23 Free Webinars in October (from Wild Apricot Blog). A great list of events this month that take up neither time nor budget.

Causes releases new toolkit for nonprofits (from Causes.com). The leader in social media for charities adds some really useful new functionality.

Fundraising is more effective when done by your supporters (from UStream). A video from the Case Foundation explaining one of the most important truths of social media, that your audience can turn around and be your advocate.

How nonprofits are (and are not) using social media (from Upleaf). A nice short breakdown of statistics on social media use by nonprofits. Is your organization behind, on or ahead of this curve?

What is it?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Google Wave is a new communication tool, which its creators and more rabid fans see as basically the next email. Combining aspects of email, instant messaging, collaborative documentation, and a handful of other technologies, it’s a platform that can and will be used to create some really interesting applications in the next few years. It was developed by the same team that brought us Google Maps, which is in my opinion one of the most useful free applications on the web. In my day job, I work with Maps all the time, and I know its limitations, but compared to its competitors, it’s a short list. Note to self – write soon about Maps. Anyway, Wave promises to let users communicate in a much more collaborative way. Email is basically a faster, digital version of postage, and the Wave developers argue (convincingly, I think) that we can do a lot better than that. For more information on what Wave is (and isn’t), check out the video of its first unveiling early year. (Warning: Video is 80 minutes long and a little technical, but gets the points across)

Internal First

Like I said, there will be some really interesting Wave-based apps coming out in the next year or so. But, for now, the main value of it will not be so much as a tool for communicating between your organization and the community, but instead for handling communication internally. This means that in the short run, this is a tool that is going to be most useful for larger organizations. If you have volunteers and staff in several offices, or even several continents, then a new kind of system for collaborating and sharing ideas might be immediately useful. For smaller organizations, Wave’s usefulness is still a little ways off.

So Why Should You Care?

There are a few reasons that even smaller organizations should care about Google Wave. First, it’s a sign that communication on the web is always changing. Organizations looking to recruit and maintain a community on the web can’t afford to assume that the tools used to do so today will still be useful in a year. Even by just reading up on the release, and checking out Wave-based apps as they come out, you’re keeping up to date and aware of what’s out there. That keeps you and your organization flexible, and as soon as someone comes out with an application that has a direct use for your nonprofit, you can be educated enough about the tool and its uses that you can jump on that chance.

Wave is a very new tool, in fact really still a work in progress, and nonprofits are almost never on the cutting edge of this kind of technology, for better and for worse. However, when a product comes out promising to change how people communicate on the web, and it’s got the backing of a behemoth like Google, it’s worth taking notice. After all, what industry is more concerned with communication and discussion than nonprofits?

The types were: Information Sharing, Self Promotion, Opinions/Complaints, Statements and Random Thoughts, Me Now (personal status updates), Question to Followers, Presence Maintenance, and Anecdotes. Actually, technically there were nine types, but two were different kinds of anecdotes, and that just seemed unnecessary.

The main result of the study (and the source of Mashable’s headline) was that 80% of their quite small sample of 350 users were using Twitter mostly as a “Me Now” service, posting personal updates and not much else. I have to assume that this leaves out spammers … but anyway, the question it brings to mind is this: How much of each of these types should a nonprofit Twitter account be posting?

Check Yourself

For those organizations that have a Twitter account already, there’s an obvious place to start, and that is a breakdown of your own feed’s recent tweets. Since we’re relatively new to Twitter (at least on the @charitygeek account), I can pretty easily break down all of our posts to this point. Our first 25 tweets have been made up, as it turns out, of 16 Information Spreading posts, 8 Promotional posts, and 1 Presence tweet (our first, basically saying “hello, we’re here”). That’s 72% Information and 32% Promotion. I would argue that promoting our own posts about our subject are also somewhat informative, but we’ll stick to the categories in the study.

Stay Close to Message

This blog’s whole reason for being is to spread information, to inform, and so I’m pretty happy with 72% of our tweets being informational. The 32% that are promotional are all links to our own posts, which is, at the end of the day, a main reason for having the Twitter feed at all. I would say ours is an example of being on message, perhaps to a fault. If there’s one thing that I’ll take from this study, it is to be a little more flexible with the account. There is definitely a place for the “Questions to Followers” and “Opinion” posts. Take a look at your percentage, and make an effort to stay close to your message, if not consistently on it. Don’t be afraid to veer slightly off if the topic is something that your followers will find interesting, or that will start or maintain a discussion.

