One sign the giving climate is getting better: When we asked fundraisers this spring to name their biggest challenges, not one talked about the economy.

But that doesn’t mean fundraising is easy. Jamie Ersbak, a donor-relations assistant at PATH, the global health charity in Seattle, told us he felt pressure because of “the death of the unrestricted gift” and the number of donors who want to earmark their money for specific purposes.

Kathy Butler, executive director of the Okanagan College Foundation in Kelowna, British Columbia, said she faced the same challenge fundraisers have encountered since the profession began: Forming stronger relationships with donors and convincing them to give more.

See more thoughts from fundraisers in this video, and tell us in the comments below about your biggest challenge in seeking gifts.

A House subcommittee has announced that five nonprofit experts will testify at a hearing it has scheduled for Wednesday to examine several issues related to the Internal Revenue Service’s oversight of tax-exempt organizations.

They are Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector; Roger Colinvaux, an associate law professor at the Catholic University of America;  Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance at Cornell University, who will be testifying on behalf of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO); Bruce Hopkins, a nonprofit lawyer; and Michael Regier, a senior vice president at VHA, a nonprofit hospital cooperative.

Rep. Charles Boustany called the hearing. The Louisiana Republican heads the oversight subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Send an e-mail to Suzanne Perry.

David Levis poses with Dixon, a Ugandan youngster he and his wife supported through ChildFund International. They hold the first photo Mr. Levis received of Dixon. (ChildFund/Jake Lyell)

It was a television commercial that first inspired David Levis and his wife, Stacie, to donate money to ChildFund International in 1999 and become “sponsors” of a needy child–and it was a Facebook post that helped send Mr. Levis to Uganda to meet five of their sponsored children this April.

Mr. Levis, whose family sponsors 13 children through the charity, was the winner of the organization’s “Experience of a Lifetime” promotion, held on Facebook last year. He was selected from five finalists by public vote to win the trip to meet his sponsored children.

“It was one of those things you’re hopeful about, but you never think something like this is going to happen,” Mr. Levis says.

The promotion began as a way for the charity to connect with its fans and give them a prize tied to its mission.

During the contest’s nomination process, ChildFund’s Facebook page grew from 11,000 to 16,200 fans and added 800 more during voting for the finalists, said Virginia Sowers, community manager at the organization.

And the group gained one vocal advocate in Mr. Levis, a teacher from Citrus Heights, Calif., who spent his spring break touring Uganda and seeing his sponsorships at work.

“The nicest thing about it was to really see how the system worked,” Mr. Levis says. “It seems like this small, little amount of money focusing on one child, and the reality of how they have it set up is so much bigger than that.”

While Mr. Levis traveled the country, he shared his experiences through blog posts and Facebook messages to “bring all of the other sponsors, in a sense, with us.” He says he felt a certain burden as the winner of the trip, which was valued at about $ 5,000.

“This was not going for a vacation, this was not going for a touchy-feely, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ to fill my needs,” Mr. Levis says. The trip was to “put as much communication out there as much as possible to tell the stories as real and impassioned as possible each and every time.”

Mr. Levis said his family hadn’t been public about its charitable donations in the past, but the trip gave him a chance to talk about ChildFund with his friends, family, students, and others.

Since he returned from the trip, five of his friends have signed up to sponsor needy children, Ms. Sowers says.

Mr. Levis says he and his wife, both trained as teachers, are considering what it would take to go back to Uganda in the summer to help a school. They are weighing the cost of the trip against the value of donating that sum to ChildFund.

Ms. Sowers says the charity considered the trip such a success, it may hold a similar competition again.

Below, see a video of Mr. Levis’s trip.

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

Charities that provide food, shelter, and other basic necessities have struggled to keep up with exploding demand for services in the sluggish recovery. But donors have stepped up their giving to cover at least some of the increased needs, a new study suggests.

Still, holding onto those new donors has been a challenge; some of the charities say many donors stopped giving after two years or more.

The number of donors to 13 religious shelters nationwide increased by 12 percent, to 15,555 people, from 2008 to 2010, before declining slightly last year to 15,421, according to an analysis of donations of $ 10,000 or less by Brewer Direct, a marketing-consulting firm.

The dollar value of donations during that time increased by 30 per cent to more than $ 1.8-million.

The size of the average gift grew from a low of $ 152 in 2008 to $ 175 last year, and the number of gifts made annually also rose, from 2.6 to 3.2 gifts per donor in 2011.

But the missions are now losing nearly 30 percent of their multiyear donors annually, so the future isn’t looking as bright, said Randy Brewer, president of the consulting company.

Some missions in the study did better than others. At the Allentown Rescue Mission, in Pennsylvania, for example, the number of donors increased in 2008 and 2009, but its total giving drooped by about 20 percent in those years. And while the mission is now raising as much as it did in 2007, fundraising is harder, says Gary Millspaugh, executive director.

