There are five weeks left in our quest to raise $10,000 to send 50 nonprofits to the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco this April. We're almost a quarter of the way there!

At NTEN headquarters, we're doing everything WE can think of to raise that money. All I can say is, it's a good thing we've got you to help out! Our bake sale was crumb-y (get it?), mining for bitcoin took too long, and we struck out at our bowl-a-thon.

This week, I tried my hand at the age-old art of busking. Let's just say that it wasn't my musical talent people were after. See how I fared, and don't forget to make your donation to the campaign today!

Flickr photo: andercismoThe funny thing about being the Nonprofit Technology Network is that it can be really hard to practice what we preach.

You may recall that the NTEN community recently helped us raise over $15,000 to host more local events throughout 2012. We learned so much while running that campaign, but we also made lots of mis-steps along the way. One of the things we wished for as we navigated the campaign: benchmarks. Besides average gift amount, what might we expect?

We value both transparency and sharing here at NTEN, so we decided we would share all our campaign results with you. We'll share some more of the "how-to" type advice in the coming days, but for now, here are some of NTEN's benchmarks.

Every year, the NTEN community raises $10,000 – generously matched by Convio! – to send more than 50 people from small nonprofits to the Nonprofit Technology Conference. This year, the NTEN staff was bound and determined to make it happen on our own. We organized a bake sale, tried mining for bitcoin, and last week, we held our first Bowl-a-Thon.

Let's just put it this way: the Dude has nothing to worry about! But since we can't bowl, we'll need your help (and likely a white russian).

Check out the video footage and please support the Scholarship Campaign today!

You've probably heard by now that Blackbaud has announced it intends to acquire Convio in a roughly $240 million deal.

As we all learned from "The Brady Bunch", it's not the marriage that's interesting, it's what happens when the family blending begins. As Kathleen Pequeno noted today on Twitter: