Politics

For more than half a century, charities have been barred by federal law from making contributions to political campaigns.

Fueled by anonymous, unlimited contributions, nonprofit organizations have emerged as the latest weapon of choice in political advertising, rivaling congressional campaign committees in the last election cycle.

Overall spending by nonprofits was down considerably during the 2008 campaign, even though some groups tripled their expenditures to help take up the slack.

Tips about wildly successful fundraising and awareness strategies will continue to be culled from the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign for months to come. If you have passionate constituents, tasty pieces of breaking news can be effectively delivered to supporters’ cell phones, and you can leverage these numbers to activate your grassroots support — maybe even with mobile phone fundraising (“text to give”).

At the end of this month, we will witness one of the biggest transformations in our country’s history when Barack Obama steps in as the first black president of the United States. Obama’s election represents a sea change for our country in race relations. It also represents a sea change in marketing, communications and fundraising for success.

On her Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Katya Andresen shares a recap of and highlights from the session “The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach,” which she and Sea Change Strategies President Mark Rovner presented at the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month. The NTC in New Orleans was full of fantastic, sparkly, shiny new technology tools. And then there was our session. No winsome widgets, no witty Twittering, no Dopplr-found Doppelgangers. And that was the point. Which is this: What makes technology tools great is not the technology. It’s the people behind them. Successful technology is about

On the See3 Communications blog See What’s Out There, See3 CEO Michael Hoffman shares these tips from YouTube’s “YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet.” The basics * Reach out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses. * Partner up. Find other organizations on YouTube who complement your mission, and work together to promote each other. * Keep it fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short — ideally fewer than 5 minutes. * Spread your message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get

At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, nonprofit techies and professional fundraisers met up to discuss the emerging best practices for fundraising using social networks and social media. Their conversations were overwhelmed by one small detail. Few nonprofits have succeeded in raising large amounts of money using blogs, widgets and fundraising applications for social networks. Nine months since the high-profile launch of Facebook Causes and well over a year since the first articles on Web 2.0 fundraising started to appear, members of the nonprofit tech community seemed to be turning against the new-fangled tools for online fundraising. The traditional staples

Ed note: In last week’s edition of his snarky e-letter, Business Common Sense, direct-mail pundit Denny Hatch weighed in on the online political fundraising. This article is excerpted from that; to read the whole article, click here. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama have discovered the Midas touch in terms of milking political Web junkies for cash. It looks as though they will go down to the Denver Convention in late August having spent zillions to bash each other, and very possibly destroy the Democratic Party’s chance to win back the White House in what should be a slam-dunk election. How

It might be an off year for big elections, but political fundraising never takes a hiatus. You can be sure that even with almost two years left in the current presidential administration, copywriters around the country, from every political party, are gearing up for the next big push.

Well-known political direct-mail strategist Hal Malchow recently spoke with FundRaising Success about raising money for political campaigns and how to connect with political donors. Malchow also is an author and president of Washington, D.C.-based communications firm MSHC Partners Inc.