Flickr Photo: Tracy OEvery September, our e-Newsletter focuses on fundraising. This year, we want you to tell us what you're planning for your end-of-year campaigns. Doing anything cool and innovative? Sticking to the tried and true? Contingency plans to allow for the sputtering economy?

Tell us about it in 250 words (or less) on our Facebook fan page or in comments below by September 18th. If we run your contribution in the newsletter, we'll give you a free pass to one of our fabulous webinars (not to mention the attention of thousands of nptechies).

Flicker photo: mockstarHow many of you get this annoying email from your boss/board, a forward of another organization's fundraising appeal? At the top of the message, your boss has written: "This is great! Let's do this in our next campaign!"

Madeline Stanionis wants you to know that this is NOT how you raise money online. In fact, one of the maddening things about online fundraising is that there are so few rules, so few things that will work for every organization.

In her chapter in our book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, Madeline sets up a pretty darn great framework for developing your own online fundraisng plan, but what you fill that plan with was the topic of our recent discussion:

Now that the warm days of summer have finally graced us with their presence, January seems like a distant memory. But for those of you who participated in the Case Foundation Giving Challenge, it probably feels like yesterday. We hate to bring up all those sleepless nights and the constant campaigning, but now we've got a great write up about the Challenge from Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

A total of nearly 2 million dollars raised from nearly 75,000 people means there were a few lessons learned. Many align nicely with some of the principles of We Are Media. Here are a few tidbits I found particularly compelling:

Marc Ruben, M+R Strategic Services

In a packed room at the 2009 NTC in San Francisco, LeVar Burton loomed large. Well, not LeVar in the flesh, but rather his metaphorical presence, in the form of the famous adage from his "Reading Rainbow" TV series: "Don't take my word for it."

All those tried-and-true strategies you read about in case studies, blogs, and, yes, this venerable online publication? They may not work for your organization.

You've gotta test things for yourself.

Susan Gordon, Causes

Facebook provides an unprecedented opportunity for nonprofits: 200 million monthly active users, about half of whom are signing in and communicating with their friends on a daily basis, is an organizer's dream.

But can nonprofits fundraise effectively using Causes?

Our top fundraising cause is the Nature Conservancy who has raised $262,984 to date, and we've seen another 15 nonprofits raise over $50,000 so far. Across the platform, users have donated over $9 million in 24 months and our daily donation total is up 10x over the past 12 months.

We're not promising a magic bullet for fundraising. But we have developed some excellent tools that, when combined with your knowledge of fundraising and messaging, can bring in donations from new donors who you have never before reached.

Flickr Photo: thelearnrOver the weekend, I encountered a new phenomenon: AdWords squatting. I met a guy trying to develop a business around finding obscure, but potentially lucrative search terms, building up a quality AdWords presence for them, then, presumably, selling the rights. His best success so far was -- and I cannot make this kind of stuff up -- "adult incontinence".

This is the mindset we're competing against with our Google Grants accounts.

Go search for "polar bear" on Google. You'll find ads from the NWF and Defenders of Wildlife up against ads for travel services for polar bear-based tourism.

Google's not going to give us top placement just because we're trying to do good, so join us for our Advanced Google Grants webinar series, "Maximizing Your Grant To Meet Your Organization's Goals", to learn best practices from the Google Grants team.

> Learn more and register today!

We just released the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study with our fantastic friends at M+R Strategic Services. The report is chock full of amazing and interesting information you can use to make better decisions about your online campaigns.

To help folks get started, we hosted a release party. Get the recording to see how Children's Defense Fund and HRC use benchmarks to increase the performance of their online campaigns.

Or, for those of you who can't be bothered to open another link -- that's how I roll, so I feel you -- here are some highlights from this year's report:

Well, she did it. Holly's remake of Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" video played on two 30 foot screens in front of a packed house at the opening plenary of the 2009 NTC. At the end of it, she received a standing ovation.

Now it's time for you to do your part: we expect you to make this video so popular, Holly actually gets the chance to meet Beyonce. Get to it, kids! (And thanks again for your support of our scholarship campaign.)

That's right: We can run a major conference AND release a major report!  We're THAT good! Thanks to our fab partners, Idealware, we're releasing the Consumer's Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems.

> FREE! Get the report!

The Consumers Guide provides you the unbiased comparative information you need to narrow down your choices in a fundraising system. The information is divided into two reports—the actual Consumers Guide, which provides summaries and recommendations across all 33 of the systems we reviewed, and the Detailed Reviews, which provide the detailed evaluations of twelve specific systems.

This Idealware report was written in partnership with NTEN, and with generous sponorship by NPower.

I just finished reading the 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarks Analysis, put out by Blackbaud company Target Analytics. Get the report and read it. It points to some great momentum in online giving.

By many measures, online fundraising had a red letter year in 2008:

• Online donors are younger and have higher incomes than traditional, primarily direct mail donors.
• Over the past few years, online giving has become an increasingly significant source of new donor acquisition.
• Online donors give much larger gifts than traditional donors.

You've probably already heard statistics like these floating around at various conferences and presentations. It's the kind of stuff we presenters say to justify the rest of our presentations. Fortunately, it's all true.

But, as the sector has embraced online giving, we've had a niggling voice in the backs of our heads telling us that the donors we've cultivated online aren't sticking around. It's one of those feelings we haven't wanted to talk about: Saying it out loud might make it true. And there really hasn't been a lot of data.

Well, this report has some pretty telling data. Let's get the bad news out of the way first, shall we?