Category Archives: Individual Giving

GOOD Buys Jumo, Seeks Social Connective Tissue

Jumo is supposed to be Facebook for nonprofits. Founded by Facebook co-founder and chief digital organizer of the Obama 2008 campaign, Chris Hughes, Jumo launched with great fanfare and grant funding from the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network and Knight Foundation. GOOD is a publishing and marketing company “for people who want to live well and […]

How to Evaluate a Charity

Over the holidays I wrote a blog post about how to pick a great nonprofit to donate to with extremely minimal work. That post spurred Lucy Bernholz to write two posts (part one and part two) about her effort to help a 10-year-old pick a nonprofit to support. Lucy’s posts were great because out of […]

Best Charities for Last Minute Giving

Last year on December 31 I wrote a post about how to pick a charity to support if you wanted to make a year end gift. The post has been circulating on Twitter this week so I thought I’d publish a slightly updated version… The majority of charitable giving is done between Thanksgiving and New […]

5 Questions to Ask Every Nonprofit Before Making A Donation

This is my latest column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. You will find the full archive of my past columns here. Probing Questions All Donors Should Ask Before Making a Significant Gift By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Chronicle of Philanthropy One of the holy grails of nonprofit evaluation is to be able to compare nonprofits with […]

Warren Buffett Discusses Goals for Giving Pledge

I had the opportunity last week to listen to the Giving Pledge conference call in which Warren Buffett fielded questions from the press and offered color on the purpose of the Giving Pledge. The big take away for me was that Buffett’s hope is that the Giving Pledge will lead to an increase in the […]

10% of Billionaires Commit to Give Half Their Wealth

Simply remarkable. Just 6 weeks ago, Warren Buffett and Bill & Melinda Gates launched The Giving Pledge, an effort to encourage all of the nation’s billionaires to give away at least 50% of their wealth. Today, it was announced that 10% of all billionaires have already publicly made the pledge. The Giving Pledge will be […]

The Millionaire Giving Pledge

My column in this week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy focuses on the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge and argues that the real impact of the Pledge is the potential for it to spur more every day donors to give more rather than simply trigger the giving of the billionaires which the Pledge focuses on. I tried to calculate […]

Why the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge Matters

This is my most recent column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. You can access the full archive of my past columns here. Gates-Buffett Example Worth Its Weight in Gold By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Chronicle of Philanthropy The collaboration of Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates transfixed the nonprofit world four years ago when they […]

Money For Good: $120 Billion Impact Investing Market Opportunity

This is a guest post from Hope Neighbor, founder of Hope Consulting which recently released the report Money For Good. Read Part I. Read Part II. By Hope Neighbor On Friday, I talked about principles to guide efforts to improve the quality of charitable giving. Today, I’ll talk about another opportunity to achieve social impact […]

Money For Good: Helping Donors Give More Effectively

This is a guest post from Greg Ulrich, project lead on the Money For Good report from Hope Consulting. Read Part II. Read Part III. By Greg Ulrich There’s been some terrific discussion here on Tactical Philanthropy in recent weeks about the results of our Money for Good study. Sean and others have been particularly […]