The lion's share of fund raisers — 82 percent — face ethical dilemmas once a month or less, according to a new poll.

The informal online survey, conducted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals on its Web site from from late July to late August, garnered 493 responses. Fifty-eight percent of participants said that they encountered ethical challenges less than one a month, while 24 percent said once a month.

Ten percent of respondents reported facing ethical quandries at least once a week, and 8 percent said they encountered such situations two or three times per month.

"Ethics is critical to the success of fundraising and philanthropy, so it's important to understand just how often fundraisers face ethical situations," Paulette V. Maehara, chief executive of the association in Alexandria, Va., said in a written statement.

The organization plans to conduct future online polls...

The amount of money that donors contributed online during the months of March, April, and May was up 23 percent compared to the same period in 2009, according to the Blackbaud Index of Online Giving.

The new index draws on 1,787 charities from different parts of the nonprofit world that together raise nearly $400-million online annually. Participants include both nonprofit groups that use Blackbaud fund-raising systems and organizations that use products from other software companies.

The increase in money donated online was sharpest at large organizations.

Groups with annual budgets of more than $10-million saw Internet giving rise 28 percent during the three-month period compared to last year, while online revenue rose 21.3 percent at organizations with budgets of $1-million to $10-million and 13.1 percent at groups with budgets of less than $1-million.

The Blackbaud Index of...

Finding the right way to thank a donor can be tough—but in the case of one recent gift, the Wildlife Conservation Society has come up with a particularly cute way to show its appreciation.

Margaretta Taylor, a New York philanthropist, donated $5-million to the environmental organization, which runs the famous Bronx Zoo.

As an expression of gratitude, the Wildlife Conservation Society has decided to name a baby sea lion, born at the zoo last month, Margaretta in Ms. Taylor's honor.

Among Ms. Taylor's other gifts: more than $3-million to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for research, and last year, with her family, $4-million to American Rivers, an environmental organization in Washington.

Photo: Julie Larsen Maher for the Wildlife Conservation Society

Eleven percent of cellphone owners have made a charitable contribution via text message, according to a new report.

Young cellphone owners were more likely to make text-message gifts than their older counterparts.

Among cellphone owners ages 18 to 29, 19 percent said that they had donated via text message, compared with 10 percent of people ages 30 to 49, 8 percent of people ages 50 to 64, and 4 percent of cellphone owners age 65 and older.

Nearly a quarter of Latino cellphone owners (23 percent) said that they had made a text-message contribution, compared with 16 percent of African-American and 7 percent of white cellphone owners.

The findings are part of a new study of Americans' use of wireless Internet services.

Fifty-nine percent of survey participants said that they go online wirelessly from a laptop computer (47 percent) or cellphone (40 percent).

The telephone survey of 2,...

The cause of the drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the reason why giving in response to the catastrophe has been modest, say philanthropy experts. So far, donors have contributed more than $4-million.

"This is by all accounts a man-made disaster," says Gene Tempel, a professor of philanthropic studies and higher education at Indiana University. "People expect BP and others to step up and take care of this damage."

The International Bird Rescue Research Center, whose employees are helping to clean oiled seabirds, shares the view that BP should bear the cost of clean-up efforts.

On its Web site, the Los Angeles organization says that it welcomes donations for its continuing programs but will not accept contributions earmarked for its work on the Gulf Coast. 

Charities typically are able to raise more money to deal with natural disasters than emergencies caused or exacerbated...

Charitable giving during February, March, and April was up 12.1 percent compared to the same period in 2009, according to the Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving.

The new index draws on fund-raising information from 1,400 nonprofit groups representing different parts of the nonprofit world. Together the organizations have annual revenues of $2.2-billion. 

"Economic conditions, natural disasters, and market fluctuations have made it extremely difficult for nonprofits to make fund-raising decisions informed by the latest donor behavior," Chuck Longfield, Blackbaud's chief scientist said in a written statement. "That is why we created the Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving -- to provide fund raisers with up-to-date data on fund-raising trends and to couple that information with valuable analysis by leaders in the sector."

Breaking down the information by organization size, the study...

Faced with the challenge of raising its profile among people in their 20s and 30s, the group Jewish Federations of North America is turning to social media.

Last month the New York organization started a campaign -- What's Your #ish? -- that asks people to share their thoughts on what it means to be Jewish via Twitter, Facebook, or the campaign's Web site.

So far the campaign has elicited more than 1,600 posts, including:

• "My #ish is a combination of past generations and future generations; my way of being and relating to the world."
• "Having a grandma that still bakes rugula and special prune hamentashen even at 88."
• "Watching PB Jewish Americans with one of my grandmothers and mom on mothers day was wonderfully dorky#ish in the best way but most importantly family#ish."

"The quality of submissions, which always is an unknown when you run social-networking initiatives, has been...

Americans donated $217.3-billion in 2009, a decrease of $11.2-billion or 4.9 percent compared to 2008, according to new estimates from researchers at the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. 

The researchers are more optimistic about giving in 2010. They expect giving by individuals to range between $222-billion and $227-billion, an increase of 3 to 4.5 percent.

The estimates -- which exclude grants made by foundations and corporations and bequests from estates -- are based on a model that uses changes in economic data to forecast charitable giving. The model is designed to be modified every three months based on new data, such as price and market indices as well as information about income and net worth.

The researchers note that the 4.9 percent drop in 2009 was in addition to an estimated 6 percent decrease in 2008.

"It will be some time before we can reverse these ...

In these tough fund-raising times, many charities are putting special effort into building ties to donors who give midsize sums, usually $1,000 to $5,000, as The Chronicle notes in an article from its latest issue.

But many organizations need to take a more sophisticated approach to deciding which donors of midsize gifts deserve extra attention, one that takes into account all of the data they have about their supporters, says a fund-raising consultant.

"It's too easy for organizations to say, OK, we're just going to pull everybody who's given us $1,000 in the last six months," says Kristin McCurry, managing director of Mindset Direct, a fund-raising consulting company in Arlington, Va.

Using those criteria, she says, a nonprofit organization whose work has received a lot of news-media attention—like a relief groups responding to a disaster or an advocacy group whose top public-policy...

In the first year of the Schwab Charitable Microfinance Guarantee Program, donors set aside $10-million from their gift funds to guarantee small loans to poor entrepreneurs in developing countries.

As of March 31, the Grameen Foundation had closed guarantee transactions based on Schwab Charitable-backed commitments to benefit an estimated 116,468 borrowers in Egypt, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Through the program, donors can recommend that up to 10 percent of the money in their donor-advised accounts be set aside for 24-36 months to guarantee microfinance loans. The money remains invested for the entire period and is applied to the guarantee only if the microfinance program has losses in excess of reserves.

Because microfinance loans are repaid by borrowers over relatively short time frames and then loaned out again, Schwab Charitable estimates that the initial $10-million in...