Events remain a top source of fundraising for nonprofits but advertising and promotion dollars are steadily dwindling making it harder to pump up participation and donations. “I believe it’s an art to work with a small budget, especially when the economy takes a nose dive,” says Mandy J. Kimmer, APR, CPRC, Marketing/Public Relations Coordinator, The OC Club, Orange County Parks & Recreation.
Read more...

Hailed as the saving grace for businesses and nonprofits alike, social networking specialists and efforts are as plentiful as cash donations once were. But are new tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube delivering on their promise of added money and support for struggling nonprofits or is social networking just another passing phase? Read more...

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer organization, maintains, on its Web site, a chronology of U.S. data breaches. The list, which the organization began in January 2005, provides the basic details of hundreds of breaches in the for-profit, government, educational, and non-profit (charitable) sectors; breaches are common enough that the list is updated twice a week. The total number of records containing sensitive data that have been involved -- again, this is just in the U.S., and just in three years -- 252,276,766. Read more...

Auctions have long been a crucial, and lucrative, element of nonprofit fundraising campaigns, and their popularity has grown in recent years. According to the National Auctioneers Association, more than $16.2 billion was raised in charity auctions in 2007. While the raw dollar figures suggest that auctions are lucrative, dollar returns are not the only indicators of an auction's success. And according to the leaders of two major online auction companies that cater specifically to nonprofits, if your organization is only conducting offline, "event" auctions, and not utilizing online auction resources, it's likely you're passing up many opportunities. Read more...