Websites

Sites we like that offer quality low-cost images

davida — 2008-05-21T23:00:37Z

A picture is worth a thousand words and thanks to many low-cost and free photo websites finding images for your site can cost you only pennies. Here are some great websites to scour if you want to find the perfect image for your website.

Keep in mind you always have to make sure you read the copyright information to ensure you are using the image as allowed by the copyright owner. We also suggest you make a note of where you got the image and what the licensing restrictions were when you upload it to your site. (In Plone you can add this information to your image description.)

iStockPhoto

An large and inexpensive stock photo library.

Flickr's Creative Commons pool

Flickr is photos and they have a great listing of photos that have the creative commons license attached to them. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Openphoto.net

Openphoto has a great assortment of photos and has the items tagged so it is easier to find an image by subject. http://www.openphoto.net

Rhizome Images

An exclusive collection driven by images of positive, negative, and alternative green concepts, the archive includes rights-managed and royalty-free images of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, mining and general power images along with landscapes, architectural and botanicals images to name a few. A dynamic alternative to traditional big-box image libraries, the collection now holds more than 1,000 images. http://www.rhizomeimages.com/

ELATED ImageKits

These are images you can download for free to help you build your website. They include buttons, bars, animations, stock photos and more - all created by the Elated team. http://www.elated.com/imagekits

Photoshare

Photoshare is a service of The INFO Project helping international non-profits communicate health and development issues through photography. Images are for non-profit educational use. Their online photo database currently contains more than 13,000 cataloged images shared by colleagues around the world for documentary use. http://www.photoshare.org

Stock Xchng

A favorite around ONE/Northwest. They have both free and low cost photos available. http://www.sxc.hu

Mondolibrary

Mondolibrary is a quality image library, tailored to the needs of United Nations agencies, civil society organizations and public interest communicators, where you can find and download issue-relevant photos for your website or publications. Becoming a member is free. http://www.mondolibrary.net/

LuckyOliver

LuckyOliver is a community of photographers, designers and artists who buy and sell stock photos. Our stock photos and illustrations are high quality, low cost and legal. http://www.luckyoliver.com

Dreamstime.com

At Dreamstime.com you can find a large variety of royalty-free stock images. http://www.dreamstime.com

Recommended Web Hosting Providers

jon — 2008-04-25T14:21:04Z

As websites become more and more powerful and complex, website hosting services are become more specialized. There is no web hosting provider who is best for every need that a small to mid-sized organization might have.

That said, here are the various providers that we've had good experiences with over the years, with some thoughts on the services they offer and how they fit.

It's worth noting that ONE/Northwest offers website hosting services to the groups with whom we undertake custom website development projects. We don't, however, offer general webhosting services to the community at large.

Electric Embers

Electric Embers is a small web and email hosting provider located in the Bay Area. They specialize in providing high-quality, "high-touch" services to small progressive nonprofits. They provide hosting for ONE/Northwest's email list server, and offer solid, basic services with outstanding customer support.

DreamHost

DreamHost is a very large, generally well-regarded hosting company that offers a lot of leading edge featuers, and offers a free high-end hosting package to nonprofits. It's a great deal.

Domain Name Registration Recommendations

jon — 2008-04-22T16:05:54Z

Back in the old days, when small organizations got their Internet access, email hosting and website hosting services from a single provider, registering a domain name was fairly straightforward: your ISP did it for you, and made any changes that were necessary.

Today, our needs have become more sophisticated. For example:

We might choose to get our email services from Google, and to host our website with a web design consultant (like ONE/Northwest!).
We might want to run our email through a spam-filtering service like Electric Embers' NPOShield.
We might want to redirect subdomains "e.g. lists.ourdomain.org" to an email list broadcasting provider like WhatCounts, or to an online donation service provider.

All of these scenarios rare much easier if our domain name registrations and DNS records are not tied directly to our hosting provider, but are instead managed by an independent domain registrar who offers solid DNS management services.

ONE/Northwest has had good experiences with:

GKG.net: GKG provides basic domain registration and DNS hosting services. Domain registration is $7.95/year per domain. Their services are straightforward, and no-frills, and their management tools are fairly straightforward. We've had generally good experiences with their customer service. GKG offers very limited email hosting services.

We've heard good things about:

NameCheap.com As their name suggests, NameCheap is a low-cost, few-frills domain registrar. Their level of service and pricing seems very comparable to GKG.
1and1.com Another low-cost provider.
Dreamhost.com Dreamhost is more of a full-service web, email and domain hosting provider. But they offer a very attractive free hosting package to nonprofits, and offer domain registration for $9.99/year so even if you don't use their web hosting services, it's still a pretty good deal.

What we recommend

If you're registering a new domain

Use a registrar such as GKG, NameCheap or Dreamhost.

If your current domain registration is expiring

Renew it with your current registrar, unless you are in the midst of changing web and email providers.

If you are considering a change of email or web hosting providers

Consider transferring your domain to a new registrar such as GKG, NameCheap or Dreamhost. It will make your upcoming email/web hosting provider change much smoother. You may need assistance from someone who is comfortable with domain registration and DNS configuration processes to guide you.

Be aware that most domain registrars will try to sell you expensive, unnecessary add-on services like web hosting, private domain registration, etc. etc. In general, you should avoid these offers. In most cases, superior services are available elsewhere for less.

ONE/Northwest Website Consulting Clients

Once you register your domain, ONE/Northwest will provide DNS hosting services to you as part of your regular website hosting fees. This means that you only need basic domain registration services from your domain registrar.

A Great Model Privacy Policy

jon — 2008-04-01T00:14:03Z

Our friends at Sightline Institute have written a privacy policy for their beautiful new website that is a model of thoroughness, thoughtfulness and plain English usage. If you're looking for an example privacy policy for grassroot advocacy groups, you could do far worse than to start with theirs.

