The current economic situation nationwide, combined with higher costs and tighter regulations relating to postal fundraising, will make online marketing even more important in upcoming years. Vinay Bhagat, chief strategy officer for online fundraising firm Convio, maintains that nonprofits will need to invest in effective online marketing programs. He offers 10 best practices for getting started online: Ensure your Web site makes the right first impression. Prospective donors are very... Read Full Story

The NonProfit Times is excited to announce a new way to receive breaking nonprofit news, fundraising tips, job postings, information on upcoming events and more, without opening your email! Introducing NPT Desktop Delivery, a communication service which sends subscribers daily nonprofit updates directly to their desktops. How Does It Work?Download NPT Desktop Channel, a free tool powered by THINK360Choose what time of the day you would like to receive your message. Don’t have time to read... Read Full Story

A lot of nonprofit fundraisers seem to love benchmarking studies. I really can’t blame them. Fundraisers are always judged by their numbers, after all. If we are going to be compared what we raised during the same period in previous years it only makes sense to understand the context of giving to other similar organizations. Anytime your fundraising program experiences large increases or decreases, it’s helpful to understand if the change is being driven by broader external factors or by... Read Full Story

They're not supposed to taste good. After all, they're called dirt cookies. Bright Hope International, based outside Chicago in Hoffman Estates, Ill., is selling "dirt cookies" as a symbol of poverty around the world. The nonprofit offers a package of six cookies for a donation -- of any size -- but stresses that $50 can provide a Haitian family of six with food for a month and the ability to plant their own garden. "Eat dirt so they don't have to," the Web site proclaims.Food shortages and... Read Full Story

The NonProfit Times announced the launch of a free online portal that gives free access to corporate donation data for fundraising research to nonprofit grant writers and others researchers. The portal’s address is http://www.nptgrantsearch.com. The portal is powered by Internet search company NOZA, Inc., provider of the world’s largest database of charitable gifts. The research portal was launched with more than 4,300 searchable records of corporate donations valued at $1 million or more... Read Full Story

Political pundit Eleanor Clift starts a Web-only column for The NonProfit Times, which will appear monthly through the November presidential election. A Newsweek columnist, book author and television commentator on The McLaughlin Group and numerous other programs, she'll talk to Washington, D.C., insiders to let nonprofit managers know what to expect on important issues. Here is a sample from her first column: Not Dead Yet - Estate Tax will survive the November election By Eleanor Clift The... Read Full Story

I will never forget the first fundraising conference I ever attended. It was energizing to be surrounded by hundreds of passionate fundraisers from a wide range of nonprofit groups who were eager to share their successes and failures. The experience convinced me that this was a profession where I could spend my career learning and growing while helping a great cause.Unfortunately, some of my recent conference experiences have been underwhelming. In fact, after one particularly boring... Read Full Story

The anonymous blogger "a fundraiser," blew like the wind through the NTEN conference in New Orleans last week. Here's a report."More than 1,000 of the cool cats in the country are descending on New Orleans for the 2008 Nonprofit Techology Conference hosted by NTEN over the next couple days.David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for the New York Times will be speaking at the plenary session at 8:30am... although given some of the festivities on Wednesday night, I doubt that all of the... Read Full Story

Staffing the information technology (IT) function is frequently a challenge for nonprofit organizations. Financial resources are typically limited and hiring managers often feel overwhelmed and under-educated when it comes to IT. Determining where IT should fit into the organization, how many IT staff people are needed and what those people should be spending their time doing can be difficult decisions. To shed some light on these questions NTEN and The NonProfit Times teamed up and created... Read Full Story

To make your organization’s simple HTML e-newsletter appear (relatively) alike across platforms, one tip from the experts: code like it’s 1999. This means: Decide which email clients are a priority. One expert prioritizes Outlook, Thunderbird, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, and recommends against prioritizing Lotus unless your organization uses it (“It’s a pain in the neck to standardize.”). Set up email accounts with each of the email clients to test your email.Also for seamlessness, use tables... Read Full Story