David Levis poses with Dixon, a Ugandan youngster he and his wife supported through ChildFund International. They hold the first photo Mr. Levis received of Dixon. (ChildFund/Jake Lyell)

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 fans and added 800 more during voting for the finalists, said Virginia Sowers, community manager at the organization.

And the group gained one vocal advocate in Mr. Levis, a teacher from Citrus Heights, Calif., who spent his spring break touring Uganda and seeing his sponsorships at work.

“The nicest thing about it was to really see how the system worked,” Mr. Levis says. “It seems like this small, little amount of money focusing on one child, and the reality of how they have it set up is so much bigger than that.”

While Mr. Levis traveled the country, he shared his experiences through blog posts and Facebook messages to “bring all of the other sponsors, in a sense, with us.” He says he felt a certain burden as the winner of the trip, which was valued at about $5,000.

“This was not going for a vacation, this was not going for a touchy-feely, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ to fill my needs,” Mr. Levis says. The trip was to “put as much communication out there as much as possible to tell the stories as real and impassioned as possible each and every time.”

Mr. Levis said his family hadn’t been public about its charitable donations in the past, but the trip gave him a chance to talk about ChildFund with his friends, family, students, and others.

Since he returned from the trip, five of his friends have signed up to sponsor needy children, Ms. Sowers says.

Mr. Levis says he and his wife, both trained as teachers, are considering what it would take to go back to Uganda in the summer to help a school. They are weighing the cost of the trip against the value of donating that sum to ChildFund.

Ms. Sowers says the charity considered the trip such a success, it may hold a similar competition again.

Below, see a video of Mr. Levis’s trip.

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

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 the Chronicle’s 2011 Philanthropy 400 scored a median of 73 out of 100 for their home pages when viewed on computers and 65 out of 100 when viewed on a mobile device, according to a Chronicle review of those sites.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America scored second among the 25 largest organizations, with an 86 on a computer and 82 on mobile. Those high scores may result from the charity’s new emphasis on mobile devices, says Karl Kaiser, senior director of creative services and interactive communications at the organization.

“We’ve noticed a steady increase in visits to our site via mobile devices in the past six months, so we’ve been testing the latest in CSS 3 and HTML 5 [code] to maximize site experiences across all browsers and platforms," Mr. Kaiser says. "It appears to be making a difference."

One way the organization increases speed is to load all the repeated elements—navigation, backgrounds, logos, etc.—when visitors first come to the site. Those files are then saved on the visitors' computers. That way, the elements are downloaded just once and each subsequent page will load only new content.

It's a simple strategy, Mr. Kaiser says, but groups often ignore it as their sites get more complex.

"Many developers overlook components and ultimately unnecessary page elements start piling up and slowing down the page load times on each refresh," Mr. Kaiser says.

At the other end of the list, the American Red Cross scored second to last among the top 25 charities, recording only 46 of 100 points on a computer, and 52 of 100 on a mobile device. The organization's site is being redesigned, and its new site is expected to debut soon, says Anne Marie Borrego, a spokeswoman.

Here's how all 25 sites performed in the Page Speed tests:

Amnesty International USA, which isn't among the top 25 on the Philanthropy 400, scored 93 points on a computer and 91 points for mobile. Other Web-savvy charities with newer sites also scored well: Charity: Water scored 87 on a computer and 82 on mobile, AND DonorsChoose.org scored 83 on a computer and 90 on mobile.

The Nonprofit Technology Network scored 59 on a computer and 58 on mobile, lower than all but four of the 25 charities from the Philanthropy 400 on a computer, and lower than all but nine on mobile.

All nonprofits can take comfort in knowing that almost no group is perfect: Google scored a 99 on both computers and mobile devices, and it created the scoring system.

How does your nonprofit's page Web site compare?

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

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 the Pity” campaign, using humor to create a new conversation about the continent and humanize the people who live there.

In the first, published in February 2011, a 9-year-old African boy explains in detail the plot of his favorite movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Commando.” In another, Americans and Africans sing along to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.”