Check it out at http://www.sightline.org/site/privacy_policy

Some other sample privacy policies include:

ONE/Northwest Privacy Policy

http://www.onenw.org/about/privacy

1Sky Washington

http://www.1skywashington.org/about/privacy

Washington Environmental Council

http://www.wecprotects.org/home/privacy_policy.cfm

Idaho Conservation League

http://www.wildidaho.org/privacy.php

WhatCounts

http://www.whatcounts.com/bin/display?d=/company/privacy.html&t=/main/company.

EAGLE

http://www.eaglelaw.org/about/privacy

Resizing Pictures for the Web with Shrinkpictures.com

jon — 2008-03-27T22:50:18Z

Shrinkpictures.com offers a handy web-based tool for shrinking large digital pictures down to an appropriate size for use on a website.

It's a simple, convenient, lightweight alternative to using a full-featured image editing program like Photoshop.

Why might you need to shrink your photos? Consider that a full-sized image from a modern digital camera can weigh in at over 6 megabytes. A typical image on a website should be perhaps 50-150 kilobytes (that's about 1/60th as large!). Without appropriate resizing, your website would quickly become a bloated, slow mess and you'd have some very frustrated website visitors!

Web designers typically use programs like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or XNView to resize their images. But for casual users, these can be a bit overwhelming. Shrinkpictures.com provides a simpler tool for one-at-a-time use.

Search Engine Optimization Strategies

jons — 2008-03-26T15:40:14Z

Search engines, most notably Google, can direct a lot of traffic to your website, if you take care to make sure your site is "search engine-friendly." There's a lot of misinformation about search engine optimization out there, though. In this short article, we'll cut through the myths and try to give you a few, simple actions that will optimize a typical small nonprofit's website.

Let's start with the basics: only a few search engines are responsible for the overwhelming majority of web searches, with Google continuing to dominate the market. In December 2007, the market share for search providers was:

Provider	Share of Searches
1. Google	56.3%
2. Yahoo!	17.7%
3. MSN/Windows Live Search	13.8%
4. AOL	4.7%
5. Ask.com	2.2%

Source: Nielsen Online Press Release: Top 10 Search Providers for December 2007

Bottom line: make sure your site is Google-friendly, and don't sweat the other stuff too much.

Titles, Descriptions and Page Content Matter Most

The most important aspects of your page that search engines like Google pay attention to are:

Your page's Title
Your page's Description meta tag
Your page's actual content/body text

So, if you have a page on your site that you want to be found when people search for "climate change" you would want to be sure to use the phrase "climate change" in the title of your page, in the text you write for the Description meta tag, and near the beginning of your page's actual body text.

What's this "Description meta tag" anyway?

Meta tags are HTML tags that appear in the code of your page, but are not part of the visible page content. Search engines look at certain meta tags on your pages (and also ignore some!). SearchEngineWatch has some great background on meta tags, if you're interested.

The Description meta tag is a short, paragraph-length summary of your page content. For example, a page about climate change and polar bears might have a Description meta tag that reads "Climate change is causing tremendous harm to polar bears. This document summarizes recent research on the effects of climate change on polar bear habitat."

How do I create Description meta tags?

Most modern content management systems, including Plone, which ONE/Northwest uses for all of its website consulting work, will automatically create a Description meta tag from the "Description" field of each content item.

If you're not using a content management system, you will have to insert meta tags manually into your HTML documents.

Inbound Links Matter

Once you've made sure each page on your site has a keyword-rich title, description and body content, you may wish to think a bit about links.

Google's Webmaster Guidelines say:

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Something to think about: one reason blogs get a lot of traffic is because blog-style writing encourages lots of links to other blogs, thereby helping make blogs very visible on search engines.

What this means: Google pays a lot of attention to the number of links from other sites to each of your pages. Google pays more attention to links coming from "important" (e.g. popular) sites (e.g. major newspapers, widely read blogs), than to links that come from sites that are not already highly ranked.

In other words, encourage friends and allies to link to your site. That helps your search engine ranking. But be careful not to create pages entirely made of links -- Google can detect attempts to "game" their system, and may even penalize your site's ranking. Focus on encouraging folks to link in the flow of their content.

How to get links? Write focused, relevant, useful content!

The most effective way to get inbound links (and visitors!) is to write focused, relevant, interesting content that is grounded in your organization's unique expertise.

Your goal should be to become the expert resource for a particular topic. Example: Search for "native plants" in Google. Washington Native Plant Society comes in at #3 (just below the California NPS). Why? Because they have a ton of quality information, not simply because they were clever with meta tags.

Link with Keywords, Not "Click Here"

One of the simplest methods for increasing page relevancy is to use keywords as hyperlinks to other pages within your site. For example, instead of a link like:

click here to learn more about search optimization

a far more effective method would be:

learn more about search optimization

Useful Background Reading

Alternatives to Adobe

jons — 2008-03-19T17:55:05Z

Adobe has tightened up its software donation program, and is no longer donating software to most environmental organizations. (Adobe's new donation program now has quite complex fine print that you should read carefully to determine if your organization is eligible.)

However, there are solid substitutes for most common Adobe products. This article summarizes some of the alternatives to the most commonly-used Adobe products.