Make the Distinction from a Personal Account

Many high-profile nonprofits have an account for both the organization as a whole and the president/chairman personally, and I think this is the way to go. A personal account lets you be more flexible, and use your personality as the tool for your cause that it really should be. That also allows your organization account to be a little stricter. Discussion is a vitally important part of the Twitter experience, and I would never counsel any group to use it purely as a promotional tool, because that is not an effective use of the service. But keep in mind what your followers want to see, and by all means, ask them what they want to see. They are interested, and your Twitter account can be a vital tool in keeping them so.

When designing or redesigning a nonprofit site, there are a lot of things to keep in mind, and a huge proportion of effort (somewhat rightfully) goes into designing the top half of the homepage. After all, this is what people will see first. It contains your logo, your main menu of options, and hopefully, a call to action like a donation button. But as important as these things are, don’t lose sight of the footer, the area at the bottom of the page, because this area is hugely important to your site’s success.

The Bare Minimum

A footer is, in 90% of cases, nothing but a short horizontal list of a few important links. Different organizations have different philosophies about where to put certain links, but there are a few that should always be in your footer. If you don’t have a Privacy Policy page, make one now and make sure that a link to that page is in the footer of every page on your site. Not only is it something that users and online donors have come to expect, but not having a privacy policy page can get your site penalized by Google and other search engines. Another thing that should always be in your footer is a simple copyright, like “© 2009 CharityGeek”

Choose These Links for a Reason

Too often, we in the web business tend to copy practices from other sites rather than make informed decisions of our own, and the choice of footer links often falls into this category. Aside from the copyright and privacy policy link, there is no “required” footer content, and it’s up to you what to put there. So what makes a link appropriate for the footer? It should be something that you want the user to be able to find, but not the path you ideally want the majority of users to take. For example, if your organization builds wells for African villages, you want users that come to your site to learn about the problem of unclean water, learn what you are doing about it, and how they can help. These are the paths you ideally want them to take, and they should be clearly shown on the top of the page. But, if they want to learn more about your organization in order to feel more comfortable working with you or donating to your cause, they will look around the page for this information. The footer ensures that they can find that information if they look, but that it’s not so obvious that it distracts from your primary goals.

Get Creative

For search engines and basic usability, a basic set of footer links is perfectly fine. But, some sites have chosen to get a little more creative, and it’s worth a look at what they have done with their footers. Here are a few that stick out to me as interesting in terms of design:

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
This footer is simple in terms of links, but tells visitors about the source of funding for the site, as well as having an attractive tagline as a cap to a nice overall site design.

National Urban League
The footer can be a second place to put your logo to reinforce your brand, and the NUL uses it like a business card, with contact information right there and then a series of links to the right.

Bailey House
This footer does a nice job of separating into two different sections – one for navigation (Home, Contact Us, etc) and one for privacy and legal data. Also, the addition of the Facebook link is one that more nonprofits should consider as a final chance to get the user involved in their social networks.

Best Friends Animal Society
Speaking of social networks, this footer puts the spotlight squarely on that aspect, with links to all of their pages on the major social sites.

CancerCare
CancerCare throws the kitchen sink at their footer, with social network links, site search, and contact information. It takes up a lot of real estate on the page, but it gives users that get there virtually every option they might want.

Don’t overinvest in your website (from WiserEarthBlog). It may seem a little backwards for me, as a tech blogger, to de-emphasize the web’s importance, but the fact is that this writer has it completely right. The web is a tool, but only in so far as it works for you.

Five Tips to Strengthen the Design of Your Nonprofit’s Website (from Frogloop). Jessica Teale was the Design Manager for Obama’s campaign. That means we listen when she speaks about better design.

Cool News for (Nonprofit) YouTube Users (from Peak Performance Philanthropy). If you have videos of your events or promoting your organization, don’t miss the new nonprofit features from YouTube.

101 5-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website (from InsideCRM). Some of these are obvious, but especially for beginners in the world of web design and SEO, this list is a great place to start.

One case where I would argue in favor of advertising is the Amazon Associates affiliate program from Amazon.com. Associate sites make a percentage of purchases made by visitors that navigate from their site to Amazon. I’m definitely not advocating a big gaudy Amazon logo and search box in your sidebar, or a banner across the top of your site. But, when used in an appropriate and targeted way, Amazon affiliate links can not only provide an income stream for your site, but a service for visitors. Here are a few ground rules for using the program in the best way for both you and your readers.

Recommended Reading
One important criticism of ads on nonprofit sites brought up in the Nonprofit SOS article has to do with implied endorsement. Amazon Associates lets you choose to link either to specific products or to sections or even the Amazon.com homepage. By selecting products that are appropriate to your cause, you can make this endorsement perfectly clear. I can’t think of a single nonprofit organization off the top of my head that could not pick ten books that relate strongly to their cause. A homepage link or search box might end up making you more money, but what it costs you is control over your message. Always link to specific products, and make sure you are 100% comfortable with them. If you wouldn’t want them visible in your office, don’t link to them.

