Despite the bad economy and rising unemployment rates, a majority of American professionals say they will give to the same number of nonprofit organizations next year as they did in the preceding 12 months, according to preliminary results from a new survey.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the survey said they will probably give to the same number of nonprofit organizations next year, and nearly a quarter said that they had donated more than $5,000 to nonprofit causes in the preceding 12 months.

The research, conducted by the American Society of Association Executives, was based on a survey of more than 5,000 adults. The respondents included its own members as well as members of five other associations.

Sixty-six percent of respondents predicted that their “employment situation” would be the same next year, and another 26 percent said they expected theirs to improve. Only 8...

Last year the recession had less impact than feared on big gifts made to charities in Britain, according to a new report released jointly by Coutts, a British bank, and the University of Kent’s Centre for Philanthropy, Humanitarianism, and Social Justice.

In fiscal 2008, researchers at the university documented 189 gifts of a million pounds — or the equivalent of $1.7-million — or more each to British charities. That was only a slight decrease from the 193 gifts of that size made in fiscal 2007.

The collective value of the 189 big gifts last year, equal to $2.3-billion, was 13 percent lower than the cumulative total in 2007. And the number of donors giving at the million-pound level declined by 6 percent, according to the annual report, the second of its kind.

The researchers noted that the drop in assets among the wealthy in Great Britain has been far greater than the decline in ...

The sour economy has put more of a damper on capital and endowment gifts than those for operating expenses, according to a new survey.

In the survey of 43 institutions that have completed fiscal 2009, pledges in fiscal 2009 declined by an average of 33 percent compared with fiscal 2008.

Cash gifts to pay for buildings and other capital projects to organizations in the survey — mostly private schools and colleges and universities — dropped by an average of 26 percent compared with fiscal 2008. Endowment gifts in 2009 had the next steepest drop, 19 percent on average.

Meanwhile, gifts that organizations could use for operating costs — including both those earmarked for such purposes and unrestricted donations — fared better. Earmarked gifts declined by 4 percent and unrestricted donations by 7 percent.

The survey, conducted by Marts & Lundy, a Lyndhurst, N.J., fund-raising...

As the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund — which raises more money than all but two other charities in the United States — enters the year-end giving season, its leaders say they see some promising fund-raising and giving trends despite the bleak economy.

In the quarter ending September 30, contributions to the organization’s donor-advised funds totaled $397-million. While that’s 27 percent less than the organization received in the same quarter of 2008, contributions have improved somewhat since Fidelity reported a 40-percent decrease earlier this year.

Donor-advised funds work like charity checking accounts — donors put money in to the funds and then earmark it whenever they want for the causes they care about.

In a hopeful sign for struggling charities, Fidelity says more of its donors are using their accounts to make unrestricted contributions to charities to use “where needed...

More than 70 percent of churches nationwide raised as much or more money in the first half of this year as they did during the same period in 2008, according to a new study.

The study, based on 1,540 mostly Protestant congregations surveyed in August, found that 37 percent raised more and another 34 percent raised the same amount in the first six months of 2009 as they had in 2008. Less than a third reported a decline in donations.

However, compared with a similar survey conducted in 2008, higher percentages of the churches reported a decrease in donations, while lower percentages reported a rise. “This may indicate that the recession has had a greater impact on congregations’ fund-raising receipts in 2009 compared to 2008,” the researchers wrote in a release summarizing their key findings.

The research was a joint project of the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving at Indiana...

The recession has had a widely varying effect on charities in Europe, said speakers at this week’s International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

Among them:

• Adrian Sargeant, a British researcher at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy summarized recently released data from the United Kingdom’s annual survey by the Charities Aid Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Based on a poll of 3,316 British adults from June 2008 to February of this year, it found that donations had declined by 11.4 percent from the previous year.

• A fund-raising consultant from Greece who helps organizations obtain corporate sponsorships said such payments have declined by 10 percent this year.

• Amanda Seller of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that currency exchange rates have proved to be a “nightmare” for...

The Australian Fred Hollows Foundation won the third annual Gold Star Award for Nonprofit Video Advertising for its fund-raising video Help Fred’s Work Shine On.

The winning video was chosen by a popular vote among nearly 950 attendees from 61 countries who gathered at this week’s International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

The competition is sponsored by Rapp, an international communications and marketing company.

European charities express varying degrees of optimism that donations will rise next year, according to a new survey of nearly 650 nonprofit organizations in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The survey, presented at the 29th International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, was released by the Resource Alliance, the London nonprofit group that organized the conference, and Blackbaud, the Charleston, S.C., software company.

Eighty percent of French charities in the survey — more than in any other nation — said they believe contributions will increase next year.

More than 50 percent of Dutch charities and about 48 percent of Italian organizations said donations will rise in 2010, but only 40 percent of charities in both the U.K. and Germany expected an increase.

Seismic cultural changes have fundamentally altered donors’ motivations and will shape their giving decisions in the years ahead, says Alan Clayton, a senior executive at the Good Agency, a London consulting company that specializes in nonprofit communications.

Speaking at the International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, Mr. Clayton offered views in a session entitled “The Changing 21st Century Donor.”

Propelled by a tripling of the world’s population in the last 85 years, the spread of wealth, and the explosion of online communications, society has made a “digital leap,” he said. Since the mid- 1990s, he said, “people hungry for communication and knowledge suddenly got access to communication channels” that are flattening traditional social hierarchies among entire populations.

In the past few decades, Mr. Clayton said, marketing research has shown ...

Efforts to attract big gifts work differently in India than they do in North America said Tony Myers, a Canadian fund-raising consultant, one of the speakers at the 29th annual International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

In an interview, Mr. Myers spoke about some initial findings in his research to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary; his dissertation will compare efforts to seek major gifts by universities in India and Canada that specialize in technology training.

In India, Mr. Myers says, the largest donations in higher education come from alumni who have accumulated wealth in India and from “diaspora” donors who have left the country in pursuit of business opportunities.

Large gifts to Indian institutions typically come from alumni who themselves decide to make a collective donation along with others who graduated in the same year—not in...