Many nonprofit leaders understand the value of telling stories to connect with potential donors or to inspire action by supporters. But they struggle to find creative ways to tell stories—especially because they are often more focused on helping the people they serve than they are with documenting the experience.

How can nonprofits tell attention-grabbing tales about their work and the people they help?

In the latest episode of our Social Good podcast series, Michael Margolis, founder of the consultancy Get Storied, and Mark Horvath—a nonprofit leader who uses a video camera, social-media tools, and his Web site, InvisiblePeople.tv, to illustrate the trials of homeless people—discuss how charities can tell effective stories about their work.

The Internal Revenue Service’s annual “dirty dozen” list of the top 12 tax scams in the United States includes schemes that involve charities—in particular, the misuse of noncash donations.

The IRS says that it’s investigating cases in which donors try to maintain control over donations or income from contributions of assets.

The tax agency says it has seen cases in which several charities claim the value of the same donated products.

“Often these donations are highly overvalued or the organization receiving the donation promises that the donor can repurchase the items later at a price set by the donor,” the IRS says.

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 imposed higher penalties for inaccurate appraisals of noncash gifts, says the tax agency.

Last month, the IRS imposed a fine on Food for the Hungry, an international charity, for allegedly misleading the public about the value of its noncash donations. Food for the Hungry disputes the IRS’s action.

Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, gave 2.2 percent of their income to charity from 2007 to 2010, according to tax returns the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination released last night to Politico, a newspaper that covers politics.

The Santorums gave 1.8 percent of their $ 930,227 in total income to charity in 2010. In 2009, they donated 2.7 percent of their $ 1,127,266 total income.

The tax returns do not disclose the names of the organizations they supported.

The four years of returns show that the Santorums’ giving is about average for people in their income range who itemize their taxes.

Americans who make $ 500,000 to $ 1-million gave on average 2.6 percent of their total income to charity in 2009, the latest year for which the Internal Revenue Service has provided data. People who earn $ 1-million to $ 1.5-million gave on average 2.9 percent of their income to charity.

Mr. Santorum’s giving is similar to that of Newt Gingrich, his fellow GOP contender, who gave about 3 percent of his earnings to charity, but far less than Mitt Romney, who gave 13.8 percent of his wealth to charity in 2010. President Obama, meanwhile, gave 13.6 percent of his total income to charity.

Mr. Santorum also created Operation Good Neighbor in 2001, a charity to help low-income people in his home state of Pennsylvania.

The charity, which closed in 2007, spent at least 60 percent of its money on fundraising, consulting, administration, and office rent paid to one of Mr. Santorum’s political allies,  The Washington Post recently reported. Of the $ 2.58-million raised, 39 percent was given to groups working directly with the needy.

Robert Pratter, a former board member of charity, told The Post that the group’s expenses were reasonable for a small nonprofit struggling to raise money on its own.

“We were raising money for these very small mom-and-pop groups. The most effective way to raise money was the way we raised it,” Mr. Pratter told the newspaper.

Dig deeper: Learn about the stands the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination have taken on nonprofit issues.

We asked our followers on Twitter to share their best romantic messages in the language of nonprofits.

Below is a running list of some of the responses from the nonprofit world and the Chronicle staff. Join in and post using the hashtag #nonprofitvalentines.

Video gamers often are portrayed as slackers. But at a video marathon last month, participants proved to be adept fundraisers.

The video-game enthusiasts from the group Speed Demos Archive, whose members dedicate themselves to completing video games quickly, raised about $ 150,000 for cancer research in a six-day marathon of speed gaming. That’s a big jump from the $ 53,000 the group raised last year in its initial event for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

“It’s really phenomenal,” says Liona Chan, spokeswoman for Prevent Cancer Foundation, which focuses on early detection of the disease. “The gaming community is really supportive. They’re a unique and unusual group of people who are energized to donate money for charity.”

It’s certainly not the foundation’s typical donor group, which skews older. “Most of them had never heard of our foundation,” Ms. Chan says. “They’re a completely atypical demographic.”

About 90 people gathered, in shifts, at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center, in Chevy Chase, Md., to play video games around the clock for a good cause in the event called “Awesome Games Done Quick 2012.”

Participants completed 107 games for the event, which was watched by thousands of online viewers around the world through a live broadcast stream on the Speed Demos Web site, where they could donate. During that time, some 3,200 donors gave 5,850 times, with an average gift of about $ 25. (One donor contributed $ 3,500).

To encourage people to donate more online, organizers raffled off prizes (such as a replica sword from the game “Legend of Zelda,” sold event T-shirts, and conducted bidding wars, like letting the biggest donor choose the next video game to be played.

This more-involved strategy proved to be a game-changing element in this, the event’s second year: People gave and gave. The video gamers’ goal was to raise $ 80,000 to finance a two-year cancer-prevention research grant. But they soon blew past that goal in about 79 hours.