Adobe Product	Use	Substitute Products
PageMaker	Desktop Publishing	Quark XPress is PageMaker's main competitor. Quark makes Quark XPress available to nonprofits at a discounted rate of ~$500 (the software retails for about $1000). However please note, it is not available yet for those who use Mac OS X. http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/ purchase/nonprofit.cfm You can call their customer service department at 1-800-676-4575 (ask for Special Sales) and they will help you make the purchase. Microsoft Publisher is suitable for very low-end desktop publishing projects (e.g. flyers, short newsletters), but is not widely used by professional graphic designers and print houses. A promising, but still "immature" option might be Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing program. (http://www.scribus.net/). Scribus runs natively under Linux, and under Mac OS X's "X11" environment, and there is now a beta of their first official Windows release.
Photoshop	Image Editing	XnView is a powerful, reasonably easy-to-use image editing program that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's free for personal and non-commercial use. A great choice. http://www.xnview.com Picasa is a free, beautifully designed, extremely easy-to-use image management and editing tool from Google. It's great for managing and touching up photos. Its resizing functions coud be a bit better, though. http://www.picasa.com. The GIMP is free, open-source photoediting software for Linux, Windows and Mac. It has a reputation of being somewhat difficult to use, but offers a fairly solid set of features at zero cost. http://www.gimp.org/ GimpShop is a version of the GIMP with a friendlier interface that very closely resembles Photoshop. http://www.gimpshop.com/ Corel PaintShopPro offers most of the features of Photoshop, and Corel offers nonprofit licenses starting at $65. See the Corel website for product information and nonprofit licensing information. Adobe Photoshop Elements is Adobes consumer image editing product, and offers most of the features that nonprofits need to prepare images for the Web. Can be purchased at retail for <$100. GraphicConverter (http://www.lemkesoft.de/gcdownload_us.html) is a shareware program for Macs that does many of the same things as Photoshop. The demo version does almost everything useful; the full version is $30.
Acrobat	Creating PDF files	PDFCreator ($0) is a free, open-source PDF creation tool for Windows only. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ PDF995 ($0) is a free (but not open-source) PDF creation tool that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP only. http://www.pdf995.com/ Win2PDF ($35) is a simple commercial PDF creation tool that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP only. http://www.daneprairie.com/products/win2pdf.htm Jaws PDF Creator ($99) is another well-regarded commercial PDF creation tool. Supported on Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000 /XP and Macintosh 8.5 through 9.x. http://www.jawspdf.com. Details on discounted nonprofit licenses for 10 or more users at: http://www.jawspdf.com/pdfs/elp.pdf NitroPDF ($99) is a very full-featured commercial PDF creation and editing tool for Windows only. http://www.nitropdf.com
Illustrator, Freehand	Digital illustration	Inkscape ($0) is an open-source alternative to Illustrator or Freehand for creating scalable vector graphics. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. http://www.inkscape.org
GoLive, Dreamweaver	Web Editing	NVU is a simple, open-source HTML editor that is fine for basic needs. http://www.nvu.com.

Finally, its also worth noting that Adobe offers very reasonable upgrade pricing on most of its products. So, if you already own a legit-but-outdated version of an Adobe product, you can easily buy the latest version for a pretty reasonable price typically $75-$150 for most products.

Online Donation Tools

jons — 2008-02-29T03:17:20Z

Why take credit cards on your website?

If you enable your website to accept credit card payments, it offers your organization several important potential benefits:

Online credit card payments offer increased convenience for donors. Being able to take credit cards online lets your donors give to you instantly. No hassle of writing a check and mailing it off. Donors can receive immediate confirmation and appreciation for their donation.
Online credit card payments "close the loop" for online appeals. Email is a cheap and effective way to communicate with potential donors, and being able to accept credit card payments online allows donors to immediately "close the loop" by responding to an online appeal.
Online credit card payments save your organization staff time. With online payment systems, the funds are quickly and automatically transferred into your organization's bank account. You don't have to process checks or make deposits. In many cases, you can import contact and financial imformation directly into your database and accounting systems, which helps avoid data entry errors as well as saving staff time. Some sysetms even allow you to automate the process of sending "thank you" messages and tax receipts, saving additional time and money.
Online credit card payments are attractive to a new generation of tech-savvy donors. The membership of many environmental organizations is aging fast. A new generation of donors are much more "tranasctional" in nature, and are not people who want to write a check and "join" an organization. But they will give to support campaigns and organizations that make it fast, easy and deliver tangible results.
Online payments make it vastly easier to register people for events and to sell things. Online fundraising isn't the only use for online credit card capability. If your organization runs events or sells merchandise (or documents!) then online credit card payments make it much easier to run events and sell merchandise.

Caveats, cautions and curmudgeonliness

If you merely build it, they will not come. Having a quick, convenient way to accept gifts online does not constitute an online fundraising strategy. You still have to raise the interest in giving to your organization via appeal letters, emails, special events, other types of campaigns. Having an online payments system in place is an important part of the puzzle, but unless you have clear strategy for prospecting, cultivating, asking and stewarding your donors online, you'll never raise much money online.

It's also important to understand that online giving costs more than cashing a check (although not much more than taking a credit card in person or over the phone). Costs are typically 3-5% of the donation amount, plus setup and (in some cases) ongoing service fees. If your organization has a small, loyal group of checkwriting donors, then building online giving capacity just to serve those folks isn't worth the effort. But if you have an aggressive plan to use a variety of outreach tactics to build your donor base (beyond just the same old direct mail appeals), then online payments are probably an important tool.

State Charitable Registration

There's one potential catch, though. Laws in 39 of the 50 U.S. states require nonprofits to register as professional solicitors in order to solicit donations. Although there are efforts underway to update these pre-internet-era laws, it's still something of a legal gray area; these laws could be construed to apply to online solicitations. You should consult with your own legal advisor as to the necessity and method of registering for your particular situation. For background information, see:

http://www.nonprofits.org/npofaq/16/24.html
http://www.multistatefiling.org/b_introduction1.htm#which

Overview of the online payment process

The online payment cycle starts with a person choosing to donate to your organization. A form on your website (or on the site of an online payment vendor) collects contact and credit card information from the donor. The website then initiates a process to verify and charge the credit card. The money is deposited into a special kind of bank account, known as a merchant account. (The merchant account may be in your name, or it may be in the name of an online payment vendor.) This process is run by a piece of software called a payment gateway. The online payment software then sends the donor a receipt, and stores the information for later reporting to you.

