Google has been offering free donation processing to nonprofits for the past couple of years through Google Checkout. That free service will end on March 1 except for U.S.-based nonprofits that receive Google Grants. Other nonprofits will pay 2% + $0.20 per transaction (but at least there won’t be any monthly, setup, or gateway service [...]

Tags: Online Fundraising

Every day it seems like there’s a new article on how nonprofits and businesses can use Twitter for engagement, activism, marketing, and fundraising. Today’s entry comes from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which published When Characters Count: Advice for Charities on Making the Most of Twitter. Their recommendations include:

Do some casual research [...]

Tags: Social Media, Web 2.0

Idealware just published an article by Keith Heller called Do You Need New Donor Management Software?

Keith urges nonprofits to look before they leap into new software, cautioning that “new software may not make anything better — in fact, it could make things worse.” He then addresses what new software could do for your organization, [...]

Tags: Databases, Donor Databases, Fundraising

Trend or coincidence? Twice in the past week I’ve come across online fundraising campaigns in which the fundraiser promises to do something embarrassing when the goal is met.

Last week, Holly Ross, NTEN’s Executive Director, posted a video appeal for her attempt to raise $10,000 for scholarships to the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference. If she meets [...]

Tags: Fundraising, Online Fundraising, Social Media, Web 2.0

Word 2003 and Acrobat Professional 5 aren’t on speaking terms. As far as I’ve been able to tell, PDFMaker, which provides 1-click integration with Word, is incompatible with Word 2003 and higher. I removed PDFMaker from the Word startup file according to these instructions and no longer get error messages.

I can still use Acrobat Distiller [...]

Tags: Software

From the Foundation Center’s RFP bulletin:

The Tides Foundation Invites Nominations for Award Honoring Open Source Software Developers Who Add Value to Nonprofit Sector
Deadline: March 2, 2009

The Tides Foundation is accepting nominations for the $10,000 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest. The annual prize — now in its third [...]

Tags: Open Source, Software

Following up on Elliot’s blog post, How Important Is Mobile Giving?, and the subsequent TechSoup discussion, I’m posting an analysis conducted by Sarah Grosvenor, the Assistant Director of Annual Giving at Willamette University, on the potential for mobile fundraising at the University. Sarah granted me permission to share her findings with the world. The information [...]

Tags: Fundraising, Mobile Communications

I’m organizing two workshops for NTEN’s upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference on the topic So You Want To Be A Consultant? (The workshops are described here and here.) Holly Ross, NTEN’s Executive Director interviewed me via Skype a few weeks ago and posted the video at http://www.nten.org/blog/2009/01/27/2009-ntc-preview-robert-weiner. The audio and video aren’t quite in [...]

Tags: Consulting

Margaret King, President of the InfoRich Group, has published an article on how prospect research yielded $1 million in foundation funding for one of her clients. She discusses the strategy behind the research, the tools she used, how the list was narrowed to a group of top prospects, and the general approach to cultivating [...]

Tags: Foundations, Fundraising, Prospect Research

Tactical Tech, based in the UK and India, has published The Quick ‘n Easy Guide to Online Advocacy to help advocates find "online services that are quick to use and easy to understand." Here’s how they describe it:

The guide provide descriptions of online services including social networking sites, image and video hosting services, and [...]

Tags: Advocacy