• “A nonprofit is a type of business and must act like a legitimate organization to be trusted by supporters, donors, and even the people it seeks to serve,” writes Joanne Fritz, a former nonprofit manager, on her About.com blog. Ms. Fritz discusses why some charities fail to meet standards set by the Better Business Bureau.

• On Connection Cafe, Jordan Viator, communications manager at Convio, offers several insights from Convio’s recently released guide on how nonprofit organizations can effectively raise money online.

• Writing a good nonprofit tagline is tough, and relying on abstractions is one of the most common mistakes charities make, Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing, writes on Getting Attention. “And that’s too bad,” he writes, “because most nonprofits I know actually do specific things.”
• Damian O’Broin, founder and director of Ask Direct, writes about lessons he learned from the charity concert Live Aid, which was recently the focus of a documentary on BBC4, Live Aid: Against All Odds. Mr. O’Broin argues that, like the concert, fund raising needs to be passionate, urgent, and thrilling.
• On the Foundation Center’s blog, Tom Adams, president of Transition Guides, offers advice to nonprofit groups on why they should focus on leadership development. A key reason: The leadership pipeline is essential to carrying out a strategic plan.
• Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit…

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• Dramatic changes in the real-estate market mean that many estimates charities have made about donors’ wealth and capacity to give are no longer reliable, David Lawson, president of screening and analytics at DonorTrends, writes on the company’s Fundraising Action blog. He recommends that fund raisers reevaluate the giving potential of prospective donors whose wealth estimates are based largely on real estate.

• Michael Seltzer, an expert on nonprofit management and a contributor to the Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog, writes about the growth of charities and foundations in Africa and how they are reshaping the continent’s “social and economic landscape.”

• On Future Fundraising Now, Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing, discusses the latest findings of a survey on charitable giving, conducted by YouGov, a British public-opinion site.  The survey…

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• Erratic tweeting can cause an organization’s Twitter account to lose followers, writes Ken Goldstein on the Nonprofit Consultant Blog. Mr. Goldstein says he stopped following an organization after receiving hundreds of tweets from the group within three hours. The incident, he says, underscores the notion that social media can easily be abused when the recipient’s information needs are not considered.

• Holden Karnofsky, a co-founder of the nonprofit-evaluation group GiveWell, writes on his blog that the closure of the microfinance group Unitus highlights why donors need to pay more attention to whether charities have “room for more funding.” (See The Chronicle’s story on Unitus’s closure). 

• In Chattanooga, Tenn., Children’s Home/Chambliss Shelter provides administrative services to five other nonprofit child care providers. Jean Butzen, a nonprofit management consultant,…

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• Writing on Change.org, Ryan Allis, founder of iContact, an e-mail marketing company, provides advice on how billionaires inspired by the Giving Pledge can have the most impact. The Giving Pledge was put forth recently by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage billionaires to give away 50 percent ore more of their wealth to charity.

• Charitable contributions to nonprofit groups responding to the drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are necessary to ensure that there are independent voices monitoring the clean-up, Penny Fujiko Willgerodt, executive director of the Prospect Hill Foundation, writes on Smart Assets. The blog is run by Philanthropy New York. “It is inherently impossible for the perpetrator to monitor itself,” she writes. “It is inherently impossible for the government to monitor itself.”

• Sherine Jayawickrama, of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit …

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• Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of the nonprofit-evaluation group GiveWell, says he is against the government’s efforts to expand the Harlem Children’s Zone approach to other places.

• On her blog, Jocelyn Harmon, director of nonprofit services at Care2, along with Allyson Kapin, founder of Women Who Teach, offer a presentation on how to raise money online.

• The United States is behind the curve in advancing social entrepreneurship and innovation, writes Timothy Ogden, publisher of Philanthropy Action, on the Harvard Business Review blog.

• Ellen Remmer of the Philanthropic Initiative writes about new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help educate donors.

•  Tony Proscio, a consultant, writes on the Duke University Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society blog about his new report on Atlantic Philanthropies’ plans to distribute all its assets and…

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• Academics and experts on the Middle East debate a recent New York Times article describing how tax-deductible gifts from Americans support Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The discussion is featured on a Times blog.

• Melinda Burns, of Miller-McCune, reviews the book Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution From the Global South, in which three British scholars write about how developing countries are reducing poverty by using money from their national budgets to provide cash payments to the poor.  

• What key things should nonprofit organizations not do on social media? Sokunthea Sa Chhabra, director of interactive communications at the Case Foundation, considers the question on the fund’s blog. Among her tips: Never erase a tweet or post. “Someone saw it at one point or other,” she writes. “Own up to your actions and words.”

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• On her blog, Katya Andresen, the chief operating officer at Network for Good, offers her analysis on the nonprofit organization Nanhi Kali‘s fund-raising campaign. The effort features an animated story about a character whose life path is determined by the donations the organization receives. Ms. Andresen argues that the campaign is effective in that it focuses on impact and encourages donations, but she questions whether donors will feel sympathy for an animated character.

• On his blog on The Guardian newspaper’s Web site, the writer David Brindle discusses the recent move by England’s coalition government to urge wealthier British citizens to give one percent of their income to charity as a way to soften the blow of recent cuts to the country’s nonprofit organizations.

• In a rebuttal to the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that businesses can change the world more effectively than nonprofit groups, Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, says we need to get beyond the “sector wars.”

• Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, announces that the nonprofit watchdog group has added “transparency and accountability” to its criteria for evaluating organizations.

• Sean Stannard-Stockton, an adviser to donors and a Chronicle contributor, urges the nonprofit group Unitus to be more open about why it is redirecting its resources from microfinance to an as-yet-to-be-identified “area of maximum socio-economic impact.” Is the group exiting microfinance for positive reasons (it has accomplished its mission), or negative ones (it determined that microfinance wasn’t the area where it could have the most impact), …

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• Lucy Heady, of New Philanthropy Capital, a British nonprofit-evaluation group, says that researchers of nonprofit performance need to be open about how they collect data and must gather information from everybody, not just the people they like.

• Andrea Brock, senior research analyst at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, discusses a new report by the Atlantic Philanthropies, “Giving While Living.”  And Joanne Duhl of the Philanthropic Initiative adds her thoughts to the debate.