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The response from donors following January's earthquake in Haiti came in fast and furious — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars flooding in through every channel imaginable. From online donations to mobile text-to-give to traditional mail, the response was overwhelming. But questions also arose about today's giving environment, especially in a crisis. How do you keep new donors engaged? Is this the sign of a mobile revolution? How can you mobilize funds quickly and efficiently? How do you prepare for emergencies?

The fast pace and apparent shallowness of sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as blogs and other online communities, seem to be the antithesis of what major-donor fundraising is all about. Not so, according to fundraising consultant Carolyn Appleton, who presented her case at the Nonprofit Technology Conference held in Atlanta earlier this month. In her session, “Major Gift Fundraising and Social Media,” Appleton tackled the old-school perceptions of social media.

FundRaising Success: How would you define where the fundraising sector in the United States is in regard to mobile giving?

Jim Killion: Mobile giving is in its infancy, but with the dramatic results achieved by the Red Cross with text-to-give to Haiti relief, it is now on most people's radar. In many ways, mobile giving is where what is now often referred to as "traditional Internet giving" was six or eight years ago. And just as Internet giving has taken off in the last decade, so will mobile giving. But the move to mobile will be much faster than the move to Internet giving.

March 31, 2010, Los Angeles Times — A group of businesses and advocacy organizations, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Tuesday that it is calling for an update to a decades-old privacy law it considers seriously outdated. The law governs how and when law enforcement agencies can access citizens' private electronic communications.

Dubbing itself Digital Due Process, the group said the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was written in a time before the Web had become a ubiquitous communications medium, where users around the world store huge amounts of personal information for years or even decades at a time.

Prosecutors and law enforcement frequently request e-mails and other online data when performing investigations, but private companies have argued that the guidelines for such requests have become too loose for their comfort.

Is Google stealing traffic from your Web site? Maybe not intentionally, but the increasing sophistication of the search engine giant’s results page may be diverting your current donors and potential ones away from the very messages you want them to read. Try searching for any reasonably well-known charity on Google, and you’ll get the search engine’s results page, which is known as a SERP in the IT business.

It was a typically Sunday morning for me in Chicago. I had my Starbucks, my free Wi-Fi and my Google bookmarks to keep me busy for the next hour until I was fully caffeinated and ready to face the world. I came across a great article that I was really excited to share with my fellow social networking enthusiasts — but then a very troublesome thing happened. When I went to utilize the “share” feature of this article, I was redirected with an error message. After a bit of scoffing at the thought of actually having to copy and paste the URL into my Twitter account, I began to think about how many other organizations are utilizing sharing tools and other social media widgets and tools without troubleshooting their functionally.

Palo Alto, Calif., March 1, 2010 — CauseWorld, the mobile application that allows consumers to give to causes just by entering retail stores and restaurants, has added the option to contribute to the Chile earthquake relief effort. The funds sent to Chile through the app will be facilitated by CauseWorld partner GlobalGiving, a nonprofit aid resource for disaster relief and long-term development around the world. 

Feb. 18, 2010, San Jose Business Journal — The Wikimedia Foundation said Wednesday it received a $2 million grant from Google Inc.

We're calling a new rector for my church. This entails creating a detailed profile of our institution, assessing our ministries, analyzing our finances, and praying and reflecting on our next "calling." It also entails letting some ministries go.

In the Sage Nonprofit Solutions webinar "Intro to Search Engine Optimization & Marketing for Nonprofits" in its Web Wise Series, Katie McNally, account supervisor for Sitewire Marketspace Solutions, and Dan Gonzalez, Web manager for Sage Nonprofit Solutions, discussed search basics, best practices for organic SEO and what search’s role should be in fundraisers' overall interactive marketing mix, among other things.