Repeal of the Estate Tax and Its Impact on Philanthropy

The estate tax has many advocates and opponents. We present a review of the primary arguments and empirical evidence promulgated in support of continuation and for repeal. Overall, we find that there are plausible theories and strong, but not definitive, empirical evidence on both sides of the issue. Further research is needed that more clearly isolates differences between the income-tax and estate-tax (that is, the after-tax cost or price of a donation or bequest) effects, the independent-income and wealth effects (how having higher income or wealth has an effect on giving during life and at death), and married and single estate tax filers. These differences can be best isolated using longitudinal data. Data and analyses for both the short run and long run are necessary before society can reasonably predict the impact the repeal of the estate tax will have on both giving during life and charitable bequests

Fundraisers in the 21st Century

Who are fundraisers today? How and why do individuals become fundraisers? And, what is the situation with fundraisers in the various nonprofit subsectors? Fundraisers in the 21st Century provides fresh insight into fundraisers’ career paths, challenges, successes, and the overall growth of the field. As a comparison to a 1996 study of fundraisers, this study reveals that the profession continues to mature – more people are choosing it as a first career and tenure is up, for example – but challenges remain. The white paper analyzes survey data from 1,826 fundraising professionals

Presidential Satisfaction with Development Programs in Research and Doctoral Universities

The increasing costs of higher education and the decreasing willingness of taxpayers to support it have amplified the importance of fundraising in the modern university. The (dis)satisfaction of the university president with his/her development program can have profound ramifications for the success of the program and the careers of the development professionals. This paper addresses a gaping hole in the academic and practitioner knowledge base: What makes presidents satisfied and/or dissatisfied with their institution’s development efforts and how do they evaluate the performance of the development program

Changes in Religious Giving Reflect Changes in Involvement: Age and Cohort Effects in Religious Giving, Secular Giving, and Attendance

We present two patterns over time in religious giving, secular giving, and religious service attendance. The first pattern describes the prewar cohort (born 1924–1938) as they aged between middle adulthood (ages 35–49) and their senior years (ages 62–76). The second pattern compares the baby boom cohort (born 1951–1965) in middle adulthood to the middle adulthood of the prewar cohort. We present patterns for all families as well as separately for Catholic and Protestant families using data from three sources. The prewar cohort increased their religious giving and attendance as they aged, but—compared to the prewar cohort in middle adulthood—baby boomers give less than expected to religion and attend less. Baby boomer giving is noticeably less-than-expected and attendance noticeably lower among Catholic boomers, but less so among Protestant boomers. We argue that together these patterns are evidence that changes in religious giving reflect changes in religious involvement

Turnover intention and job tenure of US fundraisers

Fundraisers secure financial resources that organizations need to achieve their missions. Raising money, particularly large gifts, can follow years of relationship building with individual donors. When fundraisers leave these efforts can be set back substantially, making fundraiser turnover particularly worrisome and worthy of exploration. This analysis addressed the issue with US survey data (n = 1663) and examinination of three research questions. What are the job tenure and intent to leave of fundraisers? How is fundraiser job tenure affected by intent to leave? What relationships do job tenure and intent to leave have with fundraisers' individual demographics, position attributes, and organizational characteristics? We found that the study participants had current mean job tenures of 3.6 years (median = 2 years) and mean tenures across their fundraising jobs of 3.9 years (median = 3 years). Twenty percent intended to leave their organization and 7% intended to leave fundraising within the next year. Of the tested variables, salary consistently had the largest effects and was the most significant. Older and more experienced fundraisers had longer tenures. The study provides nuanced information about fundraisers' job-related behaviors, includes careful attention to theory and related research, and presents specific ideas for organizational interventions for increasing fundraiser tenure

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe