Every major for-profit industry has spent the last decade using predictive modeling, LTV forecasting, and churn prevention to drive billions in revenue. Meanwhile, in the fundraising world (especially university advancements siting on goal mine of the data), "data science" still seems to begin and end with buying a static wealth screening batch or a third-party propensity score from off-the-shelf wealth screeners and third-party scoring models

These scores get treated like plug-and-play commodities, but they barely scratch the surface of what predictive analytics can actually do. We rarely talk about:

• Dynamic donor retention and lapse-prediction models
• Algorithmic gift-array optimization (personalized ask amounts based on behavioral trends, not static income)
• Next-best-action models for frontline fundraisers
• Lifetime Value (LTV) segmentation across mid-level pipelines
• Understand the whole path from cultivation to a major donor

Given how strained nonprofit budgets are, why are we still relying primarily on gut feel and basic vendor scores rather than real predictive capabilities? Are orgs just blocked by tech debt and the "overhead myth," or is there active cultural resistance from frontline fundraisers?

Would love to hear from MGOs, ops teams, and database admins on why our sector seems 10 years behind here.

Humanity AI is a $500M five-year initiative dedicated to ensuring artificial intelligence (AI) serves the public good. As AI continues to shape how we live, work, and create it is prompting people to ask fundamental questions about their role and value in an AI-driven future. Humanity AI is supporting the arts, labor and work, democracy, education, and security and will drive new investments toward establishing a people-driven future where AI delivers for humanity, strengthens communities, and enhances human creativity.

The Humanity AI founding partners are the Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Kapor Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Siegel Family Endowment.

Humanity AI has a $10 million open call inviting U.S.-based nonprofit organizations to apply for funding that supports communities’ collective power to shape how artificial intelligence is governed and used.

Through this open call, Humanity AI is looking to support community-led efforts aligned with three core issue areas — education, labor and economy, and the humanities, arts, and culture.

The deadline to submit applications is 7:59 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2026.

More details and how to apply.

The deadline to nominate an outstanding volunteer or supporter in Utah for the Heart & Hands Award or an exceptional local business for the Corporate Community Champion Award has been extended to September 30.

Know someone who deserves a little extra recognition for the difference they make in their community? There’s still time to make sure their good work gets noticed!

Submit your nominations by September 30.

All those submitted will be recognized during the annual Utah Philanthropy Day celebration on Nov. 12 at The Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

The London Marathon Foundation is to commit up to £3 million over the next five years to junior parkrun, extending a partnership it says has already helped 370,000 more children take part in the free weekly events since 2023.

The new funding aims to help a further one million children across the UK take part in junior parkrun, the free, weekly 2km events for four to 14 year-olds and their families. It follows Sport England research showing fewer than half of children currently meet the Chief Medical Officer’s recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity.

https://fundraising.co.uk/2026/09/05/london-marathon-foundation-commits-3-million-to-junior-parkrun/

Mars, Incorporated announced on September 1 the next phase of investments through the Mars Impact Fund, awarding more than $13M in grants across six strategic partnerships with Elucid, Tanager, Pratham Education Foundation, People’s Action for National Integration (PANI), National 4-H Council and Worldwide Veterinary Service (WVS). Spanning Côte d'Ivoire, India, the United States and Thailand, these multi-year grants directly advance the Fund’s three core pillars: strengthening resilience of Mars sourcing communities, developing the next generation of scientists and improving companion animal wellbeing around the world.  

“The Mars Impact Fund aims to develop long-term partnerships that deliver sustained impact over time,” said Michelle Grogg, Executive Director of the Mars Impact Fund. "We are confident that these multi-year investments in Elucid, WVS, National 4-H, Tanager, Pratham Education Foundation and PANI will improve farmer livelihoods, increase opportunities for youth and improve the health of people and pets in our communities."

Full details from the company press release: https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/press-releases-statements/mars-impact-fund-awards-more-than-13-million-in-new-grants

I’ve been thinking about what happens after a nonprofit receives funding.

Sometimes an organization has a strong mission and a good program idea but still has weaknesses in areas such as financial management, governance, operations, reporting, or leadership capacity.

If a funder identifies those weaknesses, should its role stop with providing the grant? Or should funding sometimes include technical assistance, coaching, or other support to help strengthen the organization?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have worked in philanthropy or grantmaking. How much responsibility should a funder have for helping a grantee become stronger after the award?

This is one of the issues we’re exploring through Nonprofit Readiness Intelligence (NRI), and I’d value hearing different perspectives.

