Nonprofit web design

Andrew Perry demonstrated a free and open-source product called CiviCRM at the Connecting Up conference. It’s a customer relationshop management tool that you can install on your own webspace; and if you use either Drupal or Joomla to run your website, then CiviCRM can integrate with it.

CiviCRM helps you manage your relationships with donors and supporters, sign up people to attend your events, run your memberships and handle your email newsletters and other communications. Lots of nonprofits are using it and I can see why, it has a lot of very useful features. Read more »

I really like the PowerPoint slideshow that Emily Turner of Philanthropy Australia and Priscilla Brice-Weller of ANTar used in their presentation at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane. Apart from the clever way they divided the screen to give their individual perspectives on blogging, it’s also an interesting, short overview of why a nonprofit organisation might want to use a blog. Read more »

I’m at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane, Australia. Rather then me tell you all about it, find out what’s happening here from various conference delegates’ blogs.

Today I gave a presentation about how to plan the development of your nonprofit’s website, and here’s the slideshow that accompanied it.

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Caring Choices is a nationwide initiative to help shape future policy on long-term care for older people. More than 700 older people, carers and others were invited to share their experiences and views at events and on the website throughout 2007.

The Caring Choices website is based on WordPress, a free and open source content management system. It enables The King’s Fund and its partners to publish pages and articles onto their website; and for visitors to the site to leave their comments; and for visitors to subscribe to receive new articles. Read more »

MANSEO is short for Mother of All Nonprofit Search Engines Optimized. It’s a search engine that only searches nonprofit technology websites. Why might that interest you? Well, type in keywords about web design (I just tested it by typing “CSS”, “Joomla”, “donations”, “CMS”) and all the results should all be specific to nonprofits’ use of these technologies.

That makes Manseo a great tool for when you want to find examples of what’s worked for other charities, what’s good practice and what’s being discussed by your peers about any tech topic. Manseo currently searches 259 websites but more are being added by a small team of volunteers (I’m adding some UK and Australian websites).

The Addiction Search Engine was designed to help people find reliable information on the web about addiction-related issues. It uses the free Google Custom Search tool and was set up by the Ana Liffey Drug Project, a not-for-profit organisation in Ireland. This case study explains how they did it. Read more »

Google has a new section on its website listing its free tools that are useful to non-profit organisations. At www.google.com/nonprofits you’ll find a list of these tools. Click on each one to go to a page that explains how your organisation could benefit and how to get started. Read more »

An organisation called nfpSynergy does research into charities’ use of the Internet and publishes the findings in their annual Virtual Promise reports. These reports give a useful insight into the evolution of charity websites.

Five years ago, when nfpSynergy began their research, only 16% of the public said they had visited a charity’s website in the past six months. By February 2007 that figure had risen to 23%; and by October 2007 it was 30%. That’s very encouraging news for charities spending time and money on developing their websites. So what else does the report tell us about trends in charity websites? Read more »