May 10, 2012, 04:26 PM ET
A Facebook Promotion Connects a Charity With a Loyal Donor
It was a television commercial that first inspired David Levis and
his wife, Stacie, to donate money to ChildFund International in
1999 and become "sponsors" of a needy child–and it was a Facebook
post that helped send Mr. Levis to Uganda to meet five of their
sponsored children this April. Mr. Levis, whose family sponsors 13
children through the charity, was the winner of the organization's
"Experience
of a Lifetime" promotion, held on Facebook last year. He was
selected from five finalists by public vote to win the trip to meet
his sponsored children. "It was one of those things you're hopeful
about, but you never think something like this is going to happen,"
Mr. Levis says. The promotion began as a way for the charity to
connect with its fans and give them a prize tied to its mission.
During the contest's nomination process, ChildFund's Facebook page
grew from 11,000 to 16,200 ...
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April 30, 2012, 03:14 PM ET
Speeding Up Your Nonprofit's Web Site
If your organization's Web
site isn't up to speed, you could be losing donors and other
supporters. But a free online tool, Google's Page Speed,
can help offer a quick analysis of the code on your site to
determine whether it is loading as quickly as it can and offers
recommendations for changes that can add zip to a sluggish site.
Those recommendations also come with a Page Speed score designed to
show how much a site can improve. The score doesn't measure the
actual time it takes for a site to load on a computer screen,
because that is influenced by the size of a page in bytes, server
hardware, and other factors. But it does help gauge whether a site
is performing as well as it can. Sites that need significant
improvements score below 50 out of 100. If a site is more modern,
with best practices in place, it will probably
score in the 80s or 90s. The top 25 charities included in ...
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April 26, 2012, 04:16 PM ET
A Nonprofit Uses Humor to Change the West's View of Africa
http://youtu.be/qSElmEmEjb4 Nyla Rodgers is one charity official
who is fed up with the way nonprofits represent Africa. Too often
she sees depictions of AIDS, warfare, famine, hopelessness,
desperation, and dependence on a Western hero. That kind of
concern came to the surface when she saw the "Kony
2012" campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children. "When
I saw the Kony campaign, it made me so mad," says Ms. Rodgers,
founding director of Mama Hope, a San Francisco charity that works
in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to start farms and build
schools, health centers, and other facilities that strengthen
communities. But long before that campaign, her charity started
working to create new perceptions of Africa and to show that it is
full of capable people with the potential to support themselves.
Her nonprofit has released three videos over the past year as part
of its "Stop
...
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April 23, 2012, 04:26 PM ET
Video: How Small and Large Nonprofits Use Social Media
As social networks grow in popularity, nonprofits of all sizes must
figure out how they spend their time using them, which networks to
focus on, and what skills to hire for. But big groups and
small groups often have different approaches to these challenges.
Large groups typically have more resources and can give more time
to social media. For example, TechSoup Global, which has a staff of
about 230, dedicates three full-time employees and four part-time
contractors to maintaining its presence on social networks. The
group soon plans to use fewer contractors while adding a new
full-time employee who will handle live online events, says Susan
Tenby, TechSoup's director of online community. Smaller groups
can't afford such luxuries. The Collaborative for High Performance
Schools, which has three full-time employees, must juggle social
media with its other priorities. Still, it manages...
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April 19, 2012, 10:39 AM ET
3 Online Traffic Measures All Nonprofits Should Track
Nonprofits can gather expansive amounts of information about their
online visitors by using free programs like Google Analytics. But
how much of this information is really important—especially for
groups that have limited time to track and analyze data about
viewers? Joanna Miles, online campaign organizer at Food &
Water Watch, an advocacy group, says nonprofit leaders should be
selective about what they track. "If we're never going to use that
data, I don't want to track it," she says. "Otherwise, it's just
more noise in our content reports." For nonprofits that use Google
Analytics, Ms. Miles recommends they use a tool called Goals, which
can track how many views a particular page gets, how long someone
spends on the page, and how many pages on a Web site each person
visits. 1. Outbound links and inbound referrers
Many groups measure the amount of time that someone stays on a ...