“Last year, we thought we raised a crazy amount of money because we raised $ 53,000,” says Mike Uyama, the charity event’s coordinator. “We were expecting to just raise $ 20,000 to $ 25,000 more. I guess if we were bad at doing one thing, it’s that we’re bad at making estimates.”

Picture above: Speed Demos Archive members get ready to kick off a marathon video-gaming session for charity. Photograph by Liona Chan.

President Obama has withdrawn the nomination of a high-profile pick for a seat on the Corporation for National and Community Service board—John Podesta, a prominent Democrat who was President Clinton’s chief of staff and co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team.

Mr. Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House, was among seven people that the president nominated in June 2010 to fill vacancies on the national-service board. The nominations were approved by a Senate committee in July but have still not been confirmed by the full Senate.

The White House declined to say why the nomination was withdrawn, and Mr. Podesta could not be reached for comment. Mr. Obama had re-nominated Mr. Podesta just last month.

But he was an unpopular selection with some Republicans. A group of conservative leaders included him on a list of “controversial” and “egregious” presidential nominees in a letter they sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2010.

The national-service board, which is supposed to have 15 members from both political parties, is now down to just six. President Obama’s nominee to serve as chief executive of the corporation, Wendy Spencer, is also waiting Senate confirmation.

Send an email to Suzanne Perry.

Stanford’s announcement today that it has raised $ 6.2-billion in a campaign with a goal of $ 4.3-billion seems all the more remarkable given that the drive took place amid a severe recession.

Martin Shell, Stanford’s vice president of development, says that the university has received more than 80 percent, or about $ 5-billion, of the money pledged by donors.

The campaign was announced publicly in 2006, after a “quiet phase” of two years in which $ 2.2-billion was raised.  But during the public phase, which lasted five years and ended in December,  the campaign ran into some slow periods, Mr. Shell acknowledges.

One of the worst periods was in early 2009, when Mr. Shell was forced to lay off 20 fundraisers. As a result of those layoffs and leaving vacant positions unfilled, he says, Stanford’s  development staff was reduced by about 50 people.

In 2010, Mr. Shell says, Stanford raised the smallest sum in six years, $ 600-million. Yet during that same year, he notes, the university made a big effort to reach out to donors, and it had a record number of both donors and gift transactions, with many people making gifts of $ 100 apiece.

Mr. Shell says that another reason the campaign did so well was that wealthy donors identified new projects for which university officials had not sought money.  Thomas Steyer and Kathryn  Taylor gave $ 50-million for a center for sustainable energy, and Jay Precourt gave $ 40-million for another institute devoted to developing alternative energy sources.

Other goals, however, such as raising $ 300-million for student financial aid, did not appeal to some donors. Stanford fell short of reaching its student-aid goal by $ 50-million.

The Stanford campaign had the largest goal of any capital drive until a few months ago, when the University of Southern California announced a $ 6-billion campaign, which some fundraisers have criticized as unrealistic.

Now USC’s goal “doesn’t seem that big,” says Bruce Flessner, a Minneapolis fundraising consultant who for decades has advised universities and other large nonprofits on capital campaigns. But, he adds, Stanford’s accomplishment puts “enormous” pressure on fundraisers to follow that example.

In recent years, Mr. Flessner says, other universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, and Carnegie Mellon, have established operations in Silicon Valley to compete with Stanford for big donations. “If you don’t,” he says, “Stanford just adopts your donors.”

Stanford’s campaign also underscores the importance of geography, Mr. Flessner notes. “This tells you that there’s a lot of money in Silicon Valley,” he says, “and Stanford does not have as much competition” as universities on the East Coast.

Mr. Flessner says Stanford is fortunate to be located in the country’s technology belt, which he calls one of three “wealth-creation centers” in the nation. The other two are New York’s  financial-services industry and the oil and energy industries in Texas.

He adds: “You don’t see too many $ 100-million gifts coming out of Atlanta.”

Dig deeper: Learn more about the geographic divide among wealthy donors.

Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits and foundations that has waged a vigorous campaign against proposals to limit the charitable deduction for wealthy people, has now decided to devote more attention to other aspects of budget and tax policy that could harm poor people.

Critics have accused Independent Sector and other nonprofit advocates of spending a disproportionate amount of energy protecting the charitable tax break, given other critical issues facing the nation, especially those affecting vulnerable people.

Diana Aviv, the group’s chief executive, said Independent Sector’s board “sympathized with that point of view.” It adopted a series of “guiding principles” last week, saying it plans to promote policies to cut the nation’s deficit and overhaul the tax code that do not “exacerbate income inequality or increase poverty.”

The principles, which were sent to the organization’s members today, also say deficit-reduction plans should include both tax increases and spending cuts, the tax code should remain progressive, and changes to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid  should not increase burdens on those “least able to care for themselves.”

What’s more, it says, “those who can most afford to contribute more should be asked to do so.”