“We know that a lot of active donors in their 60s and 70s are helping adult children who lost their jobs,” he says. “It is somewhat encouraging that we got more people to give, but the level of giving tells us that there are still difficulties in getting people to give more or the same as they used to. ”

Mr. Brewer, the consultant, said he’s helping the missions try new ways keep more donors from withdrawing their support.

For example, some groups are asking for smaller sums and making phone calls to follow up on direct mail.

What ways have you found to keep donors from cutting their support to your organization?

Send an e-mail to Holly Hall.

A Congressional hearing has been scheduled next week to examine various tax issues affecting nonprofits, including Internal Revenue Service oversight of universities and nonprofit hospitals.

Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., a Louisiana Republican, called the hearing. He told The Chronicle this winter he was concerned the tax agency had not been aggressive enough in monitoring charity abuses.

The event, which will take place May 16 at 10 a.m., will be the first in a series of hearings on tax-exempt organizations planned by the oversight subcommittee of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Boustany, the  subcommittee chairman, said in a statement that the hearing would allow nonprofits to weigh in on certain questions he had raised in a letter he sent to the IRS last October.

They include IRS audits of universities in areas including excessive compensation and unrelated business income—the money they earn for activities not related to their charitable missions—and new rules requiring the IRS to monitor the charity care and community benefits that nonprofit hospitals provide.

The hearing will also examine recent efforts by nonprofits to design good-governance standards, the redesign of the Form 990 tax return that is filed by nonprofits, and the history of recent changes to the tax code that affect nonprofits.

The subcommittee has not yet announced the names of the witnesses who will speak at the hearing.

Send an e-mail to Suzanne Perry.

Rice, beans, and pasta. That’s what Suzanne Pelletier’s family ate Monday, Tuesday, and today—and what they’ll eat tomorrow.

Ms. Pelletier, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation, is participating in “Live Below the Line,” a five-day campaign to call attention to global poverty and raise money for groups fighting it. Participants, including employees of more than a dozen nonprofits, pledge to spend just $ 1.50 a day, the amount that the world’s poorest people—about 1.4 billion—survive on.

The campaign is organized by the nonprofit Global Poverty Project. Its online fundraising tools enable donors to support charity workers and others who are living on a tiny food budget.

So far, the Rainforest Foundation has received roughly $ 5,000 through Global Poverty Project’s campaign Web site and by appealing to supporters through e-mails and social media.

While she’s now an enthusiastic participant, Ms. Pelletier says she didn’t immediately think the campaign was a good fit for her group. There’s no obvious connection between conservation and poverty, and she wondered if supporters would be confused.

But then she did a little research and realized what a good educational opportunity it would be to show people how logging and other forces can rob people of vital resources.

“Although 5 percent of the world’s population live in extreme poverty, 15 percent of indigenous people live in extreme poverty,” she says. “One of the main causes occurs when indigenous people lose control of their livelihood—land.”

Ms. Pelletier says she thinks the campaign is helping introduce her group to more people. In the last few days, the Rainforest Foundation has received about 1,200 new “likes” on Facebook, reaching more than 5,600.

As for Ms. Pelletier’s belly? It’s making do, she says. And by subsisting on rice and beans, her kids, 5 and 7, are gaining a deeper understanding of poverty than they can glean from conversations about their parents’ work abroad in Africa and Latin America.

“They’re proud of what they’re doing and telling their classmates,” she says. They’re also asking if they can add leftover Easter candy to their beans-and-rice diet: Is that technically free?

Send an e-mail to Caroline Preston.

If your organization’s Web site isn’t up to speed, you could be losing donors and other supporters. But a free online tool, Google’s Page Speed, can help offer a quick analysis of the code on your site to determine whether it is loading as quickly as it can and offers recommendations for changes that can add zip to a sluggish site.

Those recommendations also come with a Page Speed score designed to show how much a site can improve. The score doesn’t measure the actual time it takes for a site to load on a computer screen, because that is influenced by the size of a page in bytes, server hardware, and other factors. But it does help gauge whether a site is performing as well as it can.

Sites that need significant improvements score below 50 out of 100. If a site is more modern, with best practices in place, it will probably score in the 80s or 90s.

The top 25 charities included in the Chronicle’s 2011 Philanthropy 400 scored a median of 73 out of 100 for their home pages when viewed on computers and 65 out of 100 when viewed on a mobile device, according to a Chronicle review of those sites.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America scored second among the 25 largest organizations, with an 86 on a computer and 82 on mobile. Those high scores may result from the charity’s new emphasis on mobile devices, says Karl Kaiser, senior director of creative services and interactive communications at the organization.

“We’ve noticed a steady increase in visits to our site via mobile devices in the past six months, so we’ve been testing the latest in CSS 3 and HTML 5 [code] to maximize site experiences across all browsers and platforms," Mr. Kaiser says. "It appears to be making a difference."

One way the organization increases speed is to load all the repeated elements—navigation, backgrounds, logos, etc.—when visitors first come to the site. Those files are then saved on the visitors' computers. That way, the elements are downloaded just once and each subsequent page will load only new content.