Separate the Store
Once you’ve assembled 5 or more products that you are comfortable selling on your site, set up a separate page for your site’s affiliate storefront, with a descriptive link in your main menu like “Store” or “Bookstore”. Keep the Amazon links all on that page, rather than in a sidebar or in your content. That way, the only visitors that see the links are those that know beforehand what they are going to see. Most visitors will come to your site through a link or search because they care about your cause, and because they want to learn more or help your organization. Don’t reward those good intentions with ads they didn’t ask to see.

Reviews
I’m going to contradict myself almost immediately here, and I apologize for that. In the last paragraph, I said not to embed Amazon links in your content. The one exception to this is a book or other product review. If a book comes out that is extremely relevant to your organization’s mission, and you have a blog-type site with fairly frequently updated content, you should absolutely be doing book reviews. Not only are you an authority on the subject of the book, but your perspective as a nonprofit manager will often give you a different take from traditional reviewers. At the end of these reviews, I think an affiliate link to the product is both appropriate and helpful to the reader. Make it perfectly clear that the site makes a percentage of sales. If you didn’t like the book, and write a scathing review telling readers how badly the authors got it wrong, obviously don’t link to it. Once again, the link is an endorsement of the product, and that should always be kept in mind.

No tool is right for everyone, especially in the realm of monetizing nonprofit sites, something that makes a lot of us more than a little uncomfortable. But if you can find products that you honestly like and use, and that are appropriate to your organization, why not give your visitors a chance to support you while also getting a product they want? With the holiday shopping season close at hand, it’s worth considering if this kind of program could help bolster your bottom line. If anyone has any experience or thoughts on this, positive or negative, I would love to hear them in the comments.

For charity websites, there are three main classes of calls to action, though you can of course get more specific if you so choose. These three, in order of visitor commitment, are Learn, Help, and Give.

Learn
The simplest call to action, and the one that requires the least commitment from your visitors, is to read more of your site. For some nonprofits, such as public education and awareness campaigns, this is the primary goal, though the others should come into play too. If educating your readers about a certain topic is important to you, then make sure that as many pages as possible have links to a central page with that topic. If you have a sidebar along the left or right of every page of your site, you may want to put links to this central page there, especially if it is time sensitive. For example, the leader of a local AIDS foundation will want to not only write a separate page about the upcoming AIDS walk, but link to it from several prominent places on the site. If your site is a blog, or uses blog software like Wordpress, think about listing Related Posts at the end of each page. Here’s a great list of Related Posts plugins for Wordpress. This won’t provide the control over links that you get from writing them all yourself, but it’s easier, less time-consuming, and does a pretty good job of finding things that the reader will be interested in.

Help
While some readers will want to remain just that, readers, some will be so inspired by your site that they will want to do something to help. This may sound specific to volunteer organizations, but nearly every nonprofit website can and should take advantage of this kind of traffic. Helping doesn’t just mean working at a soup kitchen or donating services. It can be as simple as clicking a link. Providing links to spread the word about your site can be a great way for readers to help you without a lot of commitment from them. Provide a Twitter button to “Tweet about this”, or a Facebook button to “tell your friends”. Look around the web for awards and contests that you can enter, like Name Your Cause, then link to a page that lets your visitors vote for you. It not only makes them feel better, but it involves them more in your organization, and can lead them back, and you might even be able to convert them with the highest level of nonprofit call to action …

Give
We will be talking very soon about the best way to set up online donation for your site, but regardless of how you do it, you must give your visitors a way to give to your organization. Ideally, whether it is on your sidebar or on individual pages, the reader should always be just one click away from donating. There is nothing more frustrating to me than finding a nonprofit website that I love, and finding it difficult to donate to them online. The user that finds your site and is willing to contribute to your cause is precious – make sure you’re allowing them to do so. Now, that does not mean being annoying and having a massive flashing green donate button. In fact, let’s just make it a rule that you should never make anything flashing at all. But make the option available to them, and make sure it’s not easy to miss.

The importance of analytics
My boss at my day job is constantly repeating the mantra of web analytics – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. I recommend that all nonprofit websites, regardless of size or technical knowledge, install Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to install and use, and it gives you basically all of the information that paid packages do. All you have to do is put a short bit of code at the end of your pages, and suddenly you have information on which pages your visitors are seeing, how long they are staying, and most importantly, whether your calls to action are working. Play around with things like different donation buttons and different kinds of links, until you see improvements in how many visitors are doing what you want them to do. It’s also incredibly fun to look over your stats and see where your traffic is coming from, and what they seem to like the most on your site.

