Per the post today from someone at a nonprofit asking if a foundation the nonprofit had been contacted by was "for real" (the foundation DOES appear on Candid, formerly Guidestar, but there's scant info).

If a foundation or someone that says they want to donate to you is asking for an annual report or a program report to evaluate you regarding a grant, that should be public info on your web site, which you can direct them to.

If your nonprofit or NGO is asked by any new donor for your bank account info, do NOT give it. Not until you have done a GREAT DEAL of due diligence. Any legitimate donor will be fine with that.

NEVER pay a fee - a "registration' fee or a "tax" or a "processing fee" or whatever for a donation. NEVER.

The Nebraska Attorney General’s Office has warned that scammers, posing as wealthy, interested, first-time donors, send large fraudulent checks, often five figures or more, to nonprofits, unsolicited. But then these donors quickly request a partial refund from the charity, claiming a mistake. The nonprofit issues the refund, the scammer vanishes, and the original donation check bounces, leaving the nonprofit with a significant financial loss.

This article details how the scam works.

With so many scams targeting nonprofits, claiming to be a foundation or a wealthy individual with a donation for the nonprofit, your nonprofit needs protocols before accepting a large, unsolicited donation. For instance, in response, ask for:

• The foundation's or the person's physical address.
• How they heard about you and what activity you engage in that got their attention.
• The foundation's web site address - or a reason why they do not have such.
• The foundation's most recent 990.
• The name of two nonprofits the foundation funded in 2025 or 2024 or even 2023, that you could call yourself and find out if this is a legitimate gift.

Also tell this person that all donations are final and cannot be refunded. If they are scammers, you are likely to never hear from them again.

If the are legit, they will be fine with all of that.

But if you don't hear from them, pass their email on to the State Attorney General for wherever it is they say they are registered. If they don't provide that, pass it on to your state's attorney general.

Deposit checks QUICKLY and make sure they have cleared before you count that money as a for real donation.

With all that said - I have worked at nonprofits that did receive large, unsolicited gifts from individuals. It does sometimes happen. In one case, the person called and talked to the receptionist, just asking all sorts of questions that she could easily answer (the info was all available on the web site). When the gift showed up, he referred back to this phone call. But in both cases, the donation wasn't "for real" until that check cleared.

Your thoughts?

Hi Everyone,

Full disclosure.

I am the founder of Impact Collage, a for-profit company.

After learning that most donors donate only once to a nonprofit’s mission, I started exploring why and wondered whether it could be linked to donors, especially smaller ones, who might have felt their donation was transactional and didn’t make much of an impact. Smaller donors typically get a thank-you email, but no public recognition, and may drift away. Also, traditional donor walls usually have room only for major donors, and they sit in lobbies that most donors never see now that donations come in online from across the country.

What if nonprofits didn’t have to set a giving threshold for public recognition? Smaller donors could also receive public recognition they would value and in a cost-effective way for the nonprofit.

With that in mind, I built Impact Collage, a platform that lets nonprofits recognize donors of all sizes on their website with a virtual donor wall featuring donor photos, names, messages, and an optional link to their social media profile.

Donors can easily share their public placement on the wall with their own networks, increasing organic visibility and social proof for the nonprofit's cause.

My aim is twofold: to make smaller donors feel seen and valued, and to help nonprofits grow donations over time from supporters who feel more connected to their cause and to each other.

https://impactcollage.com

I would love to hear what you think about the concept (Good or Bad :) ) and answer any questions you have.

Thank you for your time.

Hello NP friends,

I received an unsolicited email this morning in our general email inbox from an American Charitable Foundation. The subject line was Financial Opportunity for (my organizations name). the email did have an Ein and I do see that when I search charity navigator the EIN does come up but I still feel unsure, especially since there are so many scams out there.

Has anyone ever had any emails from them, funding from them or any relationships?

Thanks, a nervous development director

A blog about the current state of trust between the public and the nonprofit sector and how Americans understand, perceive, and relate to philanthropy in its various forms. 

https://johnsoncenter.org/blog/public-trust-in-transition/

Very often I see queries from people who say "oh I wish to help some people this month. Which charity should I help? Who are trustworthy? Who spends the money well?" and things like that. If your intention is to help, shouldn't you just splurge that philanthropic mind without being measuring? Who cares what the recipient does with it or if another recipient needs it more than whom you helped? There are millions who are always in need and no one can host contests to decide who deserves help more than everyone else. That will unnecessarily condition your mind into thinking of charity as a tiresome job and quit doing it altogether.

The below is a parable associated with the Mahabharata:

You hear about these famous persons making huge donations. Most persons can never match those big numbers, but what is it relative to my own net worth?

So I worked on a little website to check that easily:
Isitpeanuts.com

For example the 100M Bezos ga e to the Mamdani campaign promises is only 0.031% of his wealth. If your net worth is 800k$ it's 220$ in comparison.

Another Jensen Huang just donated 75M to the Vanderbilt University, it's 0.037% or 300$ if your net worth is 800k$.

How does that put things in perspective for you?