If you're selling products or running events, your website may include a shopping cart system or a event registration system that manages a product catalog and inventory, or manages the logistics of complex events prior to collecting payments as described above.

Stratgies for enabling online payments

There are several basic strategies for enabling online payments:

1) Outsourced payment services

2) Build it yourself

STRATEGY #1: OUTSOURCED PAYMENT SERVICES

For most grassroots organizations, outsourcing your online payment/donation systems makes the most sense. There are several different varieties of these online payment services -- some focus exclusively on processing online donations for nonprofits, and others are more generic online payment/e-commerce services that may also allow you to sell merchandise, register folks for events, etc. Some services can pass information to your merchant account, and others do the entire transaction for you.

The number one rule is "Always read the fine print!" And believe us, there's a lot of it! Before you plunge into online donations, it's absolutely essential that you take the time to read and understand the terms of your agreement with any outside entity that will be handling money or names on behalf of your organization. Caveat emptor always applies.

It's also important to note some donation processing services are set up so that donors do not make a donation directly to your organization, but to a nonprofit pass-through affiliated with the donation processing service. While this generally isn't a problem in terms of image, there can be bookkeeping and administrative issues (e.g. public support test.) You should also keep in mind that donors who give to you through a donation portal can elect to remain anonymous from you. All online donation services have lengthy privacy policies; you should read these (along with all other fine print) before moving forward.

The four most important factors to consider when evaluating potential donation processing services:

1) Costs both upfront and ongoing
2) Method of funds transfer
3) Access to and privacy of donation data
4) Integration with your website

Based on these factors, we've found several online donation services whose services should be attractive to Northwest conservation groups. Keep in mind, though, that the e-commerce world is a fast-changing place, and this information may well be out of date by time you read it.

Recommendations for U.S. groups

GiftTool

http://www.gifttool.com

GiftTools provides relatively high-end online donations and event registration tools to nonprofits in the US and Canada. Cost is about $100, plus $25/month, $0.99 per transaction plus 3% if you use their merchant account, or you can bring your own existing merchant account.

Network For Good/Groundspring

http://www.networkforgood.org/npo

Network For Good is a non-profit created by the AOL Foundation. Network For Good acquired Groundspring's popular "DonateNow" online donation service in 2006, and offers low-cost online donation services to nonprofits. Cost is $199 for a customized donation page, plus $29.95/month and 3% per transaction.

PayPal Donations

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside

PayPal is a for-profit provider of online payment services that was acquired by online auctions behemoth eBay a while back. While PayPal doesn't specifically target nonprofits, their basic e-commerce services can be used quite effectively as a basic online donations and/or e-commerce solution for nonprofits. PayPay's pricing is quite attractive, with zero startup costs and 2.2-2.9% per-transaction fees. They offer a fairly robust feature set, including subscriptions and recurring donations. You can customize the payment workflow and data collection fields a fair amount, but PayPal offers only miminal abilities to customize the look and feel of the payment pages. As an extremely large company, customer service can be spotty sometimes, but their documentation is excellent, and their systems are designed for relatively non-technical users. The final caveat we'd offer about PayPal is that their tool gently encourages folks to become "PayPal members" in order to speed up future PayPal-powered transactions.

Democracy In Action

http://www.democracyinaction.org

Democracy In Action is Washington, DC-based nonprofit that provides a variety of online donation and online advocacy tools to grassroots organizations at affordable prices. Setup is self-service, which can a bit complex, but the costs are quite reasonable, and their tools integrate nicely with a database backend, email tools and more. Plan on a bit of consulting help in the setup proces, too. Democracy In Action is currently providing their tools as a bundle, rather than breaking out the online donation tool. If you need email newsletters, online advocacy, and online donations all in one suite, then DIA is a pretty good choice. Cost starts at about $100/month plus ~3% donation processing.

Recommendations for Canadian groups

There are several online payment providers who specialize in serving Canadian nonprofit/charitable organizations. Our top choices are:

GiftTool

http://www.gifttool.com

GiftTool is a relatively high-end Canadian provider, both in cost and features. (GiftTool also serves US groups!) It's the only provider serving Canadian group we've looked at that offers substantial customization of the giving form. Pricing is as follows:

$100 setup
$25/month ongoing cost
$0.99 + 3-4% per transaction

CanadaHelps

CanadaHelps is quite similar to US-based Network For Good (above). They provide a very inexpensive (3% per transaction), minimally-customizable service with few bells and whistles. It's a good entry-level solution for groups just getting started with online giving.

More information on online donation tool providers

ONE/Northwest has complied a detailed matrix that compares the features and costs of a number of leading online donation tool providers, including Groundspring DonateNow, Auctionpay, PayPal, Network For Good, Sporg, Democracy In Action, GiftTool, CanadaHelps, and Charity.ca. You can download this file at:

http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/online-donation-tools-matrix-1.3.xls

A more comprehensive -- and more recent -- look at the overall marketplace is Idealware's Fall 2005 report "Selecting an Online Donation Tool" which is avaialable at:

http://www.idealware.org/donations/intro.php

STRATEGY #2: BUILD IT YOURSELF

If your organization has complex online payment needs, or is planning on making online sales of merchandise a critical part of your operations, it may make sense to build your own online payments solution. However, most small organizations should steer clear of this route -- it can be expensive and complicated.

There are two components to building your own donation processing system:

1) The capacity to receive credit card information via a secure web page
2) The capacity to authorize the credit card transaction and deposit it to your bank account based on that information

RECEIVING CREDIT CARD INFORMATION SECURELY ONLINE

In order to receive credit card information from your website, your web hosting company will have to support a technology known as "SSL" (Secure Sockets Layer), which enables information--such as a credit card number--to be transmitted securely between a user's Web browser and your website. Many "basic" web hosting accounts, such as those that are provided for free with a dialup Internet access account, do not support SSL or don't support it at a reasonable cost. You may need to consider moving your website to a dedicated web hosting company. (See our article on domain-hosted websites for more info.) Most good web hosting companies support SSL under their plans that cost $15-25/month.

