Packaging Your Organization to Communicate Impact The Way the User Wants to Experience It

I’ve had the pleasure of consulting closely with countless unique clients with diverse missions, yet all face a common challenge. They struggle to position their organizations effectively in a manner which communicates the impact of their organization to various demographic segments. The challenge, common among most non-profits, goes beyond messaging to encompass internal operational silos, departmental or programmatic territorialism, false profiling of market segments due to lack of proper evidence, and an overall challenge in defining each organization’s role in changing the world for the community they serve in an appropriate way – all the while addressing the communications preferences of disparate populations. Does this sound like too many balls to juggle in the air? I argue this is not the case.

More often than not, organizations approach challenges such as user-intuitive information architecture (navigation) on their web site and through other communications channels without taking into account how unlike individuals will navigate and interpret information. An exercise recently conducted with one client’s technology and web review board unexpectedly triggered surprised looks as board members realized for the first time that individuals tasked with the same objective in reviewing, critiquing or navigating a web site will not only interpret and perceive navigation, visuals, interactivity, and messaging differently, but will adamantly argue that their views apply to all. They’re all disagreeing, but they’re all right – their way is “the right way.” One of the first lessons I learned in my career in non-profit fund development and marketing came to me from a mentor and VP at the world’s most popular cola creator. In chairing my organization’s PR and marketing committee, he operated under the mantra, perception is reality.

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Blackbaud recently released the 2007 State of the Nonprofit Industry Survey and you can click here to download a copy. The SONI survey was conducted between July 17th and August 11th, 2007 and had a total of 1,140 respondents. All surveys and polls should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do provide some insight into a snapshot in time.

I have picked out a couple of interesting stats after having a chance to look through the results. Here are some findings from the “Technology/Internet Usage” section:

• 98.5% of respondents have a website.
• 92% believe a unified database is very important.
• 88% use their website to market their organization/educate the public.
• 68% use online fundraising tools.
• 67% believe that it is important to use email.
• 48% actively use online fundraising strategies (compared to 43% in 2006 and 35% in 2005).
• 29% see their websites as effective in achieving their Internet goals.

This is a similar trend from the 2006 SONI survey. And I think it shows that many nonprofits are still stuck in Web 0.5 or Web 1.0 mode when it comes to engaging constituents online. They believe it is an important communication channel, they are continuing to think strategically about using the Internet, but they still use it mostly for one-way communication.

The key dot to connect is that 88% of nonprofits believe the primary purpose of their website is to be a marketing device, but 71% of respondents don’t think they are meeting their Internet goals. Does that mean that they should just try harder at their online marketing efforts? No, that would be the definition of insanity.

Websites that are just brochureware or only used for marketing purposes belong in a museum. What about online advocacy, people to people fundraising, social media, volunteering, etc? That doesn’t mean that you can’t use the Web to clarify your message and inform the public, but it can’t be the end-all be-all raison d’être. Otherwise you really can’t complain when your online efforts don’t produce measurable and meaningful results.

The question then becomes: How does an organization move from a Web 1.0 presence online to a more Web 2.0 presence online? And how do you balance the marketing messages with the development programs? I’ll tackle the answer to those questions in a future blog post…

Before coming to Blackbaud in 2004, I spent many moons on the interactive design/information architecture/user experience/visual communication side of the world. So while I’ve been immersed enough in the technical bits & bytes to grok about it — my interest and passion has always been with the human rods & cones side of things.

A major focus when we started building our Blackbaud Interactive group was to provide a comprehensive set of design services. This meant bringing in a lot of talented designers with experience in both the for-profit and nonprofit world. I’m proud to say that we now have one of the largest and most experienced interactive design teams serving the nonprofit industry operating from both our Charleston and London offices.

Blackbaud Interactive recently began work on its 100th complete website redesign project built on NetCommunity. What started out as a new part of our overall online design services has grown dramatically. The team does a variety of redesign strategy, information architecture, usability testing, content analysis, creative concept and styleguide design, and other services for our clients. I thought I would share some important lessons learned to help organizations about to undertake any website redesign project.

Don’t Accept Blind Designs: There is still a practice of design shops offering to do “blind design” or “speculative design” in an attempt to earn a client’s business. This usually involves a design shop taking some thrown together or recycled designs and presenting them as part of their RFP or proposal. There might be some initial “ohs” and “ahs” but these fade once discussions start about a client’s goals, objectives, brand, etc. Good creative work never happens in a vacuum. Good creative work takes careful analysis, two-way discussion, and uses a proven process that brings the best ideas to the surface.

