Making small changes to how callers conduct phone-athons can reap bigger gifts for universities and other charities, writes Naomi Marshall, an official at Academic Impressions, on the Future Leaders in Philanthropy blog.

Among her tips for improving phone-athons:

• Express gratitude first. If the person you’re calling has been a past donor or volunteer, be sure to thank them for their involvement. (Ms. Marshall also suggests that universities consider “thankathons,” by which they thank donors for past contributions and don’t make any requests).

• Be enthusiastic. “Put heart into your call, and make your listener believe that it really matters to you,” she says.

• Stress the organization’s mission. Be sure to make a compelling case for why the money is needed and how each gift will make a difference, says Ms. Marshall.

• Understand why a donor turns you down. If a don...

Getting rid of boring board meetings and irrelevant board committees could have big benefits for fund raising and for the future of a nonprofit organization.

Jan F. Brazell on Wednesday told the final session of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ annual conference in San Diego to “eliminate staff-led committees like development committees.”

Trustees on such committees see the staff fund raisers and think “here are the three suckers who will do all the work,” says Ms. Brazell, a fund-raising and management consultant in Tacoma, Wash.

Besides, she adds, the full board should be involved in fund raising, and a development committee only encourages trustees to think that, unless they’re on the committee, fund raising is not their job.

Another big problem, Ms. Brazzell says, is that trustees spend 80 or 90 percent of their time in meetings listening to dull reports about...

Karen Osborne and her husband regularly make gifts to a N. Y. Easter Seals chapter so it can buy special equipment to help disabled children recover the ability to talk.

But with other financial obligations pressing on the couple, Ms. Osborne told an Easter Seals fund raiser that they were considering cutting back on some of their favorite causes.

A few weeks before the couple made the final decision about what causes it would drop from its annual donation list, the Easter Seals fund raiser called and reminded Ms. Osborne of the speech-therapy work the Osbornes’ gift had made possible. Then she asked Ms. Osborne to hold on for a minute and gave the phone to a child who spoke to her — and was able to do because of the speech therapy provided by the charity.

Such gestures are irresistible, Ms. Osborne says, but all too rare. “We say thanks and move on, send them a newsletter....

The tensions between young fund raisers and older ones are deep in many nonprofit offices, but the generation gap can be closed with a few relatively easy steps, said speakers at the annual meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which wrapped up in San Diego today.

One key difference between the generations is that baby boomers prefer to work independently and assume that their staff members feel the same way. But younger employees are comfortable with a high level of oversight and would prefer more guidance, said Amie Latterman, development director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

“You can never talk too much to younger staff,” said Ms. Latterman, ,herself a member of Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979).

Ms. Latterman also said that younger staff members are more productive if they are involved in the decision-making...

Americans get richer by giving money away than keeping it — and the more they give, the more they can stimulate the economy.

Arthur C. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, told the annual meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals that for every dollar Americans give away, they will gain $3.75.

“I would have told you, as an economist, that the reason we give so much is because we’re so rich,” he says. “And I found that when people get richer, they give more money away. But I also found that when people give away more, they get richer.”

Mr. Brooks says he reached his conclusion after he analyzed data from a 2000 survey of charitable giving by 30,000 households in 41 different towns and cities across America. Households that donated money in one year saw their incomes increase the following year, he says. His findings held up when he...

After more than 20 years of organizing high-visibility events to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fight famine and poverty in Africa, the rock musician Bob Geldof has learned that philanthropy alone is not enough.

“After 20 years, I arrived at the point where charity can only do so much,” said Mr. Geldof in speech Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals in San Diego.

What makes the real difference, he said, is policy changes at the highest levels of government, coupled with charitable efforts that attract publicity to those changes, so that governments “won’t go back on their word,” he said.

Mr. Geldof said he arrived at that conclusion after organizing Live Aid, a rock concert in 1985 that raised $200-million, and traveling to Africa, where he encountered suffering on a scale that “no human should ever have to see.”

After Live...

The entrepreneurial founders of global technology companies, who have changed the world in terms of how information is shared, are now leading a similarly radical change in how philanthropy is practiced, says Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, in Mountain View, Calif.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals in San Diego on Monday, Mr. Carson — who led the Minneapolis Foundation before spending the past 14 months working with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial donors — outlined a dozen characteristics of Silicon Valley donors that have implications for the way in which fund raisers and other nonprofit leaders work on a day-to-day basis. Among them:

• Speed and adaptability. Entrepreneurs must frequently remake their companies, fire staff members, and replace them, sometimes on a weekly basis, Mr. Carson said...

Naming rights used to be popular only with individuals, but now foundations and corporations are seeking such opportunities, said Terry Burton, a fund-raising researcher and consultant, in a presentation today at the annual conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Mr. Burton, founder of Dig In Research, in Vancouver, B.C., urged nonprofit groups to include naming opportunities in proposals to corporations and foundations. Companies, he said, are especially interested in seeking such opportunities “because they are running out of stadiums to name.”

For example, he noted that AT & T last year donated $25-million to the University of Texas at Austin after the university agreed to name an executive education center and conference center after the company.

He also noted that a growing number of naming rights are now offered for a short period of time — and at lower...

Fund raisers have long been told to avoid commissions — mostly out of concern that otherwise donors will wonder who has more to gain, the charity or the person soliciting the gift. But plenty of fund raisers are accepting commissions, a new study has found, and other ethical lapses are common among people who solicit donations for charity.

The fund-raising study comes just days after another report was released showing that ethics problems are common in other areas of nonprofit management, not just the process of seeking donations.

Have you witnessed an ethical lapse in fund raising at your organization? Tell us what you saw and whether the issue has been resolved. Just click on the comments link below this post to share your thoughts.

Fund raisers are normally far more confident than other people, said Paulette Maehara, president of the Association of Fundraising Professionals as she announced the results of her organization’s study of giving in 2007 and the outlook for the current year.

So when only 58 percent of fund raisers say they expect donations to increase in the coming year, that should be taken as a somber measure of the state of giving, she said.

Odds are the most pessimistic are fund raisers for small groups, since those organizations are seeing signs of a slowdown more seriously than bigger organizations, the study found.

How is the economy affecting your organization? Are some solicitation techniques working better than others because of the economy? Click on the comments link below to let us know how your organization is faring.