Once you have a SSL-enabled website in place, you then need to build the online donation form. There are lots of ways to do this, and all of them require that you have some knowledge of developing simple form pages on a website. Virtually all web-authoring software has form-building tools that are fairly capable. More experienced web developers can also use scripting technologies such as ColdFusion or PHP to build more advanced business logic into their donation pages. You can also use off-the-shelf e-commerce/shopping cart packages such as VP-ASP (http://www.vpasp.com) to build fairly complex online storefronts with a modest level of technical skill.

AUTHORIZING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS

Authorizing your credit card transactions is an essential step in the process. When you set up a merchant account (if you haven't already), you will need to decide how you want to authorize the transactions. This can involve filling out the paper slip with an imprinter and calling a 1-800 number, using a dialup terminal and modem, or using an online system such as Authorize.net. Tell your bank representative what your expected volume will be. S/he should help you decide what authorization method makes the best financial sense for your organization. Automating your authorization capability--rather than just the capability to receive credit card information securely online--is a separate (but related) issue, and is the most complicated and expensive part of building your own online donation processing system. If you elect to authorize via 1-800 number or modem, then all you need to do is design your donation page the page that will "deliver" the credit card numbers securely to you for authorization and processing.

The main advantage of this "do-it-yourself" approach is that you have total control over the content, look and feel of your donation pages. The pages are seamlessly integrated into your site, and look exactly the way you want them to.

However, there are some disadvantages to the DIY approach. Unless you have a person on staff or a volunteer who is comfortable wading into HTML and scripting languages, you'll probably find this approach too technically demanding. The other disadvantage is the cost--an additional $15/month with most Web-hosting providers, plus additional annual fees if you have to provide your own SSL certificate, and possibly the significant expense of establishing online credit card authorization services.

CONCLUSION

Online payment services provide a low-effort way to add a basic online giving functionality to your website. Technically sophisticated organizations, or those that need total control over the look and feel of the donation page should look into developing their own capability, or at other donation services that, while higher-cost, do offer some customization options.

If you use any online donation service, it's essential to establish a well-designed, well-written "giving" page on your website BEFORE you send people hyperlinking off to the donation service. If people don't understand what's going on and have confidence that it's safe and secure, they won't do it.

Will online fundraising dramatically boost your bottom line? Probably not, and definitely not right away, unless you launch a corresponding online campaign pointing people to your donation page. Should your organization pursue online fundraising? Almost certainly. Giving money online is an idea that's here to stay. We ignore the opportunity that the Internet presents at our own peril. It's always wise, though, to move forward one step at a time, with realistic expectations, and a constant eye on the results.

Writing Online: Best Practices

sknox — 2007-07-23T23:25:58Z

Following are some guidelines, tips, and hints for writing more effective web content. This is a wide-ranging article, but we hope it will help whether you are writing for a web page, email newsletter, action alert or anything else that will primarily be read online.

Keep it short!

Above all other advice, this is probably the most important point. Online writing needs to be much shorter than other writing. Research shows that people scan much more than they read every word. Therefore, you want to make it easy for your visitors to scan for information quickly.

Large blocks of text are much more difficult to read online than in print. Long paragraphs that run on and on with nary a break will drive all but the most dedicate visitors away. Break up your writing into shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs than you would for print.

On your website, avoid including lengthy descriptions about your mission, achievements, history, etc on the homepage of your site. Your site's "About Us" section is usually better for those things. Use your homepage to showcase what's new and to guide difference audiences towards the content that will help them accomplish their goals.

Subheadlines, lists and boldface make content easier to scan

Along with writing short, easily digestible chunks of text, you should also make good use of boldface, lists and subheadlines. These elements help guide readers' eyes towards the most important content, and make it easier to absorb large content.

Another way to break content up on a page is to use a bulleted list. Write a short sentence and then support it with bullet points. Example:

Here's some ways you can reduce your carbon emissions:

Commute to work
Drive a fuel-efficient car
Turn your thermostat down when you leave the house
Turn lights off at work when you leave for the evening

You don't need to end sentences in a bulleted list with a period. They tend to stop the eyes from scanning anyway.

Use hyperlinks effectively

Write short, to-the-point pages and link to other pages on or off your site to allow visitors to find more information. The average time new visitors spend on any one page is around 30 seconds. Take advantage of that short attention span by providing lots of links to explore.

Web usability experts discourage the use of the phrase "click here" for links. Instead use an accurate description of the linked content worked into a sentence. For example, instead of

"To see our most recent annual report, click here"

try

"For more information, see our most recent Annual Report."

This is a usability issue because if a vision-impaired person is using a web reader, "Annual Report" will tell them about the content, while "click here" gives them no real information about where the link will take them.

Build trust with citations

Many people are wary of linking off to other website for fear that their visitors will simply spend time on other sites instead of theirs. This is not necessarily so. You want people to think of your site and the center for good information whether that information lives on your website or not. The idea here is to build confidence in your site visitors that if they want information about a subject, they'll come to you first. People prefer websites that provide "click worthy" links to good information.

It is particularly hard for people to assess the accuracy and quality of information they find online, so consider citing your sources whenever possible.

Use active voice

Never use a passive voice construction like "Marketing and communications plans are being developed." Instead, try "We are developing marketing and communications plans" that make it clear who is performing the activity. Using the active voice is one of the best ways to write more clearly and more directly and to avoid getting caught in a dead, dry, bureaucratic voice.

