Despite the current economic recession, Americans were donating an average of 1.6 million dollars an hour in the weeks that followed Haiti's deadly earthquake. They've already begun texting donations in the wake of Chile's earthquake, and when the Tsunami hit the Indian Ocean in 2004, individual Americans donated some 2.8 billion dollars towards relief efforts. That ended up being almost half of all charitable giving from around the world.
But, Americans don't just give money to help people recover from disasters, that's what Wendy Smith found out when she researched her book Give a Little: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World. Smith worked as a fundraiser for a nonprofit organization when she got the idea for the book after she went to a workshop on grant proposal writing...