The most recent video, included above, shows a group of educated, rugby-playing young African men dismissing Hollywood stereotypes and making jokes about a “shirtless Matthew McConaughey.”

The video, released on Wednesday, received more than 250,000 views on YouTube in its first day online. Ms. Rodgers takes that as a sign people are ready for a new image of Africa.

“Using images that people can relate to, showing people not at their worst but at their full potential, with creativity, is just as effective,” Ms. Rodgers said.

Donors so expect to see a tragic story from Africa that many people who watched the “Commando” video assumed at first that the boy was a child soldier, Ms. Rodgers said. But as the video continues, it becomes clear that the piece is merely about a 9-year-old boy’s love for his favorite movie.

“We wanted people to say, ‘What am I thinking?’ ” Ms. Rodgers said.

Ms. Rodgers has faced criticism for showing only relatively wealthy, happy African people in the charity’s videos. But Bernard, a man featured in the “Hollywood Stereotypes” video, was an orphan originally sponsored by Ms. Rodgers’s late mother, who inspired the founding of Mama Hope. His story shows the power of what people can do when they get an education, Ms. Rodgers says.

Ultimately, Ms. Rodgers said she believes the perceptions Americans have about Africa will be shaped by what nonprofits say. Too often, she says, charities figure images of desperation will attract more gifts. But that’s not helping anyone, she says.

What do you think of this campaign?

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

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 to maintain an active presence, and because of its small size, it can be nimble in making decisions about its social strategy, says Ariel Dekovic, program and communications manager.

Ms. Tenby and Ms. Dekovic discuss how they approach social media in the video below.

Related live discussion: Social-Media Advice for Small Nonprofits

Send an e-mail to Derek Lieu.

A fact sheet featured on Food & Water Watch. The organization tracks what people download to see what draws attention.

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 Web site to help gauge how well it is engaging users. But when users leave the Web site, Google Analytics can show only the last page they visited, not where they’re going.

Ms. Miles addresses this by placing goals on all outbound links—those that direct away from Food & Water Watch—including the site’s social-sharing portals. This allows her to differentiate between the people who leave the site to visit the organization’s Facebook page and those who are “just wandering away,” she says.

In addition, knowing where visitors come from can tell an organization how well it is connecting with people on other sites and social networks.

2. Downloadable resources

Food & Water Watch offers users a number of fact sheets and reports on its site, usually in the form of PDF files. Users can also access spreadsheets and other downloadable content. Because these file names always end in a predictable extension (.pdf, for example) it is possible to attach goals to all of them at once, without going through each file individually.

“It’s the only way we can know if people are using them,” says Ms. Miles.

3. The thank-you page

Almost every charity has a thank-you page that appears after someone makes a donation. Tracking the traffic to this page is a reliable way to see how many people are donating, since people can click on the “Donate” button without actually giving.

For Web sites with a donate or checkout process that requires more than one page, Ms. Miles says, attaching goals to monitor the traffic to each page can reveal when users start to drop off.

Although donations are a concern to most groups, other uses of Analytics will vary.

For nonprofits dealing with the “balancing act” of how much data to log, Ms. Miles stresses the importance of having clear objectives. For her organization, she says, “We care about people donating, signing up for newsletters, and taking action. Figure out what’s important to you on your site, and have something in place to track it.”

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

New York’s Museum of Modern Art was nominated for its “I went to the MoMA and…” site.

In online film and video, the arts nonprofit Art21 is nominated for documentary series with PBS’s “Women, War & Peace” series and the Doctors Without Borders “Urban Survivors” series. Human Rights Watch’s “Revolutionaries: Egypt’s Transformers” was also nominated for best news and politics video series.

In mobile and apps, the PulsePoint Foundation was nominated for the best use of GPS or location technology for its application that alerts people trained in CPR that a medical emergency is happening nearby.

Dig deeper: Read about last year’s nominees and nonprofit winners, and also get video advice from the winner of last year’s Webby and People’s Voice award winner for public service and activism 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 below, and read Mr. Alpert’s views on why they are effective.

