This month, donors to Brown University’s annual fund will receive e-mail appeals seeking gifts of $10,000 to $75,000.

The university is one of many nonprofit institutions that has started seeking big gifts online, not just the small sums that have long been the hallmark of Internet fund raising.

To help organizations learn how to solicit donations via the Internet, The Chronicle will hold an online discussion tomorrow at noon Eastern time.

Our guests will be:

• Jeff Regen, vice president of online marketing and communications for Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental charity in Washington. Defenders of Wildlife receives more than 40 percent of its first-time gifts of $1,000 or more...

Donor-advised funds are one of the fastest-growing types of philanthropy — now worth about $23-billion, according to The Chronicle’s most recent tally.

But tapping those accounts can be challenging. Donor-advised funds are like charity checking accounts that people set up at financial institutions, community foundations, or other nonprofit organizations. Donors can spend the money in their funds anytime, and they don’t need to tell the government or the public anything about what they do with the money in the funds (or even how much they give.)

Still, the funds offer a good way for careful charities to identify potential donors.

Kim Wright-Violich, president of the Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving, urges charities to keep a record of every gift they receive from a donor-advised fund, even the small ones. People who start donor-advised funds are usually pretty affluent so they...

The news that Blackbaud, the nation’s largest provider of fund-raising software, plans to purchase Kintera, a struggling competitor, is attracting concern among some nonprofit officials.

The anonymous fund raiser who writes the blog Don’t Tell the Donor writes that while Blackbaud’s “press release seems almost giddy, I’m not so sure nonprofits will be thrilled that their viable options for major providers continues to shrink. If I was a shareholder in Blackbaud, I would be concerned that $46-million is too much to pay for a provider that seemed destined to go out of business anyway.”

Shareholders do have reason to be concerned according to one financial company. Market analysts at William Blair & Company downgraded Blackbaud’s status, notes the financial site New Ratings.

“In a research note published this morning, the analysts mention … that Kintera has a weak record of...

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would renew a tax break that encourages older Americans to give money from their individual retirement accounts to nonprofit causes.

Until December 31 of last year, donors age 70½ or older were able to transfer up to $100,000 to charity from their individual retirement accounts each year without paying income taxes on the money.

Members of Congress have been working to revive the tax break, and the House on Wednesday approved legislation that would extend the break for one year, from January 1, 2008, through December 31.

Before the bill passed the House Ways and Means Committee, a Democratic member of the committee unsuccessfully proposed shaping the measure to encourage colleges to lower their tuition costs.

Rep. Peter F. Welch, from Vermont, wanted to forbid colleges from receiving IRA rollover gifts if the...

Stephen J. Dubner, writing on The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, says it’s a safe bet that you haven’t donated to help cyclone victims in Myanmar. Why not?

Well, for starters, news-media attention tends to drive donations. Americans gave about $1.92-billion to help victims of the 2004 tsunamis, compared with just $150-million after the earthquake that struck Pakistan the following year.

Mr. Dubner ventures that most of his readers probably remember news-media coverage of the tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina, but probably not much at all from the Pakistan earthquake. He highlights a recent paper by Philip H. Brown and Jessica F. Minty, produced by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, showing the impact of news-media attention on donations to relief groups following the 2004 tsunamis.

The study showed that “an additional minute of nightly news coverage ...

The generation gap isn’t such a big deal in fund raising, according to a study to be released next week.

While fund raisers often say that baby boomers are very different in their giving styles from their parents, it turns out that other factors — such as income and education level — matter a lot more than the generation in which a donor grew up.

Researchers at Indiana University Center on Philanthropy analyzed data from 10,000 individuals, 80 percent of whom had given to charity. They represented five generations: great (born before 1929), silent (born 1929-1945), boomer (born 1946-1963), generation X (born 1964-1981), and millennial (born since 1981).

The scholars found that the amount people give rise along with their income, levels of education, and frequency of attending religious services. The age of donors didn’t matter at all.

However, the older donors are, the more...

Grant seekers have a new online resource to consult.

Bank of America has created a Web site that provides information about nearly 70 foundations for which it serves as trustee or grant-making agent. Profiles on the site detail each foundation’s mission and the causes it supports, application procedures, and recent grants, as well as the bank employee to contact for questions about the fund.

“We are very committed to the transparency of the giving,” says Cary Grace, a managing director at Bank of America.

Altogether Bank of America serves as trustee or grant-making agent for more than 2,000 foundations, which award more than $350-million annually. The bank plans to continue to add foundations to the site, and hopes to have information about more than 100 funds online by the end of the year.

Bank of America hopes that the new site will make it easier for new or smaller charities ...

A new endowment at Wesleyan University may pique the interest of donors and alumni — but for now the fund is not seeking donations.

In what may be the first of its kind in the nation, Wesleyan’s student assembly has set up its own endowment to pay for student activities, reports The Hartford Courant.

While officers at the Middletown, Conn., institution will provide financial advice to the Wesleyan Student Assembly, the group will manage the endowment and make investment decisions.

The assembly hopes the fund will generate enough money to eliminate fees that students pay to support clubs and social activities.

Student leaders said they will start the fund with whatever surplus the assembly has from the fees this year and it will not be accepting donations.

The creation of the unusual fund comes as universities face pressure to spend more of their endowments on financial aid and...

Demand for fund raisers continues to be intense as the number of charities in the United States keeps growing, the ambitions of organizations expand, and the economy’s ups and downs lead organizations to look at ways to raise private money to replace government aid.

Dozens of people who want to fill those jobs — or upgrade their skills — gathered at New York University on Saturday to participate in a day-long conference run by the George Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising.

Naomi Levine, executive director of the center, warned aspiring fund raisers that success “doesn’t come easy.”

She urged participants to “look at yourself and make sure you have what it takes. You have to be a salesman, an entrepreneur, an idea person, a teacher, a lawyer, an accountant, and you have to like people.”

But perhaps most important, she said, “you can’t be a dumbbell.”

She added: “...

The debate over how best to ensure charities are spending the right amount on fund raising expenses compared with their spending on charitable efforts is growing more intense.

In recent days, a number of proposals have been floated:

• A top official at the Internal Revenue Service Thursday it will figure out how to use its authority to crack down on charities that are inefficient in their spending on fund raising and other expenses.

• Members of the House are considering asking charities that send direct-mail appeals to post data about how much money from a solicitation will end up benefiting a charitable cause.

• A key member of the Senate has proposed that the Federal Trade Commission start regulating charities to determine if their fund-raising appeals are fraudulent — especially if too little money raised goes to the cause.

• An executive at a prominent...