The death of actress and animal advocate Betty White has provided a fundraising boon for animal-focused nonprofits and charities, as donations in her honor have flowed toward a wide swath of organizations. White, who is best known for her roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls, died at 99 this past Dec. 31. White’s primary animal-related association was with the Los Angeles…

A guitar auction featuring instruments from some of the biggest names in music raised more than $2 million for Music Rising. Lots featured in the mid-December action included Music Rising co-founder The Edge’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” custom Signature Fender Stratocaster, which sold for $410,000, and Paul McCartney’s tour-and-studio-played left-handed Wings Yamaha BB-1200 bass guitar, which fetched $390,000. Other lots included…

“Giving Machines” placed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in 10 cities across the United States generated more than $3.7 million in material donations as of late December. The full-sized vending machines offered opportunities for individuals to purchase a variety of activities or goods, such as textbooks, blankets, livestock or food or contributions toward physical plant upgrades, on behalf of a…

#GivingTuesday has come and gone and now it’s just time to put your feet up and coast the rest of the way, amiright? Not quite. The end of the year and the first few weeks of the new year is crunch time for nonprofits, with many banking on raising as much as half their budgets in the final weeks of the year and #GivingTuesday was…

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has reintroduced its Light the World Giving Machines. The full-sized vending machines, which offer consumers ways to fund a variety of local and global nonprofits, have been installed in 10 cities throughout the United States. The campaign will run through Jan. 1, 2022. Items offered in each machine’s 30 slots range from location to location. Typically,…

More than 26,000 new donors heard the call for help on the news program ABC World News Tonight and contributed more that $3.5 million to feed the people of Madagascar through the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) and World Food Program USA (WFP-USA). The story was weeks in the making but the donations started immediately after the Nov. 18 broadcast segment where anchor David Muir…

Many of us learned how to structure a sentence way back in elementary school. Sometimes a simple refresher can help get you back to the basics. The same could be said of something as simple as a fundraising email. Samuel Vilchez Santiago, manager, Movement, Issues, and Charitable Organizations (MICO), and Dan Michaels, associate, MICO, at ActBlue, presented a workshop titled “Digital Fundraising 101: Building People…

Fees to for-profit fundraising firms working with charities in New York have remained steady and even declined slightly since 2017. In the annual report for consumers titled “Pennies For Charity,” New York State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Letitia James reported 27% of a donation, on average, went to the fundraisers during 2020, down from 28% for 2019 and 31% for 2017. Various fundraising associations…

Nearly six in 10 (59%) nonprofit leaders believe GivingTuesday is a “significant” part of their fundraising efforts. That figure includes some of the 45% who are actively fundraising today on GivingTuesday 2021 for the first time, according to Fundraising Best Practices for Giving Tuesday, a report from Tucson, Ariz.-based fundraising platform provider RallyUp. GivingTuesday is held annually on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. First-time participants…

Charitable giving has kept pace through the first half of this year with the record fundraising of 2020 thanks to strong donor retention but new data for the second quarter could be a signal that COVID giving trends could be cooling off. The 2021 Second Quarter Fundraising Report, released today by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP), compares giving data from the first half of 2021…

The 2021 outlook for nonprofits in the United Kingdom is considerably more optimistic than it was in 2020, with two-and-a-half times as many believing they will thrive in the upcoming year, according to The Status of UK Fundraising 2021 Benchmark Report, a new 43-page report from Blackbaud. But those most likely to see turnarounds are those that have embraced digital technology as part of their…