GIA Blog

Mistakes in IRS List Cause Headaches for Some Nonprofits
Posted on June 12, 2011 by Steve

From Lisa Chiu at The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

(T)he list is misleading in places, with some well-established groups listed that have, in fact, filed their paperwork. On the list were the names of some of the biggest and most well-established colleges in the United States, George Washington University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. So, too, was the Islamic Center, a prominent Washington nonprofit established in 1957 and located just a few blocks away from the vice president’s official residence.
Over 20,000 Arts Organizations on IRS's Automatic Revocation of Exemption List
Posted on June 10, 2011 by Abigail

On ARTSblog, Randy Cohen provides brief commentary and an Americans for the Arts estimate on the number of national arts organizations to lose their tax-exempt status. Lists of organizations (arts and all others) by state are available here.

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
Posted on June 9, 2011 by Steve

An interesting post from Venkatesh Rao on his blog Ribbonfarm.com explores the 400+ year history of the corporation. And he declares the “age of the corporation is coming to an end” at the outset. His mental model of the human world is visualized here. Of it he says:

Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible
Top Ten Foundations by Assets
Posted on June 9, 2011 by Steve

Information from Foundations Center's Glass Pockets project:

  1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  2. Ford Foundation
  3. J. Paul Getty Trust
  4. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
  5. W. K. Kellogg Foundation
  6. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
  7. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
  8. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
  9. Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
  10. Lilly Endowment Inc.
IRS Removes Tax-Exempt Status Of 275,000 Groups
Posted on June 9, 2011 by Abigail

From the Associated Press, as reported on NPR:

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that 275,000 organizations have lost their tax-exempt status because they failed to file required annual reports for three straight years.

Video Overview of MacArthur Fellows Program
Posted on June 9, 2011 by Steve

The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has published a new video that promotes and describes the MacArthur Fellows Program (commonly referred to as genius grants). Take a look at this program and hear from some recipients.

On Funding Overhead
Posted on June 7, 2011 by Abigail

Rick Wartzman's latest post for Bloomberg Businessweek, here, is a summary of recent writing on funding nonprofit overhead synthesized with his own outlook on the "charitable challenge." Provocative and opinionated, it is worth a read.

Rocco Landesman Visits Central Valley of California
Posted on June 7, 2011 by Steve

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman continued his Art Works tour of the US with a visit to the central valley of California. Apparently it's the first ever such visit by an NEA chair. Rocco's host on the visit was Amy Kitchener, who runs the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, while he met with organizations and artists from Fresno, Merced and Modesto.

Read Rocco's full post here.

Culturomics and the Evolution of Culture in Measurable Terms
Posted on June 3, 2011 by Steve

A pair of Harvard mathematicians have leveraged the power of Google's massive effort to digitize the world's published text to begin a quantitative analysis of culture, a study they've termed Culturomics. In this video, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel—co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google—show how Culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.

Nonprofit Tech 2.0
Posted on June 2, 2011 by Abigail

Yet another relevant blog I didn't know I should know about: Nonprofit Tech 2.0: A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits. The linked-to post is a survey of the growing array of fundraising websites available to nonprofits and donors. These sites both facilitate giving and help spread the word about a nonprofit's mission and actions.