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Get your expectations in the right order and you'll have a happy relationship — and a productive one — with your board. Here's what you can count on — and what you can't — with your board members.

"Hipsters" are a generation of highly educated professionals in their 20s and 30s who make increasingly disposable incomes. They were born under the watchful eyes of focus groups, and Google started as they began high school. Hipsters are your newest crop of donors, but how do you reach them?

In a struggling economy, many other charities will also be conducting year-end campaigns that mix e-mail, social media, traditional mailings, and advertising. What’s more, many of them will be making pitches for gifts right up until New Year’s instead of wrapping up earlier as they did in the past.

Charities have little choice, says Ms. Dyer. “This is a busy time of year for donors, and it is cluttered in terms of competing messages. It is all the more important for us to make a bigger impact.”

Year-end online fundraising doesn't just happen in December. Here are nine practical steps fundraisers can take now to raise more money online in December.

The X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit that designs and administers competitions with prizes of up to $30 million, the Government of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi have formed a partnership to create a global competition to develop and deploy clean and efficient cookstoves. The competition will focus on the development of affordable and clean-burning cookstove technologies (and possibly delivery models) and is a part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009.

Corporate profits are on the rebound, but most big businesses say it will be some time before they can give as much cash as they did before the recession, according to a Chronicle survey of 162 of the country’s largest corporations.

Among 76 organizations responding to a survey of the 200 largest U.S. charities based on a listed compiled annually by Forbes magazine, 65 percent are blogging and 42 percent report social media are very important to their fundraising strategy.

The share of charities using some form of social media, known as Web 2.0, is up 8 percentage points and 22 percentage points, respectively, from similar studies in 2008 and 2007.

So with all these great, new outreach and engagement tools at its disposal, how can your organization harness this still-new medium to empower constituents on your behalf? There are many strategies and 
initiatives already playing out all over the fundraising sector — with plenty more new and unforeseen ideas still to come. Here, FundRaising Success highlights some creative and successful ways organizations are using social media to raise awareness and funds.

Fundraising events can be extremely valuable sources of revenue and awareness for any nonprofit organization. However, there is a lot more to successfully pulling one off than mobilizing a few volunteers and getting participants to encourage pledge donations to walk (or run or swim or bike, etc.). In a webinar presented by nonprofit technology solutions provider Convio, 5 Best Practices for Event Fundraising: Proven Success Strategies of the Top Run-Walk-Ride Events, James Young, senior open strategy manager of Convio, and Jeff Shuck, president and CEO of event fundraising consultants Event 360, discussed the important aspects of executing successful fundraising events.

If you love thinking about how social media and technology can be used to raise money, increase visibility and create social change (is there an app for that?), there's no better place to be than the annual NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference, which took place this year in April in Atlanta. Once I got done ogling all of the new iPads and finished searching for places to plug in my laptop, I actually had real conversations with a few breathing humans. Look, ma! No plugs!