President Obama has proposed numerous times limiting the charitable deduction for people earning at least $ 200,000 (for couples, $ 250,000) as way to raise money for federal coffers, a move nonprofit leaders have warned would dampen giving.

Ms. Aviv said her board, which had struggled a long time to fine-tune the new principles, wants the organization to continue speaking out about the charitable-giving incentive since “that’s our bread and butter.”

However, she said, “if we only deal with the charitable deduction and don’t place it against the backdrop of much larger issues that we should focus on as well, we would be remiss in our responsibilities.”

The new principles say that the tax break for charitable donations should be preserved or modified only in ways that strengthen incentives to give and “respect the freedom of individuals to determine the causes and organizations they participate in and support, and treat those choices equitably.”

The statement about freedom is designed to show how the group will respond if policy makers, for example, propose giving a bigger tax break for gifts that help low-income people than for those going to wealthy institutions like universities—an idea that has been floated several times in the past two decades.

Ms. Aviv said Independent Sector would emphasize the issues outlined in the new principles in its dealings with Congress and the White House.

In his most recent comments on the issue, President Obama said in his State of the Union address last month that he wanted wealthy people to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes but that his plan would not disadvantage big donors.

The Internal Revenue Service has developed an online database of 400,000 nonprofits that have lost their tax-exempt status for failing to file tax returns.

Previously, the IRS released information about groups that had lost their tax-exempt status only by state, which made it difficult to find groups by other criteria. The new Exempt Organizations Select Check is updated monthly and is on the same Web page as the agency’s main database of all nonprofits that can accept tax-deductible donations.

The tax agency in June unveiled a list of 275,000 organizations that had lost their tax-exempt status for failing to file tax returns for three consecutive years. Since then, about 125,000 more have been added to the list.

Most of the groups—63 percent—were charities. Eleven percent were nonprofit advocacy groups, and 7 percent were social and recreational clubs.

Groups can apply to get their tax-exempt status reinstated, but even if they regain charity recognition, their names stay on the list of those that have lost their tax exemptions, says Lois G. Lerner, director of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division.

“Organizations are going to stay on the list for now and forever,” Ms. Lerner said during a Webinar conducted by Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations. “The list is the IRS’s historical record, and we will not be taking names off unless we find that they were erroneously put on the list.”

That poses a challenge for anyone wanting to find out if a charity’s tax-exempt status has been lost and then reinstated, which would require searching both databases. But The Chronicle has developed a shortcut: a database, below, that includes only the 3,500 groups that appear on both lists.

So far, about 9,500 of the 400,000 groups that lost their exemptions have applied for reinstatement, Ms. Lerner said.

Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to require the richest Americans to pay a minimum share of their income in taxes, but allow them to continue claiming a deduction for charitable giving.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, aims to put into effect the so-called “Buffett Rule” that was championed by President Obama in his State of the Union address.

It would require taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of more than $ 2-million, including capital gains and dividends, to pay at least 30 percent in federal taxes. The minimum tax would be phased in for people earning more than $ 1-million but less than $ 2-million under a formula that is spelled out in the legislation.

Donors would be able to deduct their charitable gifts from their adjusted gross incomes to lower their tax bills, thus preserving a giving incentive that has been fiercely defended by many nonprofit leaders. As in the current system, the tax break would be available only to people who itemize their deductions.

Nonprofit advocates welcomed the legislation as another sign that the White House, which has previously proposed limiting the value of the charitable deduction for wealthy people, may be changing its tune.

Mr. Obama said when proposing the “Buffett Rule” last week that he wanted to ensure his efforts did not disadvantage “individuals who make large charitable contributions.”

“They are backing away from the previous often-stated view that the incentive to charitable giving from the tax deduction is de minimis,” says William Daroff, vice president for public policy at the Jewish Federations of North America, citing discussions he has had with administration officials.

He points to a Twitter exchange between one of his colleagues and Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the National Economic Council, during a “White House Office Hours” chat last week. When asked whether the charitable deduction would be preserved in any overhaul of the tax code, Mr. Furman said: “Millionaires don’t need tax incentives 4 homes, healthcare & retirement. But incentive 4 charity is impt.”

Mr. Obama has previously proposed limiting to 28 percent the amount that families earning over $ 250,000 can write off on itemized deductions, including those for gifts to charity—first to raise money for the health-care overhaul and then to help rein in the federal deficit.

The new legislation would reinstate one limit to the charitable deduction, however,  says Evan Liddiard, a tax consultant in Washington. That measure—which was phased out in 2010 as part of the Bush-era tax cuts—reduced itemized deductions by 3 percent of the amount that a person’s income exceeded certain thresholds.

Regardless of what happens to the “Buffett Rule,” the 3-percent reduction would return if  Democrats succeed in their plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers.

Mr. Obama has named his tax plan after billionaire Warren Buffett, who has complained he pays a lower share of his income in taxes than his secretary.