Don’t Design by Committee: A camel is a horse that has been designed by a committee. Committees often destroy the creative process because more minds don’t necessarily mean more great ideas. Groups of people have the tendency to pile on so many extras that the original concept collapses under its own weight. Getting buy-in from various stakeholders is important, but our experience has shown that making a single individual or small group responsible for approving creative concepts is the best approach.

Don’t Fall Prey to the NASCAR Effect: The homepage of a website is one of the most important parts of any online presence. And everyone wants to have their program featured front-and-center. This explains why the main page of so many sites resemble the front quarter panel of a stockcar. Lots of graphics, icons, links, sections, callouts, and content in a small space — all fighting for eyeball attention. If everything is important, then nothing appears important. Not to mention that their are actually some heuristics around how much is too much and what is usually just right.

Don’t Move All of Your Old Stuff: If you bought a brand new house, then you probably wouldn’t you just move all your old stuff in without doing some clean-up. Otherwise you end up with a great new place that quickly starts looking just like your old digs before too long. A site redesign offers a great opportunity to go through all of your content, images, etc. and give them all a good scrub down. In addition to any new information architecture or content analysis activities there should be some content cleansing. A good rule of thumb is updating or dropping any non-historical content that hasn’t been updated in eight months. Also check the website traffic logs for least visited pages that might need to be revived or retired.

Don’t Launch without a Soft Launch: Sadly, I’ve seen it too many times. After months of redesigning a brand new site comes the big public unveiling and within minutes someone finds a typo or a broken link or something worse. This usually happens because there wasn’t a soft launch of the website to certain key insiders and a select group of external constituents. Get a fresh set of eyes on the site before launching it to the rest of the world. Even the best designers and content authors develop a certain amount of “tunnel vision” from staring at the same pages for too long. They practice the coin toss for the Super Bowl. You should practice the launch of your website.

These are just some of the key pitfalls to avoid when launching your newly designed online presence. The website you save might be your own.

I am in London this week visiting some Blackbaud Europe clients and presenting at the 2008 Digital Communications for Charities Conference. The event is being hosted by Professional Fundraising magazine. The main presentation is all around integrated communication and how working in silos within charities means that digital media is currently set adrift.

I have used quotations in presentations for as long as I can remember, and I usually try and put in something relevant to the audience. For this presentation (and blog entry) I’m putting a new spin on the English poet John Donne’s famous phrase:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were…”
- John Donne, Meditation XVII (1623)

Many nonprofits find themselves awash in an island chain of programs and data silos. Every program has its own goals and objectives that often result in a fragmented landscape. Major giving programs guard their constituent information, the annual fund staff does the same, membership keeps different records, volunteer information exists in spreadsheets, and anything online is set adrift with the Web people. To build successful relationships you can’t maroon constituents on any of these islands. No constituent is an island.

Relationships between people and organizations are multi-faceted. We interact across multiple channels that often intersect in very unpredictable ways. Nonprofits have used traditional channels such as events, direct mail, person-to-person meetings, telephone, and many more for a long time. The Internet adds an entirely new and often different set of channels. Web, email, RSS, person-to-person fundraising, social networks, and other online capabilities continue to transform how nonprofits can interact with constituents.

A key change is to stop thinking in terms of online vs. offline, but instead you should start thinking of them as simply different channels. For the most part, people no longer see the spatial differences between online and offline. The two are blurred in most interactions and the expectation by constituents is that they are properly recognized no matter the channel they choose. Imagine if you deposited a check at the bank but the online banking website had no record of it. Imagine if you purchased concert tickets online but the box office didn’t know about it when you arrived to pick them up. Now just imagine what your constituents are thinking about their interactions with you.

People only come in units of one. (Or at least that true in 99.99% of cases.) Splitting them up or having lots of duplicates can have dire consequences. (Ever seen the movie Multiplicity?) A channel driven approach allows you to personalize interaction across programs, but still keeps people in one piece. This allows organizations to make more strategic decisions because they can look at all the touch points with a constituent. And running an event, sending a mailing, or personalizing content on the website is always more successful using this approach.

You can’t think strategically or act tactically if your constituents live on islands. It will only take one or two bad interactions before they build a raft and sail off to more friendly surroundings. Don’t let that happen.

A very popular term thrown around in buzzword bingo games for the past 20 years or so has been CRM. The for-profit world defined it as Customer Relationship Management and companies like SAP, Siebel, and Oracle have built very large technology companies around the concept. In the nonprofit world we prefer to call it Constituent Relationship Management and Blackbaud is one of a few companies that provide solutions around the concept.