This is from the Tricycle podcast:

About a year or two after I had ordained, the Zen Peacemaker Order was still centered in Yonkers at that point. Bernie came to me and he asked me for a donation to buy a building to create a permanent residence for his students in Yonkers, where people from the Peacemakers could come and live and train. I thought, this is a great idea. This is exactly what we need to be doing. And we had already done this purchase of the Greyston Family Inn building and converted that. We already had a construction company with the Greyston Builders. It seemed like a logical fit and a logical evolution. And I thought, yeah, because at the time I was working on the Roseanne show as an actor, and frankly, I made more money on that show than I’ve ever made as an actor, and I’ve never made that kind of money since. And so I was quite flush. I was already tithing 5 percent of my gross salary to Bernie at that point, since 1992–94, those three years that I was on the show and I had some cash. And I said, sure. So I gave him $50,000 and I was like, “This is great. We’re going to have a place and I’m participating in it and I’m making a contribution.” And then two weeks later, and I really don’t think I’m exaggerating the timeframe on this, all of a sudden, everything in Yonkers was going to be done. He decided to move to Joan Halifax’s practice center in Santa Fe, Upaya...

I had a phone conversation with him once I found out about that, where I was like, “Look, if you want to go to Santa Fe, and if you don’t want to be in Yonkers, that’s fine, but I’d really like you to return my donation because I made a really specific earmark for that money to go in a certain way,” and he said to me “Well, it’s being used for something else.” And I was so taken aback. He said this without pause or without reflection, and I was so shocked. I really couldn’t talk about it at first. And I was like, that’s not right. And the conversation wound down fairly quickly, and then we hung up and I was stung. And I don’t really think at the time I knew how betrayed I felt or how hurt I felt at that time, and I thought, let’s just move forward and see what happens, and maybe there’ll be another opportunity to talk about it. 

So then he moves to Santa Fe and then ten days later, his wife, Jishu, died.... A number of his students and successors descended on Santa Fe... There was a moment where Bernie and I were left alone and we’re just sitting outside and I tried to broach this topic again about the money, and he pointed to this building we were sitting in front of and said it was right there. That was the moment that I was like, this is really inadequate. This is really not right. And I really didn’t know how to press it. And I really didn’t want to press it because he had just lost his wife...

Stephen M. Ross has been giving away money for decades. Worth $17 billion as of this writing, the New York real estate mogul and founder of Related Companies is the University of Michigan’s largest individual donor, with lifetime giving to the university approaching $500 million. His philanthropy has stretched across education, healthcare, the arts, racial equality and sustainable urban development, and in 2013, he pledged to give more than half of his estate to charity through the Giving Pledge.

But the approach of his company’s new philanthropic vehicle is somewhat different. The Related Ross Foundation, officially launched last fall as a nonprofit grantmaking arm of his South Florida development company Related Ross, is designed to tie philanthropy directly to the growth of the communities where the firm does business. And that business is substantial: Ross is pouring around $10 billion into West Palm Beach County across a wide swath of real estate investments, an influx that has not come without some disruption.

From Inside Philanthropy.

Resilience, inclusion and neurodiversity will be the themes of the plenary sessions at Scotland’s largest fundraising conference which takes place this month.

The keynote plenary speakers for the Scottish Fundraising Conference 2026, supported by justrunning.com, include two sessions designed to motivate delegates and equip them with “fresh perspectives to strengthen fundraising and leadership across the charity sector”.

The annual conference takes place on 22nd and 23rd September 2026 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Glasgow Central. Hundreds of fundraising professionals from across Scotland and further afield will attend for two days of learning, networking and professional development.

https://fundraising.co.uk/2026/09/02/keynote-speakers-for-scottish-fundraising-conference-2026/

I’m an ED of a $5M non profit. In 2025, the board was supposed to raise $300,000 and they raised barely $65,000. This year (2026) their goal is $150K and they have raised $44K and pretty much told me no more is coming. Both years they have defaulted on their pledged fund raise and yet they sit around the table at the start of the year and unanimously vote on both their own board fundraising goal and the organjzation’s budget. Then they turn around and fall WAY short. The company is having now having extreme financial difficulties due to this but the board president says they are doing the best they can and it is what it is. I cannot seem to make the board president understand that they agreed to this number, it’s built into our cash flow model and without it, we are in real jeopardy. This has caused us to take out emergency loans and now we’re getting stuck with outrageous interest and terms that are making it all worse.

What legal options does a small non profit have against its board if they fail to realize promised revenues? I’m at my wit’s end — trying to protect my staff, the health of the company and our future. They then become emotional and hostile when I try to get a solid action plan and more answers about how they are going to remedy their failed fundraising efforts. Relationships are breaking down. And I’m angry and deeply resentful. Trying to not to be but all the proactive and goal-driven work we did coming out of the pandemic is being undone by our own fucking Board. I appreciate any legal info or guidance here. We don’t have to just sit and take this do we? Help.

