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Is your organization considering setting up a profile on a social-networking site? Are you wondering what tasks are involved, how much time it will take, and how you might streamline your efforts? Maybe your organization has established a presence on MySpace and is now contemplating adding one to Facebook. Perhaps you’re wondering how you can juggle multiple profiles and still have time left to do other work. As more and more organizations jump on the social-networking bandwagon, people are seeking ways to make the time spent on these tools as efficient and fruitful as possible. I recently surveyed several nonprofit professionals and social-networking mavens

When you think of YouTube, perhaps it’s the do-it-yourself entertainment of lonelygirl15 or the mysteriously faceless Pachelbel’s “Canon” guitar whiz that comes to mind.

Few universities are as indebted to their alumni as the University of Notre Dame. Case in point: In 1879, when a fire destroyed its Main Building — which at the time housed virtually the entire university — only 35 years after it was founded, it was alumni from Chicago who rallied to raise funds to rebuild it. Their support not only got the university back on its feet, but it also set it on a path of growth that hasn’t yielded to this day.

“I often visit nonprofit websites where it takes multiple steps to get to the online donation page and then the online donation page takes multiple steps to fill out and I think back to [a presentation on reaching donors under 40 that I attended a few years ago] and the donor under 40 who said ‘If your online donation page doesn’t load within 6 seconds and doesn’t work with Google autofill forget it, I’m not donating to your organization.’ These donors are busy and because they grew up in the Amazon era, they expect technology to be easy to use and they expect

Dick McPherson’s new book, “Digital Giving: How Technology is Changing Charity,” is a comprehensive yet highly digestible volume that marries McPherson’s sage insights with real-life case studies, tips and observations from myriad nonprofit fundraisers and consultants. In it, McPherson, president and creative director of Malvern, Pa.-based McPherson Associates, breaks down e-philanthropy to its essential elements and details how those elements need to be addressed by nonprofits hoping to raise money and awareness online and through other new technologies. Here, an excerpt that outlines tips for success from Katherine Miller, director of communications for the United Nations Foundation, which recently partnered with Sports Illustrated and the

Laura Fredricks, vice president for philanthropy at Pace University in New York, presented a session a the AFP Annual Conference in Dallas earlier this year on turning annual donors into major-gift prospects. Vital to this strategy is identifying best prospects through prospect research. For starters, one of the most efficient ways to do initial research these days is through basic Internet search tools like Google, or the Foundation Center’s Web site, which enables Form 990 searches. Fredricks also recommends LexisNexis, which can unearth information on a person’s wealth, their assets, what assets they have that are publicly held, boards that they’re on, other organizations

Charity: is an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about extreme poverty, educating the public, and provoking compassionate and intelligent giving.

Nonprofit organizations can create customized, multi-lingual community toolbars that supporters can download to their browsers to increase campaign awareness, encourage community participation and drive fundraising.

Toolbars — offered and hosted free of charge by marketing platform Conduit — can include features such as one-click donation buttons, RSS-driven action alerts, news tickers, weather updates, links to community chat rooms and podcasts, and e-mail alerts. Toolbar Web searches are powered by Google and, according to Rena Jadhav, chief marketing officer for Conduit, 50 percent of the revenue Conduit generates through searches goes to the nonprofit.

There is a new voice being heard on nonprofit Web sites. It’s the voice of Web site visitors stepping up, speaking out and taking part in their own online community spaces — blogs, discussion groups and more — and it’s changing the way nonprofits think about their Web sites, and about their strategic approaches to reach out and engage their constituents and supporters. Many nonprofits have “brochure” Web sites with pages that present read-only information about an organization’s goals, activities and accomplishments. These sites may be attractive and informative, but they don’t actively engage the Web site audience. Because of this, they are giving

Thanks to cutting-edge technology, online advocacy campaigns are not only possible, but they can bring an issue located hundreds or thousands of miles away right to constituents’ backyard in ways that direct mail can’t. The “I Love Mountains” campaign is a perfect example of this. A collaboration by local, state and regional organizations across Appalachia working together to end mountaintop removal, a type of coal mining where the tops of mountains are removed and mined for coal, I Love Mountains is operated through iLoveMountains.org, a site produced by Boone, N.C.-based environmental organization Appalachian Voices. It uses cutting-edge technology to inform and involve