Notes frm this plenary on #nonprofit innovation w/ @BrianReich @LAAgiving2 @megarling @VolunteerMatch @kanter #12ntc

Who benefits & whose burden? Foundations & the quest for evidence of #nonprofit effectiveness. @philanthropy #in

Should nonprofits use video for their annual reports? Maybe it's time, says @askdebra: #nptech #nonprofit

Some nice tips on using #Twitter to sell event tickets, from BrownPaperTickets, a event registration vendor. #nonprofit

Celebrating Black History Month with 28 Days of Black #Nonprofit Leaders: Thelma Golden #diversity

RT @idealware: How to shoot a #nonprofit video with a digital camera from @socialbrite #nptech

Roundup of NPO/Philanthropy predictions at #nonprofit #blog

Recently, the Progressive Communicators of Washington, DC (PCDC) held a panel discussion on Mobile Communications for Progressives at the World Wildlife Fund here in DC. The purpose was to bring together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the area of mobile campaigns and to find out what is working for nonprofits.

The speakers Included The Following:

Jeff Lee: Moderator and past President of Distributive Networks, the company that ran the Obama text messaging campaign in 2008.
Jed Alpert: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Mobile Commons, a leading mobile SMS campaign provider.
Susan Murray: Sr. Officer for the Red Cross managing corporate partnerships. Susan was responsible for the record breaking Haiti SMS text campaign that brought in over $30 million via mobile phones.
Ron Vassallo: CEO of Kaptivate and Author of Are We There Yet? Non-Profit Adoption of Mobile Giving.
Rachel Labruyere:  Reform Immigration FOR America (RI4A) Campaign. Rachel LaBruyere is the Deputy Online Director for the Reform Immigration FOR America (RI4A) campaign where she manages one of the largest SMS lists in the nation at over 140,000 names and numbers.

David Miller: David Miller is the founder and CEO of Mobile Discovery, a leading mobile and social media technology company enabling new types of interactive marketing

One key take away from the event from my perspective was around the fact that SMS and mobile giving dominated the discussion. This is no surprise, as Susan Murray from the Red Cross was a panel member and non-profits are always looking for additional channels to raise money.

Small List, Big Results:  We’ve historically found a relationship between email list performance and list size.  In this year’s study, we grouped participants into three tiers for email list size (Small, under 100,000; Medium, 100,000-500,000, and Large, 500,000+ deliverable email addresses), and found significant differences in benchmarks based on this analysis. Groups with small email lists had much higher open and click-through rates and had double the email fundraising response rate of bigger nonprofits.  But Small groups also had double the unsubscribe rate of their larger peers.

Mission-Based Market Share:  When it comes to the share of online revenue attributable to different types of gift programs – such as monthly giving, one time gifts and tribute gifts – our results showed marked differences across sectors.  Whereas Environmental nonprofits in our study raised 96% of their online revenue from one-time gifts, Health nonprofits raised 50% of their online revenue from “other” gifts (including event giving) and tribute gifts, and International groups lead the way through monthly giving, which made up more than 25% of their online revenue.

Click-Through to Success:  The largest difference between high and low performing email programs in our study was seen in email click-through rates.  So, if you’re looking to emulate the most successful email programs in our study, then work to improve your click-through rates!

The primary mission of the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation is to provide health care to the poor of Haiti in the rural area of Fond des Blancs and the surrounding region. This is done through the St. Boniface Hospital, work retreats, and other projects. The secondary mission is to improve the quality of life in the Haitian community through educational programs and humanitarian aid. The final mission is to raise the awareness in the United States of the extreme poverty endured by the Haitian people.

The people who work in online advocacy and fundraising are some of the most creative people I know. In 2009 their campaigns made me laugh or helped me channel my frustration over injustices into action. A couple of them moved me so much that I even teared up. Here’s my list of the best websites and online campaigns from 2009.  

Training and tips for do it yourself nonprofit marketers

To date, successfully fundraising on Twitter has been elusive for most nonprofits. TipJoy had promise and buzz, but quickly shut down. TwitPay.me filled the void, but has received very little attention. Micr0-donations via PayPal just don’t seem to appeal to donors. Twonate has a different spin on Twitter fundraising by essentially managing pledges to donate via Tweets, but of all Twitter fundraising tools I have seen come and go over the last year, Give a Tweet by far has the most potential.

Promoting Your Nonprofit on Facebook and Having Facebook Promote Your Nonprofit.

So you have a Nonprofit Fan Page on Facebook, now what? Facebook has over 300 million users, with more than 85 million unique visitors per month. This workshop covers building a strong brand identity in Facebook using Tools from Facebook and intermixing with current media efforts. Part 2 of 3 Facebook for Nonprofits Series

The Whys and Hows of a Nonprofit Facebook Page. Everyone's talking about it. But you don't understand. Why should your nonprofit be on Facebook and how should you go about doing it. This discussion and presentation will get you up to speed. Part 1 of 3 part series.

Twitter is good for a great many things, from sharing music to building your brand, from finding friends to playing games. But while we know all about what Twitter is good for, is it possible to actually do good on Twitter? How do you do it? As it turns out, there are many ways to help out others just by tweeting.

We’ve collected some of our favorites in the round up below. If you know of any other ways to do good on Twitter, please share them in the comments!

The importance of measuring the effects of your organization’s social media outreach is not in question. But what metrics should you track? What analytics tools do you need? And what can you do with those numbers, once you’ve got them?

The importance of measuring the effects of your organization’s social media outreach is not in question. But what metrics should you track? What analytics tools do you need? And what can you do with those numbers, once you’ve got them?

Can non-profits raise awareness, increase membership, and--most critically--“make the ask” successfully on Twitter? Can a 140-character message deliver the visceral wallop of, say, heart-wrenching footage of starving children covered in flies or the sad eyes of a neglected and abused animal? The answer is yes.

Our nonprofit is not unique. Over the past five years, we’ve stumbled our way into social media. We’ve listened to our supporters online and attempted authentic engagement with various social media platforms. While a large percentage of our organization can articulate the importance of being on Facebook, very few staff can grasp how these tools will help to achieve our goals: greater awareness and involvement in the broader movement to address hunger. Our use of social networking has exposed many cultural differences within our organization.

A post by Chris Brogan on “Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It” for business got me thinking about how nonprofits could benefit from a full fledged blogging strategy. A well implemented blog with a solid strategy behind it can be an incredible tool to help you connect with supporters on the web. Let’s look at some goals, questions, strategy and tactics to get you started.

User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.

Patrick Lambe picks up on a post via Beth Kanter about Benjamin Greenberg’s slidedeck on the benefits of internal blogging.

Benjamin Greenberg of non profit organisation Physicians for Human Rights has posted a really good presentation onto Google Docs that he developed internally to explain the benefits and the hows of internal blogging. I really like the email argument on th

We developped the BuzzMonitor, an open source application that "listens" to what people are saying about the World Bank across blogs and other sites in order to help the organization understand and engage in social media.