Protect Our Defenders, a nonprofit in Burlingame, Calif., won in the small-organizations category for a video that featured interviews with members of the military who had been sexually assaulted. “A lot of videos try to create outrage,” says Mr. Alpert. “This one does a good job at it.”

The video, which garnered more than 87,000 views on YouTube, drove visitors to an online petition site by using free tools available to nonprofits through the video-sharing site. YouTube allows groups in its nonprofit partnership program to insert links and comments into their videos by using overlays that pop up as the video plays.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation won the prize for a big organization, with a video that Mr. Alpert says “creates aspiration.”

“The basis of great videos is getting people to identify with the subjects,” he says. “Helping people want to help these people.”

The first half of the video focuses on telling the stories of people who are afflicted by cystic fibrosis and does not include any information about the foundation. The second half builds on those stories to include information about the organization and a fundraising appeal.

The piece is noteworthy because of its length. At six minutes, it runs considerably longer than the one to two minutes recommended for effective online videos. But it manages to hold viewers’ attention through its compelling stories about those who are helped by the nonprofit, Mr. Alpert says.

Send an e-mail to Derek Lieu.

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 Alliance for Youth Movements, a digital advocacy organization.

“Every single person I’m seeing involved and playing some sort of role in advocating or participating in finding justice sees something for themselves in each scenario,” Ms. Rudat says. “There’s a sense of empathy.”

In the latest episode of Social Good, The Chronicle‘s podcast about social media, Ms. Rudat shares lessons from recent events and advice for nonprofits on how to spread messages online.

“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, but it eventually backed down and agreed to work with fans on the forthcoming movies in the series.

The Harry Potter Alliance has been using fiction to help solve real-world problems since Mr. Slack started posting advocacy messages on fan sites in 2005. He was motivated then by a lack of direction among Harry Potter fans: they were spending hours talking about Harry Potter’s character but not acting like him.

“He would fight injustices in our world the way he fought injustices in his world,” Mr. Slack says.

Within a few weeks, his messages were reaching more than 100,000 people. In the years since, the organization has donated 90,000 books around the world, sent five cargo planes of aid to Haiti, and is working on other issues such as gay rights, genocide, and fair-trade chocolate. The organization has almost 90 local chapters and a staff of 70 volunteers.

“Just by harnessing the power of an untapped fan community,” Mr. Slack says. It’s a strategy he calls “cultural acupuncture.”

“We find where the energy is in the culture and authentically move with that energy,” he says. “Imagine looking at the movies, or looking at a sports event, and seeing all of the energy that’s already there. Then imagine taking that excitement and harnessing it toward social good.”

Any organization can use the same principles, Mr. Slack says.

He suggests nonprofits pay attention to forthcoming movies that have messages or plots that are tied to their missions. Groups can then try to connect with online fans and get them excited by creating Web pages or Tumblr pages that connect their missions and the film.

“Popular culture we oftentimes disregard, and that is at our own peril,” Mr. Slack says. “We need to be engaged.”

Send an e-mail to Cody Switzer.

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 consistently writing more compelling e-mail copy, tying it to the issues of the day,” she says. ”They’re also doing more sophisticated targeting and segmentation, so actually sending the e-mails to the people who are most likely to respond to them as opposed to blasting every e-mail to the full e-mail file.”

On average, monthly giving accounted for 8 percent of the money nonprofits collected online in 2011, compared with 5 percent in 2010. The average size of one-time online gifts for groups in the study was $62, while the average size of monthly gifts was $20.

Organizations’ social-media efforts continued to grow significantly in 2011. The groups in the study saw their number of Facebook fans increase by an average of 70 percent in 2011. On average, the charities in the study had 103 Facebook fans, 29 Twitter followers, and 12 mobile subscribers for every 1,000 people on their e-mail lists.

While the number of supporters who have asked to receive information via cellphone is still small, the number of people who view the groups’ e-mail messages on mobile devices is growing significantly.

For the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights organization that participated in the study, 17 percent of the group’s e-mail messages that are opened are read on mobile phones. As a result, the organization is experimenting with ways to make its messages easy to read on the devices’ small screens.

Send an e-mail to Nicole Wallace.