Harman Interactive LLC

Support Nonprofit Software Research

betsyh — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:36:49 +0000

For people who work at nonprofit organizations, staying current with the latest software and various technology tools available to help them do their work more efficiently can be difficult. It is also tough to sort through sales pitches and gather reliable unbiased data. Idealware is a great organization that has made great strides in the last few years to help organizations understand what is out there and the factors that should be used to make smart decisions in this arena.

I contributed to their article about selecting email tools and I advertised in their excellent guide to selecting donor management software.

Idealware has recently announced a research fund to help them do more of the great work they do which means so much to the nonprofit sector. Get all the details here and join me in donating to this worthy effort before year-end.

Fundraising Thermometers for Your Website

betsyh — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:54:13 +0000

As nonprofit organizations move into the busy year-end fundraising seasons, many are starting to update their websites with their year-end goals and reasons for supporting the organization. For organizations that want a Free simple graphic thermometer to display their progress toward their goal, here are a few options. All of these are quick and easy for non-techies to use and will let the organization include funds raised both online and off line in the goal progress.
Note – with all of these you’ll need to re-generate the code to paste it on your website each time you want to update your goal.

Fasttrackfundraising.com
Fundraiserinsight.org
usafundraising.com

Joomla and Wordpress also have thermometer plugins.

Charity widgets that include thermometers such as ChipIn and Just Give may also be an option for you. These tools can be used to process your online gifts and will track your online giving in real time. These widgets can also be posted on blogs.
As you add thermometers to your site, keep in mind that nobody wants to be the first one and maybe not even the second one to donate toward your goal. There is psychology involved and once the ball gets rolling, the momentum builds.

Please share the tools that you use to create fundraising thermometers for your website.

From a D to a B+

betsyh — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:20:07 +0000

Websitegrader is a great tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides a score that measures things like website traffic, search engine optimization, social popularity and the technical aspects of the site. It even looks at whether your site is written in techno speak and can only be understood by those with masters degree or if it is written to appeal to a broader audience such as those with a college or high school education. You can also put in the URLs of your competition to see if your site gets a better grade than theirs.

Before I relaunched my site, my grade was 58/100 which is basically a D. Now my site gets a B+ – 89/100. Website grader provides some advice on how to make the score even higher so I’m going to work on that.

What is the score for your website? Check it out at websitegrader.com.

Year-End Success with Harman Interactive

betsyh — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:24:39 +0000

Many nonprofit organizations see a significant portion of their annual revenue come in at the end of the year. Harman Interactive can help you maximize your year-end results with effective integrated email, direct mail, and social media strategies.

Whether you need hands-on help with writing your year-end appeals, help with strategy or segmentation, or someone to facilitate a planning session or provide some coaching for your staff, Harman Interactive can help.

WordPress Smart You Tube Plugin

betsyh — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:06:55 +0000

Headstand Media worked with me to move my website into the WordPress platform so that my blog and website could be all in one place and easily updated. This will also improve my search engine rankings because all my blog posts will be found under my own domain. To make it easy for me to post You Tube videos in my blog posts if I want to, they added the You Tube Smart Plugin for WordPress. This video was produced by Headstand Media for the Dotster: Next Big Small Business Contest, and won an honorable mention. The video was easily posted to my site using the You Tube Smart Plugin.