Today I am taking a look at NetworkforGood.org because it has the following advantages for your church or nonprofit website:
Note: I and CWM are not affiliated with Networkforgood.org or Guidestar.org.
Network for Good is a nonprofit organization that has been around since 2001. Networkforgood.org acts as an online donations portal for non-profits. Networkforgood.org accepts online donations for any nonprofit listed within the non-profit database ran by Guidestar.org.
Guidestar lists all nonprofits who are an exempt nonprofit registered with the United States IRS. This means that if you are a church or non-profit in the US, then you are probably already listed on these websites.
Based on the information from their website, you can get started taking online donations in 4 easy steps.
Once your nonprofit registers, you can add to your listing in Guidestar. Network for Good provides you with a link and even images to let people click to “Donate Now” from your website.
One of my greatest passions is helping Christian non-profits succeed in their mission. Christian-web-masters.com focuses on helping Christian organizations with website resources. Accepting online donations is becoming one of the website resources which I most frequently recommend to the non-profits that I work with.
The chief reason for non-profits to accept online donations is the potential to develop a steady stream of recurring giving among its members. Most online donation systems allow donors to setup automatic monthly donations. These monthly automatic donations, will, over time, result in a predictable (usually steady and increasing) stream of giving. A predictable stream of income is a benefit to any non-profit, whether large or small.
Online donations are on the rise. In fact, according to a report from USA Today in June of 2005, online donations to the USA’s biggest charities increased 63% from 2003 to 2005. The ePhilanthropy Foundation has reported that online giving is growing exponentially each year, from $250 million in the year 2000 to more than $4.5 billion in 2005.
As a result of the growth amount of dollars being donated online and the increase in numbers of people giving via the web, E-commerce vendors and other technology companies have been on the move to help non-profits meet the rising need to accept online donations by providing new tools to help charities with online fundraising.
For more information on trends in online donations see:
USA Today Article About Online Donations
About.com About Online Donations
Network For Good Study on Online Giving
Online giving is particularly cost-effective for charities. While it can cost $1.25 to raise a dollar from a new donor through direct mail and more than $.63 through telemarketing, the costs per dollar of raising money online can be as little as five cents. (Sources: Fund-Raising Cost Effectiveness/James Greenfield, Cost-Effectiveness of Nonprofit Telemarketing Campaigns/Keating, Parsons & Roberts, and Network for Good.)
Series
Email Basics - Part One
Email Basics - Part One: Continued
FTP Basics - Part Two
FTP Basics - Part Two: Continued
Zip/Unzip Basics - Part Three
Graphics Basics - Part Four
Graphics Basics - Part Four: Continued
Icon Basics - Part Five
HTML Basics - Part Six
HTML Basics - Part Six: Continued
Text Editor Basics - Part Seven
Autoresponder Basics - Part Eight
Autoresponder Basics - Part Eight: Continued
Ezine Basics - Part Nine
Ebook Basics - Part Ten
Introduction
Keep it short and simple
Investing in domain names.
Summarising
If all this seems pretty confusing, it may be wise to engage the services of a consultant. It will cost you anything from US$25 upwards for
the service, but the fee of a good consultant is money well spent. Your domain name is a very important part of your online business, and there are many traps set for the unwary.
Before you submit your site to a search engine, you may want to consider what you want the search engine "bot" (the program that indexes your site) to "spider" (follow). You may have pages with sensitive information, or a scrap directory full of pages in progress that you would not like to see listed.
This can be achieved 2 ways. The first way is with a robots.txt file placed in the root directory of your web, but you must have full domain privileges in order for this to work. I will cover the robots.txt file configuration in a later article. For an article relating to this subject:
http://tamingthebeast.net/ar...
Introduction
WEBSITE DESIGN TIPS
MARKETING IDEAS (ATTRACTING VISITORS)
KEEPING VISITORS
Content, content, content. Your site must say something, teach something, provide valuable useful information. This is the most important element of any successful website. Furthermore, this information must be dynamic - kept up to date and always changing.
Introduction
Keep it short and simple
Investing in domain names.
Summarising
If all this seems pretty confusing, it may be wise to engage the services of a consultant. It will cost you anything from US$25 upwards for
the service, but the fee of a good consultant is money well spent. Your domain name is a very important part of your online business, and there are many traps set for the unwary.
How To Build Up Your Samples for your Portfolio Without Professional Experience
What should you do if you have no professional examples to place in your portfolio? If you are in a situation where you don't have any professional samples to place into your portfolio, then you obviously have a lot of work to do. You might be able to get away with placing classroom projects into your "book", but you would have a much better chance with "real world" samples. Below, please find suggestions on building your sample-base.
Creating a web site without developing a web site marketing plan is the same as planning for failure. A web site marketing plan is essential not only just to survive but to continue to thrive and expand your business. You should spend 80% of your time marketing your web site. It's the life blood of your online business.
Most of us probably create a web site first before we plan to market it. However just like a business plan, you should prepare your marketing strategy ahead of time. What's the benefit of doing this? The further you plan ahead the easier will all the pieces of your web site fall into place.