By adding the Bed & Bread Club logo to its trucks, the Detroit Salvation Army promotes its monthly giving club.

A simple fundraising idea has given millions of people a place to sleep and a hot meal. The Salvation Army’s Bed & Bread Club has raised more than $100-million nationwide in the last 25 years by persuading people to give monthly.

The charity asks donors to give at least $10 a month, or $120 for the year. More than 19,000 people are now making gifts, and nearly 70 percent of them give additional gifts that exceed the minimum annual requirement.

The Bed & Bread Club is the brainchild of Barbara Antrim Bledsoe, who devised the idea while serving as director of development of a Kansas City, Mo., rescue mission.

Opening all the mail the mission received from donors, Ms. Bledsoe, who is now …

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Charities that provide food, shelter, and other basic necessities have struggled to keep up with exploding demand for services in the sluggish recovery. But donors have stepped up their giving to cover at least some of the increased needs, a new study suggests.

Still, holding onto those new donors has been a challenge; some of the charities say many donors stopped giving after two years or more.

The number of donors to 13 religious shelters nationwide increased by 12 percent, to 15,555 people, from 2008 to 2010, before declining slightly last year to 15,421, according to an analysis of donations of $10,000 or less by Brewer Direct, a marketing-consulting firm.

The dollar value of donations during that time increased by 30 per cent to more than $1.8-million.

The size of the average gift grew from a low of $152 in 2008 to $175 last year, and the number of gifts made annually…

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NPR’s Car Talk and PBS’s Masterpiece Theater could soon become big fundraising boosters for the nation’s charities.

The Federal Communications Commission is inviting comments on a proposal to allow public radio and television stations to raise money for any nonprofit. Now stations are solely allowed to raise money for their own programs and operations, in part because regulators wanted to ensure broadcasters put all their energy into educational programs.

Stations have been allowed to raise money for big catastrophes, for example after Hurricane Katrina. But they had to go through a special process of getting a waiver from the federal communications agency.

Under the FCC plan, public radio and television stations could spend up to 1 percent of their annual broadcast time—about 88 hours per year—doing on-air fundraising appeals for any charity they want to help.

The FCC is…

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An online fundraising challenge to spur giving among minorities ended Thursday night after raising $2.2-million in just 10 days. The money will be shared by Associated Black Charities, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and 2o other charities that serve minorities.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation kicked off the Cultures of Giving Donor Challenge on April 17.  It offered a dollar-for-dollar match—up to $20,000—for donations made online to each of the 22 charities, all grantees of the foundation.

During the campaign, charities also competed in one-day contests to see which ones could raise the most to improve education, health, or the financial security of the people they serve.

At the end of the competition, Kellogg also offered a $100,000 prize to the charity that raised the most in the 10-day drive. The winner was the American India Foundation, a charity that raised $325,752….

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A just-hired fundraiser landed several big gifts after taking donors out for drinks. Now he is asking his organization to reimburse him for some hefty bar tabs. But was it ethical for the fundraiser to get his prospects drunk?

Gary Ravetto, a fundraising consultant, received a slew of comments on The Chronicle‘s LinkedIn group after posing this question from a former client. She asked Mr. Ravetto for advice about her new development director whose meetings with donors often take place at a bar.

“His strategy has been to get them drunk and they more easily reach for their checkbooks,” Mr. Ravetto wrote. The client, he added, “wants to know if this approach is acceptable or should she stop it. There have been no complaints thus far.”

Judging from the online comments prompted by the post, many fundraisers believe that mixing alcohol and fundraising is an unethical ploy, though some…

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Fundraisers at Newark’s main art center will get a chance to prove their talent in attracting corporate and other big donors as the institution takes main stage on NBC’s popular weekly show “America’s Got Talent.”

In Newark, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center expects to reap substantial financial and other benefits from a new partnership with the television program.

In some ways, the arrangement creates strange bedfellows. The center is best known for showcasing ballet, classical music, and opera, while less highbrow forms of entertainment are featured on the television show.

But as “America’s Got Talent” starts its 10-week production cycle at the center in July, it will help the arts center attract business during the typically slow period for indoor performance spaces.

The deal came about because the shock jock Howard Stern said he would agree to serve as a judge on the …

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More than half of churches say donations increased last year, the first year a majority of congregations achieved gains since 2009.

This year’s “State of the Plate” annual survey, which assessed giving to 1,360 churches nationwide, found that 51 percent reported increased donations in 2011, 14 percent said contributions were flat, and 32 percent suffered declines.

The researchers interpreted the findings as evidence that congregations are finally recovering from the Great Recession. At 51 percent, they said, the number of churches reporting increases in this year’s survey was up from 43 percent in the 2010 survey and 36 percent in the 2009 survey.

Meanwhile, the percentage of churches reporting a decline in giving dropped to 32 percent, compared with 39 percent in 2010 and 38 percent in 2009.

“I was pleasantly surprised that we seemed to turn a corner,” said Brian Kluth,…

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Charities don’t do nearly enough to tell donors how their money will be used. That’s one of the striking preliminary findings from a new survey by the researcher Penelope Burk. This is the fourth year that Ms. Burke, president of Cygnus Applied Research, has conducted an online survey with thousands of donors. (See my article about last year’s findings.)

The survey asked donors “what could unleash your philanthropy at a whole new level?” Nearly half of the donors said that they had more money to give but held back. Many of them said that was largely because they had not received enough information about how past donations had been spent.

Ms. Burk is careful to say that the preliminary responses she released are not necessarily representative of the entire group of donors.  Still, fundraisers may want to take note of the comments she shared. One donor wanted “the need for funds…

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Susan G. Komen for the Cure is conducting a poll to learn more about the best ways to apologize for the furor it aroused a few weeks ago when it cut off support for Planned Parenthood, then reinstated it after sustaining days of protest from angry donors and others.

Nonprofit experts say the poll may well do the opposite of what Komen wants to do—soothe donor anger—and offers a lesson to other nonprofits on what not to do when it comes to managing an image problem.

The online survey asks people to rate the believability of an array of statements that are  are designed to appeal either to conservatives who believe that Komen is “letting left-wing liberals dictate its internal policies” or liberals who see the charity becoming “a punching bag of anti-choice Republicans.”

Another set of statements offers different types of apologies from Komen and asks people to rate whether…

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How much can top fundraisers expert to earn? At least one fundraiser is paid well over $1-million a year: Anne McSweeney, who is leading a big capital campaign at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was paid more than $1.4-million in 2010, according to her organization’s latest Form 990.

Richard Naum, the next highest-paid fundraiser at the center, earned $844,100 in 2010, a year in which Memorial Sloan-Kettering raised $244.6-million.

I sought out that kind of information for an article about St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, which raised more than $698-million last year but was ranked as one of 20 “least efficient financially” big charities by Forbes magazine. The reason: St. Jude’s high fundraising costs, which include salaries, the magazine said.

Still, other big hospitals and cancer centers paid their fundraisers more than St. Jude did in 2010, but they raised far…

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