CRM grew out of the disco database marketing days where companies and organizations crunched through mounds of information in an attempt to sell more widgets or reach more people. The problem with relying on just data to make important decisions is that data ≠ information. What decision makers really wanted were systems that could track every interaction, connection, transaction, and other important events to build a more informative picture of the relationship. And thus, CRM was born.

Companies like General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor Company, and Wal-Mart spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sophisticated CRM systems to sell more jet engines, shampoo, toilet paper, cars, dog food, and household items. Over the years CRM became a lot more sophisticated and companies like Amazon.com, Costco, JetBlue and Target took things to a whole new level.

What these innovators understood was that it was very myopic to define “customers” as just people that purchased one of their products or services. A much broader view is that customers can also be influencers, trendsetters, early adopters, referrers, and have a hand in other important roles. In a highly competitive global market, managing those relationships and retaining those relationships has never been more important. The word “customer” has been redefined.

Nonprofit organizations have also been making the transition from “donor database” systems to solutions that enable the entire constituent relationship to be managed. They understand that fulfilling their mission and satisfying the needs of stakeholders requires more than just a place to put data about dollars and events. Organizations have been gradually embracing the concept that a constituent isn’t just someone who donates to the organization.

In the past, I’ve given presentations about the three different ways individuals “give” to nonprofit organizations. People give their time, talent, or treasure. (cue the visuals)

An activist might give their time to support a cause, an accountant might give their talent and serve as a board member, and an alumnus might give their treasure through a major gift. (I think you get where I’m going here.) A traditional fundraising model might be entirely based on moving individuals from time to talent to treasure. But a more modern approach is to acknowledge that constituents may have their only interaction with an organization through a time/talent/treasure relationship.

I used to think that this broader definition was overstating the obvious. But I continue to talk to organizations that still have an old school view of things, and worse yet, nonprofits that have a progressive view but are stuck with systems that still don’t get it. The other limiting factor to success is having multiple disparate systems to track and manage different types of constituents. Activitists in one system, alumni in a another, donors in another, major donors in another, corporate contacts in another, online donors in another, volunteers in another, direct mail recipients in another, email recipients in another, and no ability to look across groups to better personalize the relationships.

Bits and bytes won’t entirely solve the need to redefine what constituents mean to nonprofits. This is a bigger philosophical shift to understanding that every individual and organization that interacts with a nonprofit is a valuable relationship that needs to be nurtured and developed over time. Technology can help carry some of the load , but it will take the leaders of nonprofit organizations to point the way.

Last week, Target Analysis Group released the latest Index of National Fundraising Performance. The index reports on fundraising results at 72 large, national nonprofits that have 39 million donors and over $1.9 billion in contributions.

There were some important findings in the latest index including the following:

• “After the disaster-heavy, record-growth year of 2005, index revenue reverted back to typical growth rates in 2006. Revenue growth over the first three quarters of 2007, however, was below historical averages.”
• “While revenue grew, donor numbers declined. This continues a decline that has been happening for several quarters; the index has not had an increase in donors since the third quarter of 2005, which brought in most of the revenue related to hurricane Katrina relief efforts. “
• “In the absence of donor growth, the revenue increases that most organizations experienced this year to date have been due to increases in revenue per donor.”
• “Acquisition and reactivation rates were both down and retention rates were fairly flat”

These trends aren’t very good and the index notes that “at some point increases in revenue per donor may not sustain overall net revenue growth.”

Mark Rovner blogged about this the other day and in the posting noted three big opinions:

• “The era of cheap direct mail and high response rates in acquisitions is over”
• “What currently passes for an online fundraising model is at best a stopgap”
• “This is not just about direct response. This is not just about philanthropy. EVERYTHING is going to change.”

I recommend giving Mark’s post a careful read because he hits the nail on the head. The revolving door of acquisition focused direct mail is in trouble and the same approach with email is equally doomed. The organizations that succeed will be those that build relationships and combine both online and offline channels to do it.

And then Seth Godin chimed in with the following comments on his blog including:

• “As soon as commerce started online, many non-profits discovered lots of income from their websites. This was mistakenly chalked up to brilliant conversion and smart marketing. In fact, it was just technologically advanced donors using a more convenient method to send in money they would have sent in anyway.”
• “The big win is in turning donors into patrons and activists and participants. The biggest donors are the ones who not only give, but do the work. The ones who make the soup or feed the hungry or hang the art.”