Use "inverted pyramid" construction on top level pages

Sometimes called the "Model T" method, the idea here is to load your most important information at the top of the page and at the top level of your website. Often this is little more than a few sentences or bullet points. You are trying to capture the interest of your site visitors early on. Save the more specialized and lengthily pages for deeper levels of your site.

Downloadable file or webpage?

We all use word-processing software to generate at least some of our content. Often, web content is generated from a collection of various word processor documents, PDFs and spreadsheets.

When is appropriate to copy that content onto a webpage and when is it better to simply upload to original document so that your visitors can download it themselves? It's a difficult decision, with no clear right and wrong.

We suggest three criteria:

1) If the content is longer than about 10 printed pages, or intended to be read as a whole, you should probably post the document for download. Few people have the patience to read such long documents online -- they will probably print them out anyway. Long documents often benefit from the additional formatting that you can do in print. Finally, it can be very cumbersome to convert that much text to HTML.

2) If your original document contains complex graphics or layouts it is better to post it for download. Complex documents generally can't be faithfully rendered into standards-compliant HTML.

3) If your content is short and non-graphical, it is probably best to turn it into a straight-HTML webpage. It would be silly to make your visitors download a one-page Word document. If you have a longer document that visitors may only want to read a short section of, you should consider breaking the document into a series of shorter HTML pages.

Additional reading

Following are some online resources that contain more great tricks and tips for writing more effectively online.

How Users Read on the Web

Writing for the Web

Headlines are Critical Content

How to Communicate Effectively Online (PDF)

Got a favorite of your own? Leave a comment and let us know!

Registering a Domain Name

jons — 2007-06-26T17:48:38Z

What is a domain name?

If you're reading this online, you're already familiar with Internet domain names perhaps without even knowing it. An Internet domain name is essentially the unique, "user friendly" name for each machine connected to the Internet; they make it easy to keep track of people, organizations and businesses who use these machines for email, the World Wide Web and other Internet services. In email addresses, the domain name is everything after the "@" symbol in an address (i.e. in "stevea@onenw.org", "onenw.org" is our domain name). In web addresses, domain names usually found after the "www", as in "www.onenw.org." Again, "onenw.org" is the domain name. These friendly names mask a more complex numbering system used to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of machines on the Internet.

Domain names, like street addresses, are unique; each machine has a unique name that no other machine on the Internet can use. To keep all these domain names straight, they are managed by an organization in Virginia known as Network Solutions. Network Solutions maintains a large database listing all the domain names currently registered by companies, non-profits, educational institutions, etc.

Why should I register a domain name for my organization?

Two important reasons. First, registering a domain name enables you to establish a recognizable presence in cyberspace that you can use for your Web site (www.myorganization.org) and for email addresses (myname@myorganization.org). This helps people find and recognize you on the Internet, and helps establish the online identify of your organization. Second, having your own domain allows you to "move" your Internet presence to another Internet service provider without having to change your email or Web address on business cards, letterhead, and other materials. If you find a better service provider, it is fairly easy to move your information to the new provider's server and arrange for all inquiries to your domain (emails and Web browsings) to go to this new machine. This portability in a time of ever-changing Internet rates and services makes sense for groups that are planning to be online for the duration. Again, Domain names must be unique, and they are being allocated on a first-come, first-served basis by Network Solutions. Even if your organization is not ready to make the leap to individual email accounts for every staff member and to the World Wide Web, registering a domain now that clearly reflects the name of your organization will prevent others from "taking" this name later. As an example, if another organization had already secured "onenw.org" as their domain, we may have been forced to select "onenorthwest.org" or "1northwest" as our domains. Still workable, but not as easy to work with.

How do I register a domain name? How much does it cost?

Domain names are administered locally by Internet service providers (i.e. the company that provides you with your email account and/or Web site), who work directly with Network Solutions. To register your domain, do the following:

Select a domain name that closely matches the name of your organization or is otherwise easy to recognize as representing your organization. Shorter domain names are generally better (saves on keystrokes!). For example, when we registered a domain for ONE/Northwest, we selected the domain name "onenw.org".
To see if anyone has already claimed that domain as their own, go to GKG.net and check your proposed name. Type in your preferred domain name ("enviro.org", for example) and hit the search key. If it returns a match, you're out of luck: someone else has already registered that name. "No match" means that the name has not been taken, and it is probably yours to register.
Register your domain name with GKG.net (cost is ~$9/year).
You'll need to also establish web/email hosting service with a high-quality web/email hosting provider. If you aren't ready to "go live" with a website and email, then you can "park" your domain name with GKG for next-to-nothing.

For more information

GKG.net: http://www.gkg.net

Recommended Web, Email and Domain Name Hosting Providers

jons — 2007-06-26T17:46:19Z

This article had become outdated, and the landscape of web, email and domain hosting providers has become more complex, so we've replaced it with the following three articles:

Want Better Website Stats? Get Google Analytics!

jon — 2007-05-10T19:29:31Z

We've long been frustrated by the dearth of high-quality, low-cost website statistics tool that make it easy to get information that you can actually use to improve your site. So, you can imagine how excited we were when Google purchased Urchin, one of the most powerful commercial webstats tools out there, changed its name to Google Analytics, and started giving it out for free. That's right, free.

If you are a small to mid-sized organization with a website, you should have a Google Analytics account. It's just that simple.

It's easy. Just go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign up. Google will give you a little chunk of code to place on each page of your website (or, better, in your website template) and in about a day, you'll be able to login and few your stats.

And while you're at it, check out Google's "Conversion University" -- great tips on content optimization and website marketing.

Update

In May 2007, Google delivered a major upgrade to Google Analytics that makes an already-good tool really quite fantastic! For a great rundown, see this article by Avinash Kaushik.