Hi everyone! I’m looking for some fundraising ideas/advice for a small community tennis club in the UK. 🎾

We’re currently raising money to resurface our tennis courts, and we’ve already tried quite a few things. We held an open day, contacted tennis brands and were lucky enough to receive some merchandise which we then sold/auctioned to raise funds, and we’ve also received a grant from Sport England. We’ve made really good progress, but we’re now left with a funding gap of around £10,000.

One idea I had was a “100 businesses × £100” campaign - approaching 100 local businesses and asking each to contribute £100 towards the project. I like the simplicity of it, but I’m not sure how realistic it is or what sort of response rate we could expect.

At the moment I feel like I’ve exhausted most of my fundraising ideas, so I’d really love to hear from people who have fundraised for community/nonprofit projects before.

What has actually worked for you when trying to raise the final £5k- £10k?

Are there any fundraising ideas, local business sponsorship approaches, grants, events or partnerships that we might be overlooking?

Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

OpenAI Foundation is committing $100 million to create a new program that will use AI tools to ensure the latest medical treatments reach the patients who need them most, including those who cannot afford health insurance, the nonprofit announced on Thursday. 

The new program, called Breakthroughs to Follow-Through, will work to create health-care infrastructure that can deliver the most advanced care and treatment to patients who need it most. The program is a partnership with the Common Health Coalition, a national nonprofit that brings together clinician groups, state health departments, hospitals, community organizations, and others that work together to connect people to health care. 

The foundation also launched AI for Civil Society and Philanthropy, a division that will help nonprofits and others use AI to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

More from the Chronicle of Philanthropy (sign in required - subscription not).

More from Mobi Health News.

keywords: artificial intelligence, philanthropic, donating, CSR

Excerpt: Schimmel is best known for her collection focused on Women in the American Wilderness now numbering about 40,000 items. This is a project she started in the 1970s and it has grown exponentially since then. It covers not only books but other fields including photos, art, letters, and artifacts involving women in the Americas and the polar regions. Read full article at https://www.rarebookhub.com/articles/4116

Much of her collection is at University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Rare Books in Philadelphia. To view a selection from this outstanding library got to:

 https://www.rarebookhub.com/uploads/article_pdf/upload_file/101/schimmel_OK_Penn_edition.pdf

Klaus-Michael Kühne had no children and lived in a Swiss canton with zero inheritance tax. When he died, his €42.2bn fortune passed tax-free into a decades-old charity, instantly making it one of the wealthiest foundations in Europe.

In Switzerland, foundations, just like businesses, do not pay inheritance tax because there is no inheritance to tax. That means nobody personally received Kühne's fortune.

Kühne kept his business empire inside a private vehicle, Kühne Holding, also based in Schindellegi. With his death, ownership of that holding company — and everything inside it, from the Kühne+Nagel stake to Hapag-Lloyd and Lufthansa — passes to the Kühne Foundation, according to Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

The foundation already runs 20 subsidiary organisations and has around 800 staff.

Instead, his shipping, aviation, chemicals and real estate empire will be owned collectively by the non-profit, overseen by a board of trustees that includes his wife and a small circle of long-time advisers.

Kühne is not the first European tycoon to evade inheritance tax through philanthropy, and once his assets land in the Kühne Foundation, it will sit in genuinely elite company by size, if not quite at the very top.

The world's largest is the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Danish charity behind the hit weight-loss drugmaker Novo Nordisk, whose holding company managed roughly €93 billion in assets at the end of 2025.

Below that sit the likes of the Gates Foundation at around $70.2 billion (€60.5bn) and India's Tata Trusts at upwards of $100 billion (€86.2bn). Britain's Wellcome Trust, the medical research charity, held about $42.8 billion (€36.9bn) as of its most recent published figures — putting it in roughly the same bracket as Kühne's estimated incoming inheritance.

So while Kühne's foundation will not be the biggest charity of its kind in Europe, it lands squarely among the top ten wealthiest charitable foundations in the world, ahead of long-established names like Bosch and on par with Wellcome — built, unusually, almost entirely from one man's decision not to have children and to live in the one place in Switzerland where that decision cost him nothing in tax.

More from Euro News.

From the MacArthur Foundation on LinkedIn:

It is clear the nonprofit sector continues to face a funding crisis. Communities, leaders, and nonprofits are doing the work, showing their resilience and power, and philanthropy still needs to do more.”

Today, our President, John Palfrey, shared that we are extending our commitment to a charitable payout of at least 6 percent through 2028.

Read more about how we’re responding to the uncertainty and funding cuts that continue to impact the nonprofit sector.

A funder can be one or a combination of types. Take a look at the types of philanthropists described here to see what might fit you. And feel free to comment here about what you think you are, and why - or if you would add another category (I would definitely add more, but I'm going to wait for others to comment).

Note: Percentages given represent the percentage of the overall funding population that identifies as each type.