The reasons for the decline in donor growth are varied but the trend should be a wake-up call to all nonprofits. And the online activities of nonprofits are not immune to the problem. Many organizations have seen positive initial results through email marketing efforts, but by the second go around the retention numbers plummet. Email is no more a silver bullet than direct mail if organizations don’t retain, build, and steward their relationships with constituents.

This is why strategies or tactics or technologies that separate online and offline are ultimately not successful. Doing one and not the other or doing both of them in silos is a recipe for disaster. I’ve never met a donor that labels themselves as “online” or “offline.” How can you build a true relationship if both online and offline interactions can’t be leveraged?

While the information in the latest Index of National Fundraising Performance is not encouraging, it is good to see these issues being discussed on blogs, in articles, and hopefully in meetings as well. Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Answers? Let’s keep the conversation going…

The new book People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities recently hit the bookshelves. It was around this time last year that I was sending the draft of my chapter in the book to the editors.

The book covers a variety of important topics related to how nonprofit organizations can leverage Web 2.0 and other social networking technologies.

The contributors to People to People Fundraising bring with them a lot of experience and this is an excellent way to either start or enhance your understanding of this important trend.

My task during the writing process was to put together the introductory chapter for the book. So the challenge was to paint a broad, but still vivid and engaging, picture of what people to people fundraising means in order to setup the rest of the book. Amazon.com has the “search inside” feature setup and the chapter appears as the excerpt. Click here to take a look at some of what made it into print, including this paragraph of prose:

“A fundamental reality of fundraising is that people give to people with causes, not to organizations. Buildings and brochures may in some ways influence people, but they cannot hold a conversation. People need to feel a personal connection to the causes and initiatives they choose to donate to. The power of personal content, communication, and collaboration all combine to create a sense of community.”

So where do we go from here? Lots of places, hopefully. Over the next year I will be spending a lot of time writing and talking about applying the notion of people to people fundraising in a variety of different ways. As always, this needs to be a two-way conversation so you feedback and ideas are very important. With that in mind there will be some upcoming ways to get engaged in the dialogue. Stay tuned…

At a recent conference for science editors I heard a lot of tech buzz words being thrown around—RSS, Wiki, blog, podcast. For that crowd, a lot of the concepts were new. After all, this group still focuses mostly on print journals and many of the editors remember vividly office systems sans computers.

Whatever your comfort zone, these technologies are here and as the public grows more Web savvy, they expect you to be up on the latest trends. One of my favorite parts of this new tech wave is that it’s relatively low impact on one’s budget. The Internet has in fact given Joe Public the keys to authorship through numerous free social networking and blogging sites. (They even let me on!) So, aside from the obvious commitment of time and creativity there’s no reason for you not to join the game.

Next question: What might a nonprofit use such tech for? (more…)

So, I was cruising the Internet, catching up on some articles I thought sounded interesting and I came across a piece on DM News (a marketing periodical) about how to time emails.

I have to admit, sheepishly, that I’ve never really thought about day of week or time of day with regard to sending email. It’s become such an all consuming and amorphous medium that if you’re like me, you start checking it shortly after waking and don’t stop until right before bed–seven days a week.

But when you’re trying to get someone’s attention to act on your product, in this case, your mission, timing can be important. The article, “Timing for Success: When to Fill Consumers’ Inboxes,” gives the lowdown from marketing professionals about when they get the best responses from emails. For example, Tuesdays generally see the busiest email traffic, while Saturday sees the least.

Most of the information is anecdotal, but it offers a great starting place to think about how you can make sure readers have the time to open and respond to your message. Now get emailing!

I just wrapped up six weeks traveling from East Coast to West Coast and points in-between visiting with a number of nonprofit organizations along the way. While I could share my thoughts on the state of the airline industry I thought there might be some value in covering some ideas and trends I came across during my travels. So here goes…

Strategy Stills Trumps Technology: Just like in the dictionary, strategy always comes before technology. Not having a strategy is like driving cross-country without a roadmap. Yet a lot of organizations still seem to be throwing the map out the window when making technology decisions. I found myself caught-up in more than one discussion where people were more focused on moving the mouse than moving their mission. Don’t let small shiny objects distract you from your organization’s North Star.

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Considering people’s ever-shortening attention spans and given the shocking lack of grammar taught in public schools, it’s important to keep your writing straightforward to keep your readers on track. I didn’t do such a great job in that first sentence. We’ll have to see if I can rein in my verbose tendencies. This blog post is really to provide some top tips for writing for the Web. There are a few quirks when writing for the Web that are important to keep in mind.

