Three years ago, the March of Dimes faced a dilemma. It was introducing a new image campaign, and had renamed its longtime signature fund-raising event from "Walk America" to "March for Babies."

The organization, founded in 1938 to improve the health of babies, had put on the event since 1970 and had raised more than $1.8-billion. The group figured "March for Babies" was a better name to communicate what the walk was all about.

But how to communicate that to its loyal supporters?

March of Dimes looked online for help. Spreading the word was essential. Its use of savvy online marketing techniques smoothed the transition, gained new followers, and established "March for Babies" as a marquee event.

In a session at the Direct Marketing Association's New York Nonprofit Conference, the group detailed its online strategy, what worked and what didn't:

• Found influential bloggers. During ...

Think about this: The American Red Cross received $32-million for Haiti relief efforts from people making donations through their cellphones. Among those donors, 1.3 percent agreed to receive e-mails from the organization. That means 20,000 new donors, 95 percent of whom had never previously supported the Red Cross.

Such results are why mobile fund raising is changing the landscape of charitable giving.

At the Direct Marketing Association's inaugural Nonprofit Mobile Day on Thursday in New York, speakers discussed how charities can take advantage of the new interest in text donations:

• Establish your building blocks. To run a text-messaging campaign, you're going to need a short code (a five-digit number) for people to use to text their donations. It's activated by a key word, such as "Haiti" to 90999. This works on all carrier networks. (You can go to usshortcodes.com to get an...

As technology advances and the number of wealthy people around the world grows, more and more charities are seeking donations globally. But World Vision, the international relief organization, is going local in a new concentrated fund-raising campaign to recruit new donors in a single city.

The campaign, called Count on Spokane, in the midsize Washington city of 450,000, started last week and will run for six weeks. The charity will use direct mail, presentations to church congregations, paid radio and television spots, bus ads, celebrity appearances, and more to seek out new donors.

"By going in with all guns blazing and combining these strategies, we think it will generate a bigger response," said Steve Quant, World Vision's director of media acquisition. But, he said, "it is a big test. A lot of these channels have never worked together before." If it is successful, he added, the ...

Nonprofits need to help their donors understand that charitable organizations have a lot in common with businesses, Dan Pallotta, a prominent nonprofit expert, told a  group of charity fund raisers in New York.

"We don't like to see a lot of people making a lot of money in charities," says Mr. Pallotta, the keynote speaker at this week's Direct Marketing Association's New York Nonprofit Conference. People have a "visceral reaction" to the notion.

But nonprofit compensation should match or at least correspond to the salaries in the for-profit world, he says. For one thing, nonprofit salaries at the moment don't attract the best and brightest. Why work as a chief executive for a medical charity at $230,000, he says, when others with the same MBA have salaries of $400,000 or greater?

Mr. Pallotta, the inventor of multiday AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Day events, says other items of neglect...

Engaging donors online is difficult enough as it is, but getting them to give is even harder. That's why it's important for nonprofits to apply direct-marketing principles to online marketing, says Barb Perell, vice president for online marketing at Avalon Consulting, in Washington.

Speaking at the Direct Marketing Association's New York Nonprofit Conference this week, she offered her top tips for effective online marketing efforts:

Drive traffic. The adage of "If you build it, they will come" is false. You need to guide people to your Web site in a variety of ways, such as search-engine optimization (using leading key words). One way to get this free is to apply for Google Grants, an advertising program for nonprofit groups. It's free for nonprofits to apply, sign up and be eligible for up to $10,000 a month of free Google advertising.

Limit sign-ups. Ask for appropriate information ...

Calling all nonprofit geeks. You can now vote for your favorite nonprofit panels that could be featured at the SXSW Interactive Festival next March 11-15 in Austin, Tex.

The social-media industry event has listed a choice of 34 sessions, at the moment—and its calls for votes have been retweeted often on Twitter.

SXSW, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, began accepting votes on August 11. The public's votes will account for about a third of the final decision. SXSW staff members' votes count 30 percent, and the group's advisory board has a 40-percent say.

You have until Friday, August 27, to vote for your favorites by clicking on the thumbs-up icon.

Using the SXSW Panel Picker, you can also propose new sessions if you're not satisfied with the current selection.

Among some of the panels proposed thus far:

• Crowdsourcing the Corporate/Nonprofit Partnership. Who Wins?
• ...

Most fund raisers don't have to worry about a war getting in the way of a capital campaign. But for the American University of Beirut, that is one of the many challenges it has faced in its fund raising.

One reason the institution was able to avoid too much damage to the big campaign is that a dedicated group of faculty members decided to start a "mini campaign," separate from the university's more-ambitious capital drive, to help people hurt or displaced by the war. It raised $1-million in just a month.

To learn more about the institution grappled with a crisis, listen to this audio interview from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Have a birthday in September? Get ready to give it up.

You could be among thousands of people, celebrating their September birthdays by asking people for donations instead of gifts — all to benefit Charity: Water's campaign to bring safe drinking water to the Central African Republic's Bayaka Pygmies.

The September campaign, which began Monday, aims to raise $1.7-million to dig and build wells there. So far, it has raised $16,588 for the effort this week alone.

Scott Harrison, president and founder of the four-year-old New York group, says he only needs 1,700 participants for the effort to succeed -- since the average sum of donations per birthday "party" is about $1,000. "It's really the idea of scaling through individuals," he says.

One-hundred percent of the money raised, he says, will go to the water projects. The funds will bring clean water to about 90,000 people in the...

Web sites like Groupon.com, which offer online coupons to local businesses if enough people sign up for them, aren't just a good deal for consumers. Some charities are benefiting, too.

A new group-purchasing Web site called CauseOn, unveiled today, is committing 20 percent of its revenues to local nonprofit groups. Users will have some say in where the money goes. And Groupon, the father of such online-coupon companies, has tried a handful of ways to bring nonprofits to the attention of the approximately 12 milion people who subscribe to its daily e-mails.

Perhaps the most fruitful partnership has been with DonorsChoose, the nonprofit group that provides teachers a chance to publicize classroom projects for which they need money. In May, Donors Choose raised $162,000 when it was Groupon's featured daily deal.

The nonprofit group used a grant from Pershing Square Foundation, the...

After a period of hiring freezes and layoffs, the job market for fund raisers at colleges and universities is undergoing a "significant thaw," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Numerous institutions are trying to fill multiple openings, and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education says it has witnessed a 66-per-cent increase in job postings in the past three months. At least 80 percent of those new openings are for fund raisers.

Rather than simply filling jobs that were unfilled or vacated since the recession started, the article notes, colleges are reassessing the fund-raising landscape to figure out what skills they need.

More and more, institutions are seeking people who can raise money abroad, especially as colleges recruit growing numbers of overseas students. The University of Michigan plans to hire a new fund raiser to seek donations internationally, while ...