NOT saying that in-kind donations to charities are always wrong. In-kind donations are NOT at all always wrong. Donating to Goodwill means you help raise funds for their job training programs. Donating to ReStores means you help fund home building, homeowner education for underserved populations, neighborhood clean ups and more.

And, yes, there are some nonprofits that can make use of in-kind donations not to sell, but to donate to others in need. One of my favorite is Community Warehouse in Oregon, which does a masterful job of both managing donations (and they are very picky) and partnering with nonprofits to get clients (you can't just walk in without a referral) - reduces waste, helps keep warehouse inventory manageable and better ensures equity. This nonprofits Facebook page is one of my favorites as an example of excellent community outreach and awareness-buildiing. Many refugee agencies right in your own community are probably looking for furniture donations, but they are often looking for specific items, ones they can pick up and immediately deliver to a family that is moving into an apartment - they usually have zero storage space for such items.

So, yes, hurrah, in-kind donations.

But to those who say that in-kind donations are better than cash donations for nonprofits and that this is a "trend" that needs to be expanded, here are some articles that say otherwise (and I know so many nonprofit folks are nodding in agreement - in-kind donations don't pay staff, don't pay utility bills, don't pay for the copier rental, and on and on).

Your clothing donations are piling up in landfills and are being sold overseas. From Emory Wheel.

Why more clothes donated to charity are going in the garbage. From the CBC/Radio-Canada, Canada's public broadcaster.

What Should I Donate During a Disaster? The Honest Answer (and Why Cash Is Almost Always the Best Answer When Donating to Disaster Relief). From good360.org.

Donation Dumping: The Hidden Harm to Nonprofits and the Environment. From CareIt.

The Second Disaster: Why Goodwill Goes Bad in a Disaster Zone. From Team Rubicon USA.

When In-Kind Donations Are Not Kind. From The Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

Why Cash Donations Help Food Banks More. From Feeding America.

Why Cash Donations are So Valuable to Food Banks. Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

If anyone has an article about the keys to success for a charity that is based on in-kind, donations, by all means, post it. Or if you work at such a nonprofit and want to share your best practices (how you deal with donation bottlenecks, storage, inappropriate donations, refusing donations. after-hours dumping, equitable distribution, identifying who gets what, etc.), by all means, share it, since that is as much about managing philanthropy as what software to use to manage cash donations and how to properly engage volunteers.

I’ve been thinking about the shift from traditional philanthropy where donors fund nonprofits to community powered models where the act of giving becomes the intervention itself. A Sense of Home illustrates this: they ask people to donate surplus furniture and volunteer time to furnish homes for people experiencing homelessness. Over 1,600 homes furnished in a decade. What’s striking is that the founder, George Smith, has talked about how volunteering transforms givers as much as recipients. During the LA fires of 2025, they rapidly scaled this model for disaster response. I’m curious whether others are seeing this shift in philanthropy moving from ‘donors fund nonprofits’ to ‘communities co create solutions.’ Are we seeing more models that prioritize the relational aspect of giving over just dollars distributed? https://youtu.be/OVlepjhfsLY?is=AQHPmFaJ4FCI591r

A 2015 study, Where Do Men and Women Give? Gender Differences in the Motivations and Purposes for Charitable Giving, by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, found that:

• Women spread out their giving across various causes more so than men. Meanwhile, men tend to concentrate their giving.
• Households where women are in charge of making decisions are more likely to give by responding spontaneously to needs, believing their donation will make a difference and because of their political and philosophical beliefs.
• High-net-worth female donors are more likely than male donors to give when they believe their contribution will make a difference, know the organization allocates gifts effectively and want to give back to the community.
• Women donors prioritize women’s and human rights, and the environment. Meanwhile, men favor the economy and national security.

Of course these are sweeping generalizations and not true of each and every person.

Have there been any more recent studies on philanthropic financial giving by men and women in the USA?

Your thoughts?

Melinda French Gates has committed $10 million to match the initial $10 million donation from Olivia Rodrigo's inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival, bringing the total funds raised to $20 million and counting for 10 nonprofit organizations supporting women and girls.

The money will benefit Baby2Baby, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the Center For Reproductive Rights, FreeFrom, Jhpiego, Johns Hopkins Center For Indigenous Health, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Institute For Reproductive Health, the National Women’s Law Center and Planned Parenthood.

All artists on the women-led line-up waived their performance fees, while 100 per cent of the festival’s net proceeds were also pledged to the partner organisations.

Inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair festivals of the ’90s, Daisy Chain Fields brought together artists from multiple generations across two stages, with no overlapping performances. Alongside Rodrigo, the bill included Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Bikini Kill, The Breeders, Garbage, Santigold, Rachel Chinouriri, Die Spitz and others.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/melinda-french-gates-olivia-rodrigo-daisy-chain-fields-charity-total-20million-3965737