Unclear calls to action are some of the classic rookie mistakes of new nonprofit sites. Remember that your visitors only know about your organization what you tell them, and that includes what you want them to do. For the most part, if they have found your site, they are interested in your cause. Work on converting that interest in the most efficient way, and everyone comes out of the experience more satisfied.

Other helpful posts
Using Google Analytics to Track a Nonprofit Website (FrogLoop)
Google Checkout for Nonprofits – One choice for simple donation buttons
How to Write a Call to Action for Your Brochure (Nonprofit Marketing Guide)

Just so we’re clear for the rest of this post, I will refer to a full name as the title of the organization, like The National Organization for Women, and use the term domain name to mean the web address of the organization, like now.org.

The Kiva Route: Short, Sweet, and Foreign
If you haven’t heard of Kiva, stop reading this post and go there now. They are a fantastic microfinancing site that allows donors to make small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, and as a member myself, I can’t say enough positive about them. They are also a great example of one strategy in online branding. “Kiva” is Swahili for agreement or unity, and a good name for the site for a few reasons. First, it was short, and available. These days, it is nearly impossible to get a four-letter domain name, but the shorter, in general, the better. Second, and just as importantly, the use of a Swahili word was appropriate to their mission, since Africa is one of their main focus sites for loans. If your organization works internationally, or with an indigenous group, using a non-English word might be a great way to get your hands on a short domain name. Remember to keep it as easy to say and write as possible. If you ask five people to spell the word, and get five different spellings, that might not be the name for you.

Kiva vs. Keywords
Though Kiva has a great domain name, it didn’t do much to help them on one front: search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s new-fangled competitor, Bing, are the most important way for people to find your site. All of these search engines use different processes to rank one site higher than another, but they share a few things in common, and one is the importance of link text. When another site links to yours, the link text (like the word “CharityGeek” in this link to our homepage: CharityGeek) is often the name of your site, and every time a link like that is created, your site ranks higher in the search engines for people searching by that text. What this means for your branding decision is that you should consider putting key search terms into your domain name. If you work with children, consider a name with “children”, “child”, or “youth”. If you work in a very specific region, that can be a very useful thing to add to your name. For example, I live in Portland, Oregon, and if I search Google for “Portland charity”, one of the first organizations to come up is The National Charity League, Portland Chapter (http://nclportland.org). The domain name is still fairly short, but the full name has both “Portland” and “Charity”, and the domain name has the word “Portland”, and that helps with search engines a lot.

Search for the name before you buy it
So, maybe you’ve found a great name. It rolls off the tongue and gets a great keyword in, too. The easiest thing to do would be to let those fingers do the running over to the first domain registrar you can find and grab it before someone else does. But before you do that, take the time to search for the full text of it. Maybe childrenofmoscow.org is available, but childrenofmoscow.com is the site of a death-metal band that doesn’t exactly share your community values. Although you might get some extra accidental traffic from sharing a name that’s similar to one taken by an established site, that traffic might not be full of the sort of visitors you want. Just another point to consider.

A brand is more than a domain
Before you buy your domain name, also consider what other branding you might do for your organization. One important one, and more so by the day, is Twitter. Check to see if your domain or full name is taken yet as a handle on Twitter, by going to http://www.twitter.com/yourname. For example, our fledgling Twitter account is @charitygeek, and I definitely checked Twitter before deciding for sure on the name. Also check around other social networks like Facebook, to see if anyone else has thought of that name already.

As an organization, your brand is the first thing you really own, and in a very real way, as the head of the organization, it becomes a part of your name. Every time you introduce yourself to a prospective donor, you’re no longer just “Bob Smith”. You’re “Bob Smith, Save the Otters”. It’s one of the biggest and first decisions you have to make, and like the name your parents gave you, your organization may have to live with it for a very long time. Hopefully, this article helped you a little in making that choice.

Other helpful posts
The Effective Strategy for Choosing the Right Domain Name (Smashing Magazine)
Checklist: Choosing a Domain Name (Reuters)

I’ll be blogging here as often as I can, and on the topics that I feel are most timely and important to online nonprofit organizations, but as a big believer in online community, I’m also expecting input. If you run a nonprofit website, please feel free to make suggestions on what you’d like to see covered on this blog. You can do so by leaving a comment on this post. I will respond to as many as possible. As we build this blog up, I hope to add a ton of community resources so that you can find as many answers as possible to your questions about technology and the web. Thanks for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the site.