Online Fundraising Resources

jons — 2007-03-06T18:05:55Z

Accepting Credit Cards on Your Website

ONE/Northwest's basic article on setting up your website for online donations -- an important (but not the only!) part of a comprehensive online fundraising strategy.

An Online Giving State of Mind
A 10,000-foot overview of the basic elements of an online fundraising effort. This is a good starting point for beginners.

Best Practices and Tips for Online Fundraising
A short article, packed full of specific, actionable, battle-tested advice from the folks at Echoditto, comprised of ex-Dean campaign staffers who know a thing or two about online fundraising.

Groundspring Online Fundraising Handbook
A lengthy, in-detph online fundraising/online advocacy handbook that covers all the basics quite thoroughly. Some chapters contain a strong sell for Groundspring's suite of email and online fundraising tools.

Fundraising on the Internet: The ePhilanthropyFoundation.Org Guide to Success Online, Second Edition
A hardcover book that covers all of the basics of online fundraising. Recently revised.

Designing an online fundraising campaign
A nice short overview of a developing an online fundraising campaign by Michael Stein.

13 Tips for Online Fundraising
A nice short overview article from Groundspring with short, specific tips.

Sample Online Fundraising Plan
Another solid overview article from Groundspring.

Prioritizing and Allocating Resources for Online Fundraising Campaigns
Tips on planning and budgeting for online fundraising from Groundspring.

Donordigital Articles
Short but specific articles from some very smart online fundraising consultants.

Why the Web Matters

jons — 2007-03-06T18:05:55Z

The Web is an All New Media

While its possible to simply put many of your existing materials on the Web its probably not the most effective way of going about designing you site. That would be akin to putting a TV camera in a radio studio and calling it television. Using the Web gives you the opportunity to explore new ways of presenting your organization with the medium of the Web.

Since the Web is an interactive medium people expect to have an experience thats different from picking up their daily newspaper. This is probably one of the more difficult mental hurtles to pass.

The Web has no geographic boundaries. This means that you have the ability to reach individuals that previously may have been inaccessible to your other communication channels. Remember, though, that this means that you need to consider the wide range of individuals who may be looking at your Web site when youre making design decisions or writing content for your site.

Is your organization ready?

To make the Web work for your organization, there must be a belief that it can work. This means that not only must you be bought into the process but the rest of your organization as well.

In order to effectively use the Web as an outreach tool it needs to be incorporated into the overall communications goals of your organization. If your organization has a communications plan, the Web should be integrated into all aspects of that plan, whether it deals with communicating with your members, the general public or the press.

Finally, its important that there be a commitment of resources to the development and maintenance process of the site. While your organization may have one person whos designated as the Web site administrator, others in the organization will need to spend time preparing content or thinking about ways to integrate their programs into the site.

Your Role

Very few small nonprofit organizations have a staff person whos designated a full time Web site administrator. This means that if you play this role in your organization you most likely spend a good part of your time (perhaps the majority of your time) taking care of other tasks. This means you have a lot of work to squeeze out of a small amount of time.

You must be a Web Advocate for your organization. This means that you are responsible for touting the benefits of the Web to your organization and thinking about new ways of using your Web site. Hopefully it wont take too much prodding to get others interested in keeping your Web site fresh and up to date and helping you think about new features to add to your site.

Why invest in the Web?

So youve heard over and over that your organization needs to have a Web site, but why? There are a great number of advantages to having an effective Web site for your organization.

Probably the most straight forward reason to have a Web site is to aid in activism. Putting together a Web site that you can point interested folks to for regular updates on the issues youre organization works on can be a great way to get things done. It takes only a little effort for them to send an email to their representatives based on information that you can post on your Web site, and a little more to show up for events that you can advertise on your site.

The Web also allows for an increased level of interactivity with your members and community without the inconvenience of doing a large mailing or phone bank. Its easy enough to collect the email addresses of your members and send them email containing summaries with links to additional information on your site. You can also use more advanced features on your Web site itself to make it more interactive, perhaps using a database to allow folks search for information on your site, or have a multimedia presentation that gives them the option of controlling the experience

Having a good Web site also gives your organization a raised level of credibility in the eyes of some. These days there are a great number of people who will expect to be able to find anything they want on the Web. Having a Web site shows that youre making an extra effort to reach those people.

Another very obvious advantage to having a Web site is the ability to make large amounts of information available at little to no additional cost. You will most likely want to organize your site such that the most basic information is readily accessible to those simply skimming the site for a general sense of what youre doing, but its also possible to allow access to a greater depth of information for those researching your issue.

The Web can be a great fund-raising tool for your organization. There are a number of Web sites that provide the service of taking credit card donations on-line for little or no fee. You might also consider having a secure section of your own site set up for taking donations. This may cost you a little money to start, but may make people even more willing to give if they think the money is going directly to your organization.

Putting information about your organization on the Web allows you to increase your membership. Having a great Web site makes it easy to have your members or associates tell their friends about the organization through the Web site. Having a great site also allows you to bring in folks who might stumble upon your site through a Web search or a link from another site. Having a site thats easy to understand is very important for these individuals because they may have no background.

There are numerous ways that using the Web can benefit your organization. First it has the potential to actually save you time, or at least make your time a little more manageable. Putting general information about your organization on your Web site can potentially save you long phone calls describing what it is that your organization does and save you from having to mail out information packets. While you may trade the time that might have been spent on the phone for time spent maintaining your Web site, allocating time for regular Web updates should be more manageable for your organization.

The Web also allows you to provide regular updates that would be difficult to do by standard mail or even email. If you have an active membership, or are interested in getting your organizations membership more involved, what better way to going about that than letting them use your Web site to keep in touch? You may want to use email in conjunction with your site, for example you may send email to your membership on a regular basis letting them know when youve put new information on your site.