What if stagnant revenue reflects a gap in your organization’s systems, not a lack of commitment? When income depends heavily on a few sources, it’s reasonable to ask whether your current approach can support the mission over time. A fundraising audit checklist helps leaders examine the conditions behind revenue, rather than focusing only on financial records.

Use this practical guide to review leadership, staffing, systems, accountability, CRM, donor pipelines, development operations, and revenue readiness. For each area, gather evidence, note what’s working, identify a gap, and name a next step. This is a structured resource development assessment, not a formal financial audit or legal compliance review. The goal is a shared, evidence-based picture of readiness and a manageable path toward stronger revenue diversification.

Key Takeaways

• A fundraising audit checklist helps you assess the people, processes, and systems that support revenue, not just financial records.
• Review readiness across eight connected dimensions to see where your organization is strong and where capacity may be limited.
• Capture evidence, gaps, and an owner for each review area to build a shared, practical picture of development capacity.
• Use mission impact, urgency, and readiness to choose a manageable first priority and define how progress will be observed.

This question is for individuals:

You may have already started receiving requests for financial donations in conjunction with the November, December and January holidays. Or for you, that may start in a couple of weeks.

For many folks, times are very tough this year, with inflation, joblessness, under employment, etc.

How are you prioritizing/budgeting financial support to charities, nonprofits, etc. at this time of year? Are you cutting back? Do you have a limit on how much you are going to give overall? How are you choosing which programs to support?

Share your thoughts as the Season of Giving begins in many countries.

Seven months ago, we committed $175 million for 2026 to GiveWell’s recommendations, which we think represent the gold standard for evidence-backed, cost-effective global health giving. In partnership with Good Ventures, the foundation of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, we’re now increasing that commitment to $1 billion for 2026...

This substantial increase is a one-off surge rather than a new steady state, driven most notably by our growing expectations of future giving from Good Ventures and other funders. While the future is uncertain, we currently expect the coming years to see significant increases in philanthropic funding for the kinds of programs GiveWell recommends. As a result, we and Good Ventures are accelerating spending now, both to fill cost-effective gaps today and to create scalable opportunities for future donors. Future funding is far from guaranteed; this is a bet on laying the groundwork for others to emerge and pick up the baton.

More from Coefficient Giving.

It's easy. You can choose just one time , one day a week, or you can do it any time you log into Reddit.

You just check the queue or posts that Reddit has held as a violation, and you decide if, yes, that's a no no, or, no, that's fine, you silly Reddit automod, and you approve it.

And unless the lead mod is on vacation, you can decide you don't know and just wait for her to do it.

You also read through the new posts and comments and decide yea or nay, based on the rules. And, again, unless the lead mod is on vacation, you can decide you don't know and just wait for her to do it.

You could do lots more, but that's the minimum!

Candidates should:

• Have at least 50 points in comment karma.
• Have a public profile (meaning I can see your posts to other groups and know a bit about your character).
• DM me and tell me why you are on r/philanthropy at all.

That's it.

The nonprofit organization collecting and managing private donations for the White House East Wing ballroom project is the Trust for the National Mall.

From the HIll (links are the Hill's)

Major donors to President Trump’s White House ballroom project were revealed in a new list obtained by The Washington Post on Thursday.

According to the Post, the list reveals more than $330 million in private donations to fund the ballroom effort, most of which was donated prior to the demolition of the East Wing in October 2025.

The top donors include the Adelson Family Foundation, a pro-Israel nonprofit, as well as major tech companies Apple and Nvidia, all of which gave $25 million each.

Lockheed Martin, Microsoft and Palantir donated $10 million each, Google gave $22 million through a lawsuit settlement with Trump, and Meta and Amazon each gave $5 million.

The Washington Post noted that Trump himself was not listed as a donor to the ballroom despite past statements that he would partially fund the project.

“The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time of the demolition. 

Trump had hoped to raise $400 million to fund the ballroom, and the Post’s list shows he is short of that.

I manage an automotive repair shop. I recently had a client sign over a title to a 2016 Chrysler 200 with a supposedly bad engine. Used engines cost $1100-1400 my cost. I’m in between fixing it up and donating it to someone in need, or just selling it off as is.

I have donated a car before to a recovering addict before that followed my rules in order to get the donation. So I’m either gonna do the same, or do it for a family. I’m not making the most(about $1300-1700) a week. So the financial hit wouldn’t be monstrous. But would you just sell it as is & let someone else deal with it?

Really new to the philanthropy world as a donor, but spent plenty of time running a microscopic arts nonprofit (city and state grant funded, mostly).

I’m seeing posts that it is hard for small nonprofits to handle donations from a DAF? Could someone help me understand?

Also, after administering teeny grants for 10 years, as a donor I’m also really attracted to direct giving to unofficial causes that don’t have the official nonprofit structure (lots of art events don’t though they provide the same community benefit that they would if they did have all the paperworkey things). Because just the idea of making an artist provide me a rubric to prove people gain something from art, like I just can’t be down with that.

My ideal target is $100k giving per year, through DAF and small non-nonprofit gifts. So, what is the DAF best for? Is it easy? Or do you wish you’d chosen something different?

