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You might be amazed at how cynical a lot of donors are. I saw that cynicism up close a few years ago: I was assigned to interview donors who were sponsoring third-world children through a well-known religious organization. Again and again, those sponsors told me that the most wonderful thing about being sponsors was discovering that the children they sponsored were real people.

For many of you the upcoming holiday season will be the busiest time of the year for donations, and an increasing portion of those donations are arriving via your Web site. As a result, more of you are paying attention to your online donation pages. If you’re like many of our clients, all kinds of people are providing input, opinion and even demands about what your online donation pages should look like: "Center this." "Add that image." "Add this video." "Make it look more like that other charity’s donation page." Any of this sound familiar?

Philadelphia, PA, November 11, 2009 — customedialabs, an interactive media agency, today announces the launch of a new online home for the “first house that love built,” the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House.

October 24, 2009, The New York Times — Were it not for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, there might be no Google.

October 14, 2009, The Daily Princetonian — Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’76 donated $25 million toward the creation of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund, the University announced on Tuesday.

Twitter provides a way for content to spread organically between people, making an organization with a presence on the site more accessible to constituents, building trust and strengthening relationships with activists and donors.

So say Arielle Holland, consultant, and Marc Ruben, vice president, both with M+R Strategic Services, in the recently released whitepaper, Nonprofit Organizing in 140 Characters or Less. Holland and Ruben share some tips for nonprofits looking to harness the power of Twitter for their causes.

San Francisco, Calif., September 30, 2009 — 3banana Inc., a leading innovator of mobile information capture solutions, announced today the winners of the “Share to Win” challenge. The challenge, launched this September, was sponsored by 3banana as a philanthropic crowdsourcing contest helping health, environment and education focused non-profit organizations raise money and exposure for their respective causes while testing the sharing features of the company’s online and mobile note-taking software.

GAINESVILLE, Fla., September 3, 2009 —  Following the unimaginable loss of
their son Sebastian less than two years ago, Horst and Luisa Ferrero created
the Sebastian Ferrero Foundation with a mission to improve child patient
safety and develop a full-service children's hospital. Today the stars have
aligned for the Foundation with two significant steps forward. The Sebastian
Ferrero Foundation, the University of Florida and Shands HealthCare have
agreed to conduct an analysis of the attributes and resources of premier
children's hospitals in a cooperative effort to achieve a level of patient
safety and quality that is second to none in a full-service environment
devoted to children. The Foundation has also just received a commitment for a
$5 million gift--which represents significant progress toward the
philanthropic support necessary to move this project closer to achieving its
fundraising goal.

Most of the nonprofit techies I know have a laptop appendage — an extra (digital) limb, of sorts — attached to their bodies. Not so with fundraisers. As a breed, fundraisers are "people people" — they spend their time cultivating relationships by phone and face to face. Sure, you know how to use a computer, but when it comes down to the big ask, you've got to get out from behind your desk, right?

AUSTIN, TEXAS, September 1, 2009 — The National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) has drawn attention to hundreds of historic sites and other favorite places across the country with a creative and engaging social media campaign, This Place Matters. Launched earlier this summer with support and guidance from Charity Dynamics, the campaign enables individuals to share stories and photos of places that matter to them and also discuss ways to preserve those places.