It’s generally accepted that the nonprofit world is closely modelled on that of business.  A positive balance on the owner’s year-end bank statements, or a positive impact on whatever cause the nonprofit was formed to support? There’s a strong parallel. And nonprofits can benefit from the never-ending corporate research into what drives ...

Have you ever wanted to try online advertising to promote your organization, but weren’t sure how to get started?  Starting tomorrow, NTEN.org (The Nonprofit Technology Network) will be hosting a series of webinars aimed at teaching you how to get the most out of Google Grants, a program that offers free online Google Adwords advertising ...

Why would your organization want to pay for an email marketing service, instead of simply using Outlook and your regular email server to contact your members? There are a number of compelling reasons why even a small e-newsletter subscription list might best be handled by a dedicated email marketing service, starting — first and foremost — ...

When your spokesperson is interviewed on the TV evening news, that's air time worth far more than most nonprofits could hope to afford as an advertising purchase. And when your organization is quoted in the press, that lends an air of credibility that you just can't buy at any price. Advertising is telling your own story. Publicity is when ...

Social media and social networking are hot buzzwords in the world of online marketing, but what do they mean in practical terms? Is social media marketing just a passing fad, or could it be a worthwhile strategy for your organization? In a survey done by Collactive of close to 200 organizations, those with a successful social media strategy ...

Conventional wisdom says that it is the small nonprofit organizations who stand most to benefit from Web 2.0 opportunities, where so much can be accomplished for such a small investment of time and resources. Online video, for example, puts multimedia broadcasting into the hands of organizations that could never afford to buy television air ...

For an example of how simple web tools and social networking sites can be used to raise awareness of a nonprofit's cause, LOLseals is worth a close look. It's a new photo caption contest from the Humane Society of the United States, blending pop culture trends and web 2.0 tools in a low-cost campaign that practically begs to go viral. ...

This post has been contributed by Lance Trebesch and Taylor Robinson from TicketPrinting.com. Think your nonprofit organization has no need for a blog? You may want to think again. According to Technorati, more than 10,500 blogs were tagged charity, 4,000 blogs nonprofit and 2,300 blogs philanthropy in January of 2007 and these numbers are ...

Your nonprofit organization may buy advertising space to take a message to the general public, send out newsletters and email blasts to reach your membership, and run a website and blog to do both. But all of that, in the end, is simply “talking about yourself” – a strategy with very limited powers of persuasion. “You'll never say anything ...

 Michael Sola is the Director of Information Technology of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and protecting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers. For the past 6 months, Michael Sola has been blogging as part of the organization's larger communications strategy. We caught up with ...