as it entered the final months of 2009.

During the third quarter, contributions to its donor-advised funds were down 27 percent compared to the same period in 2008, and earlier in the year giving was...

The Internet continues to be a bright spot in a fund-raising landscape still bruised by the recession.

In 2009 Network for Good, an online charity portal, processed $112.7-million in donations, up from $71.2-million the previous year, an increase of 58 percent. It was the first year in the organization’s history that it processed more than $100-million in contributions.

The Bethesda, Md., charity attributes the growth to special campaigns, such as America’s Giving Challenge and GiveNM.org’s Give to the Max Day, as well as social-networking sites, such as Causes on Facebook, all of which were processed through Network for Good. Small and medium-sized groups also increased their use of online fund raising last year, the organization says.

The average size of donations made through the site in 2009 was $92, down from $112 in 2008, a decrease of 22 percent. But the number of gifts...