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April 19, 2012, 09:01 AM ET
Diverse Range of Nonprofits Nominated for Online Awards
Amnesty USA, Girl Scouts of the USA,
and the Sesame
Workshop are among the nonprofits whose sites and Internet
projects were nominated for the 16th annual Webby
Awards and Webby People’s Voice Awards,
which recognize the best online content. Nonprofits Change.org and Kiva are up against Internet giants
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for the People's Special Achievement
for Social Change award. Other nonprofits nominated for features of
their Web sites include:
- NPR
- PBS
- the It Gets Better Project
- the Silicon Valley Foundation-supported CitizenshipWorks
- Khan Academy
April 11, 2012, 09:38 AM ET
DoGooder Awards Highlight Effective Nonprofit Videos
Eight charities have won cash grants through the DoGooder
Awards, an annual contest that highlights the best nonprofit
videos. The winning videos, which include both advocacy and
fundraising features, succinctly communicate a message while
including a call to action, says Danny Alpert, a contest judge and
executive producer at See3, a video consulting company that
sponsors the contest, which is now in its sixth year. "Nonprofits
need to challenge themselves about what makes a story worth
telling," Mr. Alpert says. "Why will people care?" The contest
awarded four $3,500 grants, three based on an organization's size,
plus one more for overall storytelling. The Case Foundation also
provided four organizations $2,500 in its "Be Fearless Video"
category for producing especially provocative work. YouTube
recently featured the winning videos on its homepage. See two of
the winning videos be...
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April 10, 2012, 05:09 PM ET
Podcast: How and Why Causes Gain Momentum Online
In
the past few weeks and months, social media have helped many groups
unleash widespread advocacy efforts that have won the attention of
millions of people and ignited large-scale public debates.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood, for example, used Facebook and
Twitter to inspire protests after Susan G. Komen for the Cure said
it would end support to the organization. Invisible Children used a
YouTube video to start a campaign to make the public aware of
abuses committed by the warlord Joseph Kony, in Africa. And the
killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida has fueled a massive online
debate about race relations and gun laws and sparked large protests
nationwide. What is it that makes these events spread online and
generate support? The common thread is that the organizers found a
way to help anyone relate to the cause, says Stephanie Rudat, an
online activist and co-founder of...
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April 5, 2012, 02:58 PM ET
New Project Aims to Motivate Movie Fans to Do Good
"The Hunger Games," the new film based on the popular book by Suzanne Collins, has quickly become a blockbuster. Andrew Slack, executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans of another popular book and movie series, is hoping it can also inspire its fans to help change the world. Mr. Slack, who co-founded the alliance in 2005, is now working on the Imagine Better Project, an effort to help fans "turn the fictions they love into the world they can imagine." One of the first campaigns asks fans of "The Hunger Games" to carry a pledge sheet to join Oxfam International's campaign to fight hunger when they go to see the film and ask other moviegoers to sign up. The pledge sheet draws parallels between the movie's dystopian world and problems in the real world. That campaign was challenged by Lionsgate, the movie company distributing the film,...
Read MoreApril 5, 2012, 02:39 PM ET
Online Fundraising Increased 19% in 2011, Says New Report
The total that charities raised online jumped 19 percent in 2011
compared with the previous year, and the number of Internet gifts
they received climbed 20 percent, according to a new study that
analyzes online fundraising and advocacy at 44 national charities.
The 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study was published by M+R
Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company, and the
Nonprofit Technology Network. The share of people who responded to
e-mail fundraising appeals and advocacy requests dropped in
each of the last five eNonprofit Benchmarks studies. But in
2011, organizations said the percentage who made gifts increased 2
percent and the percentage who responded to advocacy alerts
jumped 28 percent. The increases can be attributed, at least in
part, to organizations' being smarter about their use of e-mail,
says Sarah DiJulio, a principal at M+R Strategic Services.
"They're...
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