It’s late at night. Someone is visiting your website and they like what they see. They want to donate to your cause, but it’s too late to call the office and too bothersome to write out a check. Where is the “Donate Now” button? You do have one, right?

Most nonprofits are heavily dependent on donations from the public to sustain their programs. A nonprofit’s website is increasingly the first public face of a nonprofit - and an excellent channel for receiving donations. Not quite sure? Watch this TechSoup webinar on making it easy for supporters to give by accepting online donations.

QR codes, two-dimensional bar codes that can be read by smartphones, are popping up in a surprising number of places. What you may not have realized is how they can be used by social benefit organizations.

Say “no” to money. We dare you. 

Full details at NetTuesday.ca

Did your favourite nonprofit group send you an email over the winter holidays inviting you to buy a calendar, a t-shirt, or some other form of merchandise?

This post is cross-posted from the TechSoup blog. You can read the original post and any comments here.

Who can help? Has this been done before? What is the best route? How can this project be sustainable? Crowdsourcing is being used to help find the answers to these and many other questions. According to Wikipedia, "crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call." Organizations are crowdfunding, crowd voting, crowdsourcing jobs, and even crowdsourcing films (see Life in a Day). Presentations illustrating its use have also been made available at this year's CrowdConf2010.

Join Cynthia M. Adams for a free webinar that offers a short tour of the GrantStation website. Learn how to use the tools that GrantStation provides to help you identify the right grantmaker for any program or project.

If you're interested in learning more about GrantStation before the TechSoup special offer on August 17 and 18, this tour will help you understand whether it's the right tool for your organization and how to get started.

If your organization is considering producing video as part of a social media intitiative, check out this video.  The information applies whether producing in-house, or hiring an professional company.  Let me know if you find it helpful and if you have any questions or suggestions for future content on the topic.

Blackbaud recently announced their new Index of Charitable Giving, a fundraising index that reports revenue trends of 1400 nonprofit organizations on a monthly basis. The tool is valuable for fundraisers and organizations interested in keep an eye on the global pulse of of monetary giving.

The Haiti Effect

Have you successfully moved from paper-based direct mail fundraising to digital tools (email, websites, video, social media, widgets, and/or mobile)? Want to gloat about your successes and possibly make some (more) money as well?

The Paperless Choice Challenge is rewarding successful, creative, replicable campaigns that use electronic  fundraising tools by giving away eight prizes totalling over $20,000. Entries can be submitted between June 15 and September 15, 2010. 

Loads of new research has been released in the last month that can help nonprofits be more strategic in their approach to their work. These studies have findings that have major meta level implications for senior leadership down to nitty gritty details for fundraisers. Here's a round-up: