Your nonprofit has a fabulous website. You attract thousands of admirers each day. You update it with fresh content, you communicate with your donors. You rock.

You've also invested blood, sweat, tears and cash into the beast. So is it possible to make some money back from your website?

Having a decent website is a given for most nonprofits. It's a key communication tool, with your stakeholders, the media, donors, the world. Given that, let's assume that your website has some inherent value for your organisation. But can you actually create a revenue stream from your website?

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You’re sitting in your cubicle, trying to get a grant proposal finished.  Through the thin plastic wall, Ted’s yammering away on the phone.  The phone message light is flashing red, like an emergency beacon signalling your imminent overload.  And then Shannon sticks her head around the corner, and asks if you have a sec…just one second…

You can sense the nervousness for fundraisers right now as they watch the stock market flop around like a goldfish on the floor.

And the media pundits aren't helping. There are the Survivalists ("It's the Long Emergency - grab a tin of cat food and head for the hills!"), but also the Pollyannas ("It's business as usual - Capitalism needs to have a heart attack every few years!")

Don't panic! Instead, let's look at a historical example to gain some perspective. In fact, our example will be Ground Zero for the original Wall Street apocalypse: what was it like to fundraise during the Great Depression?

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To paraphrase Britt Bravo, Changebloggers are people who are using online resources to raise awareness, build community and facilitate everyone's taking action to make the world a better place. Qui Diaz originally posted the 3 questions that set off the Changeblogging meme and we've reposted them below with our responses - they look easy to answer, don't they?

Well, maybe it's that we're a brother and sister writing this blog. But it took us a long time to formulate a response. I wanted very badly to be able to write "I care about human rights, I write a blog about human rights, here are three ways you can make a difference and support - you guessed it - human rights."

So you've collected information about your IT needs, you've thought deeply and grokked your problems. Now what?

Having managed IT off the side of my desk (in addition to fundraising), I wanted to pass along a few nuggets of wisdom about information technology. Specifically, I was asked the other day how to hire a good “geek” for a non-profit. Seemed that all the best IT experts were either too specialized or too expensive to hire.

So I said to her, don’t just hire a geek. You need to step back and plan laterally. Here’s my two-part series on how to solve your IT woes…

To promote a new gorilla habitat, the London Zoo came up with a virtual gorilla. You download it to your desktop, then make sure all its needs are taken care of: food, water, etc. In time, the baby gorilla will grow into a mighty silverback. (I’m waiting for a virtual Jane Goodall to show up and park herself in the corner of my monitor, taking notes on my gorilla.)

Basically, this is a retread of the Tamagotchi phenomenon. It’s a cool toy that hooks kids in, educates them a little, and clutters up mom’s computer.

I was going to write about all the excellent non-profit blogs out there that there are to be read, but Beth’s Blog already made a fantastic entry to get you started on this (granted it focuses exclusively on Gen X/Y/Millennial blogs - but we’re Gen X/Y and it’s just to get you started).

A confession is that I don’t actually read a whole lot of non-profit oriented blogs and sites, mostly because it’s hard to find ones that don’t oversimplify their advice to the point of it being useless. Consider a recent example I came across on the subject of online fundraising:

Here’s an recent example of the “long tail” effect working for a non-profit.

Backstage Technologies is a small, “secretly Canadian” software company. They specialize in developing applications for Facebook - specifically, they’ve invented a way to simulate playing “scratch and win” lottery tickets. Careful, I said “simulate” - there isn’t actually money changing hands, you can’t win any cash.