Auctions have long been a crucial, and lucrative, element of nonprofit fundraising campaigns, and their popularity has grown in recent years. According to the National Auctioneers Association, more than $16.2 billion was raised in charity auctions in 2007. While the raw dollar figures suggest that auctions are lucrative, dollar returns are not the only indicators of an auction's success. And according to the leaders of two major online auction companies that cater specifically to nonprofits, if your organization is only conducting offline, "event" auctions, and not utilizing online auction resources, it's likely you're passing up many opportunities. Read more...

In many ways, the nonprofit technology world mirrored the for-profit tech arena in 2008, as social media (Web 2.0 applications that enable people to connect easily: e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, etc.), grew as a set of mainstream communication tools. In the process, the Internet continued to become more of a two-way communication tool for nonprofits than in previous years, while at the same time capacity -- and capabilities -- enabled broader adoption of high-bandwidth tools such as videocasts and real-time videoconferencing. Read more...

The idea of a budget is one that most eight year olds can grasp: it's simply an itemized summary of how much you expect to spend along with an estimate of how you expect to collect enough income to cover those expenses. Ideally, the two numbers -- expenses and income -- will match, or come close. Most fiscal conservatives tout the benefits of balancing a budget -- with expenses on one side and income on the other allowing the arm of a metaphorical balancing scale to remain level. Read more...