From October 2025:

Over the years, a genteel nonprofit organization called the Trust for the National Mall has raised money to help care for the cherry trees dotting the Tidal Basin. It upgraded the U.S. Park Police stables on the National Mall and hosted pickleball games on the grassy expanse between American monuments.

Now it has a new assignment: handling the millions of dollars pouring in for President Donald Trump’s gilded White House ballroom.

The nonpartisan group is serving as the steward for what Trump has said is more than $350 million in private donations from individuals, foundations and corporations to remake part of the old East Wing into a 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

More from NBC News.

I’ve been supporting a couple of men doing mission work in rural Kenya for a while now, and before that I gave the usual way, through larger organisations. The difference in what I hear back has taught me more about the donor side of this than anything I read.

The common assumption when a small field worker goes quiet is that the work stalled or the money drifted. In my experience it is almost never that. It is usually one of four things.

The first is cost. In a lot of rural areas, sending photos and video eats mobile data, and data is paid for out of the same small budget as everything else. A supporter asking for “more updates” is, without realising it, asking for a line item nobody funded.

The second is fear of the boring report. Field workers learn quickly that donors respond to breakthroughs and crises. So in a normal week, when the work is just steady (the same people meeting, the same repairs, the same visits) they send nothing, because nothing feels worth reporting. Those normal weeks are exactly the ones a supporter needs to see to trust the work.

The third is format mismatch. Many of the people doing the most practical work are not writers. A monthly newsletter is a real burden. A voice note or one photo with a sentence is not.

The fourth is reporting load that does not match the gift. Restricting a small gift to one narrow use, then asking for receipts for every item, can cost the worker more hours than the gift was worth.

What changed things for me was agreeing on the update before giving, not after. One photo and one sentence, roughly weekly, in whatever app they already use. Covering the data cost outright. Giving more of it unrestricted once trust was built. And telling them plainly that the ordinary weeks are the ones I want to hear about.

The updates I value most now are fairly dull. The same faces a few months apart, a roof that was half done and then finished, a meeting that kept happening. That steady record has told me more about whether the money is working than any polished annual report did.

Most of the silence people complain about in giving is designed into the arrangement from the start. It can usually be designed out just as easily.

To help protect charitable nonprofits and the generous donors who support them, the National Council of Nonprofits and its network of state and regional associations of nonprofits have published four principles for ethical online fundraising platforms:

https://councilofnonprofits.org/articles/protecting-donors-nonprofits-and-communities-unethical-online-fundraising-platforms

Phil Buchanan sits down with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, for a wide-ranging conversation on what this moment of backlash demands of individual and institutional donors. Stevenson places the current retreat from racial equity commitments within a much longer arc: the recurring pattern stretching from Reconstruction through Jim Crow to today, in which periods of racial justice progress in America are met by a deliberate counter-narrative, and progress stalls until a new narrative takes hold.

Drawing on his own personal history, Stevenson makes the case that philanthropy's work on racial equity has too often been reactive rather than grounded in real historical learning, and argues that donors who invest in understanding this history will be far better positioned to fund effective, defensible strategies, from addressing the legacy of Black displacement during the Great Migration to reframing what accountability should have looked like after the Voting Rights Act passed. He also responds directly to donors who worry that a racial equity focus alienates potential allies, distinguishing the problems of poverty from the problems of racial bias while insisting the two shouldn't be conflated.

Stevenson reflects on his years serving on the board of the Ford Foundation, and what he learned about the gap between funders and grantees, and why he believes that foundation boards need more representation from people with direct nonprofit experience.

From Lauren Dobson-Hughes on BlueSky:

A major problem with donor funding is its project-based faddishness

Of the 65 funding calls I'm tracking this month, 28 are for AI. AI in education, AI and GBV, AI and health. Donors are pivoting from core support to AI

But for grantees, you cannot do project work without core funding

If you're an education organisation, it's no good getting $100k in philanthropic funding to explore AI in education, if you have no money for staff, office, and basic education programs

And you don't even want to explore AI in education. You mostly want the fringe 15% overhead to support core work

Original post below:

Clermont, Florida police warned shoppers about a scam outside a local Walmart where people posing as sports team fundraisers are accused of charging donors more than they agreed to give.

According to police, the individuals approached customers and asked for donations to support various sports teams.

In some cases, they sold candy and told customers they could not accept cash, only card payments. Police said victims later found their cards were charged for more than the amount they had agreed to donate.

Police said the individuals used flyers to make the sports teams appear legitimate.

Each incident involved multiple males described as being in their late teens to early 20s, typically wearing hoodies and shorts and carrying backpacks, police said.

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2026/10/03/clermont-police-warn-of-donation-scam-outside-walmart/

A Mobile, Alabama couple was arrested in Indiana, accused of using children in what investigators describe as a football fundraiser scam: the couple dressed children in football uniforms and sent them to businesses claiming they were raising money for football equipment.

Quite the story. Feel bad for the kids:

https://www.fox10tv.com/2026/05/07/mobile-couple-accused-using-children-fake-football-fundraiser-during-custody-dispute/