World Wildlife Fund

Donation pages continue to be a central part of nonprofit website design. If you’ve succeeded in making strong calls to action that guide website visitors to your donate page, you should reward them with a compelling and easy-to-use donation experience. In this post, I’ve collected a few impressive donation pages to show you. I’ll walk through the first three in more detail and point out a few things that they’re doing right.

A myth persists that nonprofits need the standard fundraising video or the basic call-to-action video to be successful. But I would argue there are a variety of ways in which you can share your story.

So, below are nine quick examples of what I have found. They are creative, unique and sometimes cutting-edge. I am hoping this can serve as inspiration when you conceive your next video story/strategy.

As a donor to 17 nonprofits in 2013 (and a lapsed donor to others), I decided to keep track of the mail and e-mails I received — as well as the receipts for the year-end donations I mailed on Dec. 20 — and share my observations with you.

Thanks to Microsoft Citizenship Asia Pacific, I’ve presented a series of online fundraising and social-media trainings to more than 300 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout Asia Pacific over the last three years. The experience has made me aware that access to information about trends in nonprofit technology, online fundraising and social media often does not reach small NGOs. Here are five online best practices to get small NGOs started: 1. Launch a new, mobile-optimized website. 2. Launch an e-newsletter. 3. Acccept donations online. 4. Study and mimic large NGOs. 5. Create a Facebook Page.

Innovation and technology among nonprofits have long been underfunded with traditional funders often feeling averse to risk and more often seeking to fund specific types of existing programs. Momentum has been building for the past decade for funders pursuing venture philanthropy, said Matt Bannick, managing partner of the Omidyar Network founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Seeking out ideas to fund, rather than existing projects, turns traditional notions of philanthropy on its head, Bannick said.

Google is announcing $23 million in grants to spur innovation among charities and increase education for girls and minority students in science and technology. Seven nonprofits won the first Google Global Impact Awards, each receiving a grant from Google: charity: water, DonorsChoose.org, World Wildlife Fund, Smithsonian's Barcode of Life, GiveDirectly, Equal Opportunity Schools and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Make sure those thumb-through folks see your important direct-mail components first … so they turn into content-pullers and engage with you.

Sixty-eight community organizations in 41 countries around the world were awarded a total of $10.5 million in grants from The Coca-Cola Foundation, the global philanthropic arm of The Coca-Cola Co., during the second quarter of 2012. These grants support the foundation's global priority areas, including $3.2 million for active, healthy living; $2.9 million for water stewardship; $780,000 for community recycling; $630,000 for education; and $3 million for other local priorities, such as youth development, community improvement, economic development and environmental responsibility.

MONTREAL, April 20, 2012 — Resolute Forest Products and National Envelope today announced a unique partnership that will provide customers with an expanded portfolio of solutions, including folio-size sheets using Resolute's innovative, high-yield, sustainable paper. This alliance is an integral part of both companies' continued emphasis on providing customers with industry-leading eco-friendly solutions.

At the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation's 2012 Washington Nonprofit Conference, five fundraising pros shared their secrets to implementing and running a monthly giving program in their session, "25 Proven Monthly Giving Tools & Ideas Packed in 50 Minutes."