Sunday, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The day could also provide a big opportunity for the charity CARE to raise money and awareness about its work empowering people around the world.

In anticipation of the event, theaters across the country will tonight screen “A Powerful Noise,” a film that tells the stories of three very different women who are working to fight global ills. Audiences will watch the movie and hear from a panel that includes CARE’s president, Helene Gayle, the “New York Times“ columnist Nicholas Kristof, and the actress Natalie Portman.

But even before the film opens, CARE is encouraging its supporters to use Twitter to raise money and attention about the event. The charity’s “tweetathon,” which began March 2 and concludes today, enables anyone who includes”#apowerfulnoise” in a Twitter message to secure 50 cents in support for CARE from film-making...

How can you capitalize on a sporting event like the World Cup to focus global attention on your cause?

That was the question posed to business students one day last week as part of the fourth annual Sports MBA Case Competition, held in partnership with the nonprofit Malaria No More. The students, from institutions such as the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Oxford University, in England, were given 24 hours to come up with a way to use the 2010 FIFA World Cup, in South Africa, to raise awareness about malaria.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Business team took the top prize for their idea of a partnership with youth soccer in the United States to raise money for malaria nets in Africa. They envisioned a “Soccer Without a Net Day,” an event in which all youth soccer teams in the U.S. would play a game without a net in each goal.

Students from...

Ken Gordon, editor of nonprofit JBooks.com, did not exactly take to the experience of writing his first appeal letter. “It was excruciating,” he says.

Other words he uses to describe the task of asking readers of his charity’s books for money? “Humiliating,” “horrible,” and “painful.”

But from pain comes, well, inspiration. While mired in the December appeal-letter doldrums, Mr. Gordon got an idea for how to poke fun at the process of writing solicitations, and himself, in dramatic style.

He enlisted the help of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (one of JBooks.com’s authors), another friend who was involved with improv, and a former producer at WGBH who’d worked with JBooks.com’s parent organization Jewish Family and Life Media.

Together, they produced a video (“The Spiel, or Send Money”) that Mr. Gordon hopes will raise funds for his charity — and save him from writing too...

Judy Moyer-Spencer started giving to the Wounded Warrior Project a few years ago, after hearing from her son, an Iraq war veteran, about some of the challenges his friends faced in returning to civilian life. But, like most Americans, Ms. Moyer-Spencer’s budget has been tighter recently, and she hasn’t been able to contribute as much.

So she was pleased to learn this fall about a new way for her to donate: through a Web site she uses to play word games. The “casual gaming” site, Iwon.com, this fall started to allow people to compete to give money to charities of their choice.

Ms. Moyer-Spencer and more than 2,000 others who have signed up as part of Wounded Warrior Project’s online “team” have so far directed $32,000 to the group. They have beaten several hundred teams competing in behalf of other nonprofit groups, winning the company’s top prize ($10,000) three months in a row...

Online giving remained relatively strong in 2008, despite the creaky economy, according to a post by Steve MacLaughlin on the blog maintained by Blackbaud, a major provider of charity-solicitation software.

In a survey of clients of Blackbaud, charities saw steady growth in the first half of the year, a slight drop in the third quarter, and online giving rebound at the end of the year. December and June were the two biggest months for donations made via the Internet.

Nonprofit groups in the study of approximately 2,000 charities received an average gift online of $152.12. Education, health care, religious, and grant-making organizations had higher average gift amounts, according to Mr. MacLaughlin.

Online giving grew four times as quickly in December as it did in other months, a trend that is consistent with the past several years. Despite the economic turmoil, December accounted...

Many people do all their giving in a few frenzied days toward the end of December. Writing on her blog, Beth Kanter shares some ideas for incorporating charitable giving into the other 11 months of the year.

Marking a birthday is an easy way to spread giving days across the year. Last year, for her 51st birthday, Ms. Kanter persuaded 51 people to donate $10 apiece to the Sharing Foundation, a nonprofit group in Concord, Mass.

Charities’ Valentine’s Day fund-raising drives make it easy to give in February, and March weather encourages marathons and other outdoor fund-raising events to which you can donate.

Earth Day is in April, so Ms. Kanter says people can help celebrate by giving to an environmental group. May is Mother’s Day — and charities’ Mother’s Day campaigns — while June marks the end of school, and a perfect time to donate money to give school supplies to children...

Many fund raisers are facing pressure to cut costs as donations drop. But Jeff Malloch, a direct-mail consultant, warns that cost-cutting mania can lead to really bad decisions.

Writing in a letter posted on The Agitator blog, he tells nonprofit officials to remember that reducing expenses only makes sense if it contributes over the longer term to higher (or more stable) revenues.

Mr. Malloch takes on several fund-raising ideas in a recent Chronicle article, saying they focus too much on cutbacks and not enough on innovation. For example, he says that the Mint Museum of Art’s decision to combine three solicitations into one year-end mailing, which saved $5,000.

Writes Mr. Malloch: “This is a dangerous move without any testing to back it up. She may have saved $5,000, but she needs to consider how much revenue she potentially loses by combining three entirely different messages ...

If you dislike rebates because of the paperwork involved, apparently you’re not alone.

More Americans have stopped taking advantage of rebates in recent years, says Brian Grayek, a vice president at the software company CA. So his company decided to turn the process of sending back rebates into a simple way to donate to charity.

The company officially kicked off a program last week to enable some of its customers to donate their rebates to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which CA (formerly known as Computer Associates) has long supported.

When they purchase software designed to protect children from online predators, customers have the option to direct the value of the rebate to the charity. For its part, CA donates $1 from the sale of the product to the charity, and another $5 if consumers sign up to automatically renew their software the following year...

Thanks to a new application by a Seattle mobile-media company, iPhone users can channel donations to the Salvation Army by listening to Christmas tunes.

The application, created by the company Melodeo, streams hundreds of holiday songs by singers such as Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and by a Salvation Army brass band.

The application costs $2.99, of which $1 goes to the Salvation Army.

“The Salvation Army is excited to spread the good cheer of the season through music while offering a new way for our supporters to contribute to one of their favorite causes,” said Major George Hood, national community relations secretary for the Salvation Army, in a press release. “This is one music download that can make a real difference in people’s lives.”

How useful do you think iPhone applications will be in raising money?

Each time Thomas Keown has asked people in recent weeks to donate to his charity, he’s had a camera rolling. The nonprofit group Mr. Keown established last year, One Home Many Hopes, is one of two charities participating in a documentary film project to show how small nonprofit groups can successfully raise money.

The filmmaking effort was started by Kristy Hall, a nonprofit consultant in Charlottesville, Va., who wanted to demonstrate how some of the fund-raising ideas she had developed could help small organizations. After recruiting a film company to help, Ms. Hall selected two charities, Mr. Keown’s Boston group, a volunteer-run effort that benefits orphaned girls in Kenya, and Student Movement for Real Change, a Washington organization with three employees.

Ms. Hall challenged the charities to raise $20,000 in 30 days—a small sum by many fund raisers’ standards, but one that ...