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The Twitter co-founder Biz Stone plans to announce tonight that he is joining forces with a nonprofit technology group to start ConvergeUS, a charity that seeks to combat social problems with new technology. The nonprofit’s goal is to make resources of large technology companies more available to nonprofit, academic, and government organizations, said Rey Ramsey, chief executive of TechNet, who said he approached Mr. Stone to work with his group.

In 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy. He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or DotOrg.

However, the hyperbole looks more like hubris. DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products.

Nonprofit brand consultant Michel Levy provided 11 marketing communications best practices that fundraisers should utilize in their communications strategies. Here are tips six through 11.

Here are six online donation tools recommended by Idealware.

A San Rafael-based nonprofit that does HIV prevention work abroad may be expanding its programs after receiving a $4 million grant from Google.

Google's sales team awarded the grant to Global Strategies for HIV Prevention "to help with access to vital medication and health services, especially for women and girls, in post-conflict areas of Africa," Google spokesman Jamie Yood said.

On Nov. 16, 2010, GiveMN shattered our goal of 40,000 donors in 24 hours by engaging 42,596 unique donors who donated to their favorite nonprofits using the GiveMN.org platform on Give to the Max Day. All told, Minnesota nonprofits collectively raised $10,041,021 in one incredible day.

Since our outreach efforts focused on providing nonprofits with social media resources, email templates and content such as a video PSA for use on their homepages, it would seem those efforts paid off when it came to driving traffic.

Here are two of the tools that I have found to be the best time-savers in my social media day-to-day listening, communication and analysis of online activity.

Undergoing a fundraising technology upgrade or transition can be a tricky proposition. There are common traps many organizations fall into that complicate matters. The good news is there are ways to combat them.

Crowdsourcing is a new way of consulting your donors and supporters to figure out how to enhance your fundraising and unearth new ideas to achieve your mission.

Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China. With the new program in place, authorities in these countries would have no legal basis for accusing these groups of installing pirated Microsoft software.