Amazon.com

We have to let the donor experience drive our giving sites, not our cumbersome internal processes that make things difficult. This process should be filled with joy and ease for the end user, not headaches and frustration. This is especially critical because your online donors make larger gifts than those that come in the mail. Need more proof of the power of online gifts? Check out the annual report from Blackbaud.

To get you thinking, here is a brief checklist of 5 items from the donor's perspective that make a real difference.

"What Great Brands Do" is relentlessly practical about brands. It starts with the assumption that great brands make their brands their businesses, not something they add on to their businesses to make them look better. The book is about commercial branding, so there are a few things that don't quite connect for nonprofit brands. But a lot of it does.

Here are the main points, the things great brands do. I've interpreted them a bit for the nonprofit sector.

Download this free whitepaper to learn more about how to compete in the changing eCommerce market. Global eCommerce sales totaled $1.2 trillion in 2012 and are expected to grow 15% annually through 2016. What are you doing to take advantage of this huge opportunity?

Open data and transparency can make a significant difference in the success of an organization. Sharing meaningful data and collecting feedback strengthen the work and the long-term impact, allowing organizations to address what is working and what is not and making them agile and able to correct course early on.

Companies do this all the time. In the for-profit world, customer feedback drives business development and innovation — think Amazon and Yelp. Companies that neglect customer feedback often stagnate and shrivel over time.

Increasingly, nonprofits are changing their brands to help boost fundraising. But what changes really help a nonprofit's bottom line and which ones don't?  Your experiences, decisions and opinions are what matter most to us, so I hope you can spare a few minutes to participate in this brief survey on behalf of a sponsor, in partnership with FundRaising Success.
To thank you for your participation, once you have completed the survey, we are offering you the chance to enter our drawing to win a $100 Amazon gift card.

Despite the emphasis on content marketing for nonprofits — crafting the right content to motivate each specific group to take the action you desire — there’s one important ingredient left out of the discussion time and time again. Copy editing — checking for spelling, grammar, consistency and accuracy. Are you investing the time and resource to polish that compelling content before you distribute it? Based on the content I see from many nonprofit organizations, the answer is “sometimes.”

We know technology has changed nonprofit operations, fundraising and supporter engagement. But how and to what extent? Your experiences, decisions and opinions are what matter most to us, so I hope you can spare a few minutes to participate in this brief survey on behalf of Charity Dynamics in partnership with FundRaising Success.
To thank you for your participation, once you have completed the survey, we are offering you the chance to enter our drawing to win a $100 Amazon gift card.

Yes, your nonprofit absolutely positively needs a drone. Of course, that’s a few years away. But that doesn’t mean you can’t — TODAY — start thinking like an organization that plans to use a new, radical technology. In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens provided a road map of sorts for learning from the "Amazon Experience" that made Prime Air a reality. He applies his lessons to President Barack Obama, but they can be applied to nonprofits as well.

Let’s have a look at six types of landing-page conversion killers. Avoid these mistakes, and your chances of creating a high-converting page will dramatically increase. 1. Are you wishy-washy? 2. Are you too clever? 3. Are you using meaningless graphics? 4. Are you a hype machine? 5. Are you irrelevant? 6. Do you rely too much on the power of free?

Amazon has launched AmazonSmile, a new program for customers to support their favorite charitable organizations every time they shop. Through AmazonSmile, Amazon will donate a portion of each purchase price to the customer's favorite charitable organization. There is no cap on the total donation amount, and customers can choose from nearly 1 million organizations around the country.