The Internet can provide us with a wide range of opportunities to help others quickly and easily and more and more people are donating and engaging online.

The tsunami online fundraising experience is a good example. After the disaster, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of online donations. An interesting article on SeattleBusinessJournal.com, Nonprofits’ new target: Web donors give more than check writers, discusses this developing trend:

Following a surprisingly large jump in online donations to aid victims of December’s Indonesian tsunami, Northwest relief agencies are aggressively beefing up their Web operations by adding staff, increasing online budgets, buying more Internet advertising and through other means, the region’s top charities are trying to tap into a funding stream where the average contribution tends to be greater than those received through mailed-in checks and phoned-in pledges.
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Perhaps the anonymity might have been a motivator for certain people to give, she said. You need all the avenues.

The article says a lot of things that make sense to me.

A new book that defines nonprofit Internet strategy as the intersection of marketing, communications, and fundraising, in an attempt to get at the heart of the question, Why and how should nonprofits use the online medium to further their mission and goals?

More and more, the Internet is where the people are. A website is no longer a luxury – it is a must for communicating information about your nonprofit organization.

But what makes a website a success? In most cases, website quality does not depend so much on the technical complexity as on the strength of the information, the layout of the site, and how well it all supports your organization’s goals and your visitors’ needs. In a recent GuideStar/Network for Good survey, Internet users ranked “Significant content on cause” as the most important quality a nonprofit website could have. Read more…

Creating a website and publishing it on the Web does not guarantee your desired audience will find it. So how do you ensure your website gets found?

To break through the clutter and get visibility, it is essential that you drive traffic to your website. You can achieve this through a variety of off-line and on-line marketing techniques. Here are some promotional options: search engine marketing, banner advertising, email marketing, affiliate marketing… to name a few.

Among them Search Engine Marketing is the most powerful online customer acquisition strategy today. It is all about using Internet search engines and directories to deliver targeted traffic (visitors) to web sites. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of search engine marketing. Today it involves much more than simply optimizing page code.

Apart from search engine optimization, other key aspects of search engine marketing are the design and management of link building and PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.

Maybe you’ve already got a website and know all of the above. But if you are new to this field and want to learn more, read this article…