• Consider your audience. You have people of all backgrounds and experiences surfing as equals. To accommodate this wide-spread audience, you’re going to want to write at about a ninth grade reading level or less. Newspapers generally follow this principle. They want their work to be as accessible as possible and so should you.
• Think about attention span. (again) As we continue on in our sound-byte driven, media overload world, people’s attention spans seem to shrink at a rate equivalent to the speed with which new toys for them to play with are developed. Not to be cynical or anything. What I’m trying to say is that you need to get to your point quickly. If you don’t capture attention quickly, your reader might surf on.
• Think about the mechanics of reading on screen. Depending on the machine a person is using, the screen size and thus the amount of text seen can vary widely. This is one of the reasons that long Faulkner-esque paragraphs don’t work well. Also, it’s really hard to follow visually as you scroll. Keep paragraphs shorter with a decent amount of space in between them.

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The 2007 running of the Daytona 500 brought with it a lot of advertising and promtions from the multitude of NASCAR corporate sponsors. Amid the flurry of comercials were promotional ads for The NASCAR Foundation’s annual NASCAR Day fundraising event.

NASCAR Day is now in its fourth year as the major public-facing fundraising initiative of the The NASCAR Foundation. In exchange for a $5 donation, participants receive a commemorative NASCAR Day lapel pin. The majority of the donations come from the many corporate partners and sponors affiliated with NASCAR and its participating motorsports teams.

This is the second year in a row that the organization has partnered with Blackbaud Interactive to develop an online micro-site to promote the event. Last year’s NASCAR Day was the largest and most succesful to date with over 3,000 companies across the country participating to help sell over 100,000 pins worldwide.

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It’s February 1st - have you updated your Web site’s copyright date yet?

If you haven’t, you’re not alone. Forgetting to update is commonplace, and I see it all the time. Data was needed, so yesterday I checked out the top 100 nonprofits. What I found was shocking.

I expected a few would have forgotten, but not 34%. I even saw a few that still were listed as 2005 - wow! But don’t feel bad - the top 100 for-profits didn’t fair much better, with 18% forgetting to update.

Are you still reading? Have you checked your site yet?

There are many ways to handle your Web site’s copyright info, some of which require no updating at all. I took a look how nonprofits and for-profits were displaying copyright info, and was able to identify five buckets to drop each method into:

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We talk a lot about nonprofits using the social web to attract and engage donors, but the concepts trend more towards awareness than action. Using MySpace or YouTube to deliver your message to a broad audience is one thing - getting them to act is another.

That’s where SixDegrees.org, AOL Instant Messenger, and Network for Good come in. Someone had the brilliant idea to put these three ingredients into a giant Web 2.0 blender in the hopes of producing a tasty, social fundraising smoothie – and it looks like they have succeeded.

With Kevin Bacon as the natural pitchman, 6Degrees.org is asking donors to choose a nonprofit, then get 6 friends to give to the same organization. Network for Good is covering the online donations, while AOL’s MySpace equivalent AIM Pages handles the social aspect. The idea is to use a social network to form impromptu giving circles…got it?

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The folks over at NetSquared, GetActive, and Squidoo have assembled their list of “The 59 Smartest Nonprofit Organizations Online.” This list appears to be the follow-up to Seth Godin’s Org2.0 Cheat Sheet and Squidoo happens to be a company Seth founded. (Just connecting some dots.)

The list includes some well known organizations, some very innovative groups, and also a good number of Blackbaud clients. According to the list, “these organizations are winners because of their web 2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond asking them to dig into their pockets.”

The Agitator likes the idea of the list but gives poor marks for their overall execution. I wouldn’t be so harsh. The value in a list like this is that it is a conversation starter. It will get people thinking, talking, and sharing in their own organizations to drive change. These are all very good things and lead to steps in the right direction.

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Friday I was walking through the Product Development department when the Director of Core Technologies, Paul Gibson, waved me into a developer’s cube. I could tell by the look on their faces that they had something cool to show me. They sure did.

Paul Crowder (the dev) has been working on implementing platform-level support for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in our upcoming Infinity application platform. KPIs will be featured throughout future applications built on the platform (Galileo, RE8, Bullseye etc.) Apologies for all the code names, we’ll cover those in a future post.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that reflect the health of the organization. By quickly scanning an organization’s KPIs one should be able to get a solid idea on how things are tracking against the defined business goals. Some examples might be:

• Response Rate for a direct mail segment
• Number of gifts per day
• Avg days to close a major gift
• Gifts This Month
• Cost Per Dollar Raised

Those are just a few samples, but each one represents a single value that could be calculated and compared vs. an established goal.