It's a simple strategy, Mr. Kaiser says, but groups often ignore it as their sites get more complex.

"Many developers overlook components and ultimately unnecessary page elements start piling up and slowing down the page load times on each refresh," Mr. Kaiser says.

At the other end of the list, the American Red Cross scored second to last among the top 25 charities, recording only 46 of 100 points on a computer, and 52 of 100 on a mobile device. The organization's site is being redesigned, and its new site is expected to debut soon, says Anne Marie Borrego, a spokeswoman.

Here's how all 25 sites performed in the Page Speed tests:

Amnesty International USA, which isn't among the top 25 on the Philanthropy 400, scored 93 points on a computer and 91 points for mobile. Other Web-savvy charities with newer sites also scored well: Charity: Water scored 87 on a computer and 82 on mobile, AND DonorsChoose.org scored 83 on a computer and 90 on mobile.

The Nonprofit Technology Network scored 59 on a computer and 58 on mobile, lower than all but four of the 25 charities from the Philanthropy 400 on a computer, and lower than all but nine on mobile.

All nonprofits can take comfort in knowing that almost no group is perfect: Google scored a 99 on both computers and mobile devices, and it created the scoring system.

How does your nonprofit's page Web site compare?

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

Environmental organizations from around the country last week got a chance to seek support for local projects by creating fundraising pages on Ioby, which stands for “in our backyards.”

The nonprofit hopes to become the environmental equivalent of DonorsChoose.org, which raises money for teachers in classrooms across the country.

The organization has already achieved great success in New York, where it has operated for the past three years. Since Ioby got started, it has raised $ 250,000 for New York grass-roots environmental efforts, with gifts averaging $ 35. Among the results of those donations: About 250 tons of food waste were composted, 36 farms and gardens were started, and nine bike and recreation days were held.

The organization hopes opening its online platform nationwide will enable groups and individuals to raise a total of $ 300,000 in a year.

“We wanted to connect people to environmental projects that were local, where they could see the problem and really do something that would actually fix and address the problem,” says Erin Barnes, co-founder of Ioby.

The nonprofit especially hopes to reach young and minority donors, who might not regularly contribute to environmental causes because the problems “seem insurmountable,” says Ms. Barnes. She says that she hopes the ease of giving online and the local nature of the projects will appeal to people who don’t typically give to conservation groups.

Unlike some online fund-raising sites, Ioby doesn’t make charities forfeit the money they raised if they don’t reach their goal. Fees start at $ 35 for campaigns to raise $ 1,000 or more; drives to raise less than $ 1,000 can be conducted free.

Charities face one requirement if they raise all the money they sought: They must supply photos and videos to donors that show their contributions made a difference. “People who are your best activists can be your best donors,” Ms. Barnes says.

Here’s how Ioby works:

Donors who give through mobile text messages could soon have the options of giving a larger donation and setting up repeat text gifts, say the leaders of two of the organizations that oversee text giving in the U.S. and Canada.

Jim Manis, chief executive of the Mobile Giving Foundation, and Bernard Lord, chairman of the Mobile Giving Foundation Canada, said in an interview that they are working with some cellular service providers to allow $ 20 donations—double the current $ 10 limit—and recurring donations, though they gave no timeline on when those features would be available.

Mr. Lord said 75 percent of donors are willing to give $ 20 or more through text messaging, according to research his group has conducted. Forty-seven percent say they are willing to donate $ 25 or more through the platform.

Text-message gifts remain popular, the two men say, even though it is quickly becoming just as easy to give through a smartphone, tablet, or other device that links to a charity’s online-donation site.

“It’s of such a tremendous value because of its simplicity,” Mr. Manis said.

NPR’s Car Talk and PBS’s Masterpiece Theater could soon become big fundraising boosters for the nation’s charities.

The Federal Communications Commission is inviting comments on a proposal to allow public radio and television stations to raise money for any nonprofit. Now stations are solely allowed to raise money for their own programs and operations, in part because regulators wanted to ensure broadcasters put all their energy into educational programs.

Stations have been allowed to raise money for big catastrophes, for example after Hurricane Katrina. But they had to go through a special process of getting a waiver from the federal communications agency.

Under the FCC plan, public radio and television stations could spend up to 1 percent of their annual broadcast time—about 88 hours per year—doing on-air fundraising appeals for any charity they want to help.

The FCC is now seeking comments on several issues. Among them, the commission wonders if it should:

* Place limits on the kinds of causes that could get airtime.

* Require stations to submit annual reports to the FCC on their fundraising activities to benefit other organizations.

* Ask stations to prove they have not exceeded the 88 hours of fundraising.

FCC officials said that their request for comments will soon appear in the Federal Register. After that, comments will be accepted for 30 days, and another 30 days will be allotted for replies to the initial round of comments.

Do you think changing the rules is a good idea? Might your cause benefit? Let us know in the comments section below.

Send an email to Holly Hall.