There is no doubt that the Internet has opened up many amazing new avenues for nonprofit awareness and fundraising. We’ve talked about several of them right here in this blog—from raising money through online shopping malls to creating your own contests and auctions. Another incredible opportunity that has been created is the ability to find foundations and other entities that provide grant funding to nonprofits such as your own.

In the “old days,” finding the right funder took a whole lot more time and effort. It involved paying a small fortune for a print foundation directory or even going all the way to the library to spend the day with their most recent edition and a pocketful of dimes for the copy machine. Now it’s possible to do a great deal of grant research without ever even leaving your desk. Read more...

It seems that the entire Internet is all a-Twitter these days. Twitter has been described in a lot of ways. I’ve seen it compared to text messaging, to instant messaging, and to blogging. Each of these descriptions is somewhat accurate, although none truly explains the breadth of what Twitter is all about.

One of the most common philosophies touted by those in the Twitterati is that it should be used as a method to offer your knowledge and assistance to others. The inevitable outcome is that others are out there, willing to offer their knowhow and enthusiasm to your cause, too. It’s a give-and-take situation that is benefiting everyone from the nonprofit sector, right on through to Fortune 500 companies.

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Whether you are just getting your nonprofit started or you have been involved for a while and are just looking at your options for technology, it`s helpful to know more about what you`re getting into. There`s plenty of information on this blog, but this post will just go over the basics for those of you new to the whole thing.

Technology, of course, involves things like computers, software, printers, digital cameras, and basically anything that enables communication and information sharing and storage. These are all very valuable tools to have for a nonprofit organization, particularly since we live in a technical world. However, these things also tend to be rather expensive, which means nonprofits need to be pretty creative about how they manage to incorporate technology into their everyday operations.

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Accounting software can be pretty pricey, particularly if you are looking at the more popular packages like Quicken. When every penny counts, it really makes you wonder if you could just do the accounts in a spreadsheet program and save your nonprofit a big chunk of change. There are certain advantages to specialty accounting software. For one, it`s already set up and fairly easy to plug information into. You will save quite a bit of time in most cases. Another advantage of using specialty accounting programs is that you can often set these up to connect with the bank account so much of the information gathered is completely automatic. Read more...