Infinity’s KPI Platform

Editing a KPI Definition

Infinity’s base platform support provides the following for KPIs:

• A framework and UI for establishing, securing, and managing KPIs.
• A way to express a goal for a KPI.
• The ability to define warning and alert zones for a KPI as it progresses toward or deviates from it’s goal.
• An automated process to calculate KPI values and cache those values for quick rendering at a later time.
• A mechanism to back-calculate KPI values to establish historical trends.
• RSS support for KPI values so they can be monitored without running the application and logging in.
• A personal dashboard that can be customized by an end user to display the most important and relevant KPIs as the user sees fit.
• The ability to view the dashboard outside the application from any web browser without having to log in and navigate the application (assuming the user is authenticated).
• A stock set of KPI calculations “in the box”.
• Advanced support for creating custom KPIs using an open, extensible XML specification. (you’ll be hearing a lot about “specs” in the Infinity platform as I discuss it in future posts…)

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Each week, billions of searches generate millions of dollars for companies like Google and Yahoo!. It’s hard to believe this much revenue can be generated simply from clicks and data retrieval. What if some of that cash could be diverted to your organization?

That question was on the minds of Ken and JJ Ramberg when they launched GoodSearch.com back in 2005. GoodSearch donates 50% of their ad revenue to nonprofit organizations…and the kicker is that users choose which ones. Here’s how it works:

On the GoodSearch homepage, choose from thousands of organizations or add your favorite cause to our list. Search the Internet just like you normally would — the site is powered by Yahoo!, so you’ll get the same high-quality search results you’re accustomed to. Fifty percent of the revenue generated from advertisers is shared with the charity, school or nonprofit organization of your choosing.

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The play on Marshall McLuhen’s famous phrase may be obvious, but the meaning it has for nonprofits may not be. We’ve just closed out a year where TIME’s Person of the Year was you, me, and everybody because of our participation in the Web 2.0 revolution. Congratulations!

I’m not so sure about the revolution part, but clearly the growth of personal content and collaboration has transformed the Web. We’re now in a new year where many nonprofits are trying to make meaning of all this stuff.

The Internet has always been more like radio than TV. You tune into things that interest you and the experience is so much more personal. The number of “stations” and strength of signal have only helped to drive greater online personalization. That perception of the Web is now taking on a new twist.

Up until recent years the Web has been dominated by text-driven experiences. Gerry McGovern just brought up this point in his latest weekly enewsletter issue that’s entitled “The Web at 15.” Gerry argues that “the Web is evolving, sure, but its foundation stone is the written word.” Clearly, we’re all now building on top of that foundation with some different materials.

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I recently ran across a new video sharing site for nonprofits, DoGooder.tv. Very cool. The site is live right now, though in alpha, and allows nonprofits to post high-quality videos for a small fee free. They plan to include more community and online donation functionality down the road, so this is pretty exciting.

But will nonprofits flock to DoGooderTV instead of free alternatives like YouTube or Google Video? DoGooderTV will always have a captive audience looking for nonprofit content, but whether or not organizations will be willing to pay for that placement remains to be seen. Tracking…

Update: Michael says:

The site is 100% FREE! A new version is online now that allows nonprofits to create basic home pages and upload video.

That’s great news from the DoGooderTV camp - not only because the the service will be free, but social elements like creating pages are coming sooner rather than later.

Using the Social Web, also referred to as Web 2.0, is a great way for your nonprofit to reach donors and spread your message.

Social sites are built to encourage sharing, and few things are more effective and inexpensive than viral marketing. While maintaining your own Web site will always be a priority, there are other ways to spread your organization’s story via the Internet.

Here are ten social web resolutions that can give your nonprofit an edge in 2007:

• Create a page at MySpace.com
  Your donors are getting younger, or at least they are acting younger…so should you. Reach out to them via MySpace.com this year. Setup a page for your organization, gather friends, post bulletins, and point people back to your online donation page.
• Go in-world with Second Life
  Get an account started at Second Life, and take your nonprofit into the virtual world. This is cutting edge internet marketing, so getting started now may get you closer to tech-savvy donors who are looking for something different. Have a meet-up in Second Life to discuss your annual campaign or just chat about issues. If you do it right, Reuters might show up and cover the event in the real world.

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