Cautions

A bad Web site can create a negative reflection on your organization. Just like having a great Web site can give your organization credibility, having a Web site thats not up to par can take away from your credibility. Even if your organization is otherwise effective in its work and accomplishes great things, having a substandard Web site can hurt your public image.

Having a Web site thats out of date can also hurt your credibility. Even a great looking site that has an urgent action alert thats a month and a half old takes away from your ability to convince folks that youre serious about your work.

A poorly designed Web site can be a real turn off. In some cases its simply esthetics, but more importantly its almost always tied to a lack of usability. If the site isnt designed such that its obvious how to find pertinent information, then that information wont be found.

Make sure that you site doesnt contain incorrect information. Whether its intentional or accidental this will detract from your credibility. Double check dates for event you post and try to always site sources for statistics.

Finally, be wary of copyright violations. Reprinting articles or displaying images that you dont have permission to use can get you in trouble and make you look bad.

The Hurdles

To afflictively use the Web most likely means making some changes to the way your organization works. Its important to set clear expectations and responsibilities for the individuals within your organization in regards to the Web development process.

It can be very easy to fall into the trap of technology for technologys sake. You can be particularly susceptible to this on the Web. Try to step back and think about the purpose for any features you want to put on your site. If theyre not going to improve the experience of the users of your site, then consider not using them. There are lots of bells and whistles available for your use on the Web. Well be talking about some of these later this week and most importantly, their appropriate use.

Finally, you may run into naysayers within your staff, board or membership. Hopefully the understanding gained in this training will help you explain the importance of the Web to those individuals.

The Composition of a Successful Site

The most successful site gives you a feeling of what the organization is doing. This is probably the hardest thing to attain on the Web because computers are inherently cold. However, the Web provides some great options for presenting your story in a way and with an accessibility that was impossible just five years ago.

A great Web site will also provide detailed information to those interested in more in depth. However even if your target audience are researchers looking for in depth information, its important to make this information available in a way that still makes the basics easy to get at.

While it may not be a hallmark of a great Web site, a great outreach plan involved promoting your Web site effectively. This can be at little or no additional cost (time or money) by using email and print links. Simply adding your Web site address to business cards, newsletters and other publications provides and easy way for people to find your site. Any promotional material you develop should link to your Web site, and even better your Web site should contain complimentary information. Its also relatively easy for all the individuals in your organization who communicate by email to add your Web site address to a signature file at the bottom of every email they send. All common email programs allow you to set this up and it can be a great way to promote your site with no real additional cost or time.

The best Web sites take advantage of the new media of the Web and provide interactivity to their users. Again, this can be a serious undertaking, but an option you should consider. Developing an interactive portion of your site may be a project you can specifically fund raise for.

Finally, one of the best indicators of a great Web site is that it is always fresh. Keeping your information up to date and interesting will encourage people to return to your site. Its easy enough to show that your information is fresh by putting dates by links to new information on your site.

What You Can Do With the Web

One of the most valuable things you can do with the Web is present a story in a much more engaging manner. The Texas Chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has put together a section of their site called the Toxic Texas Tour.

http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/

This feature of their site gives you access to information on a number of different contaminated sites around the state and uses a number of features including a short initial summary, audio and video presentations and a more in depth overview with citings of sources.

Another example of a site that provides information in a way that would be difficult to deliver in a different medium is wtowatch, in particular their searchable document library:

http://www.tradeobservatory.org/Library/

This site has cursory overviews of the issues surrounding the WTO as well as access to archived, documents, audio and video and an events calendar.

A Web site that delivers a great deal of interesting information relating to Environmental news is Grist Magazine:

http://www.gristmagazine.com/

Grist uses humor as a hook for environmental news. While much of their content could be delivered in print format, the fact that its delivered via the Web allows them to update some sections of the site at different times. So while they couldnt put out a daily printed magazine, the daily updates of different features keeps the site fresh.

Does "Fair Use" Allow Nonprofits To Reproduce News Articles on Their Websites?

jon — 2007-03-06T18:05:51Z

Does your organization republish news articles in their entirety on your website? Are you aware that in doing so, you may be exposing yourself to a copyright infringement lawsuit? Here's what you need to know about copyright, news articles and "fair use."

"But," you protest, "everyone is doing it. It's 'fair use,' right?"

Maybe, maybe not.

It's true that lots of websites, including some very popular ones like CommonDreams.org, reproduce the full text of copyrighted news articles along with a "Fair Use Notice" that reads something like:

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

But does this really provide legal cover?

Maybe, maybe not.

ONE/Northwest offers nonprofit organizations the following four recommendations on reposting copyrighted news articles:

In most cases, we recommend that you avoid reposting news articles in their entirety on public websites.
Instead, we recommend that you summarize, quote, discuss and/or link to the original article.
Making copies of articles for an internal archive or other non-public-facing repository is probably pretty safe. Not only because you're unlikely to be discovered, but because it would be much easier to show that you're not harming the market for the original work.
In most cases, the actual risk of a small nonprofit getting sued for reposting a few news articles is probably pretty low.

(Obligatory disclaimer: we're not lawyers. You should probably talk to yours about this stuff.)

Whether or not a specific use falls under the protection of fair use is a very grey area of the law. There's no way to tell in advance whether a given use is "fair" or not -- the only way to find out for sure is to get sued! If you get hauled into court, the judge will consider four factors:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes -- Courts are more likely to find fair use where the use is for noncommercial purposes.
The nature of the copyrighted work -- A particular use is more likely to be fair where the copied work is factual rather than creative.
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole -- A court will balance this factor toward a finding of fair use where the amount taken is small or insignificant in proportion to the overall work.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work -- If the court finds the newly created work is not a substitute product for the copyrighted work, it will be more likely to weigh this factor in favor of fair use.

(Thanks to EFF for this summary.)

If we apply these tests to a case where a nonprofit organization has republished news articles on its public website:

Commercial vs nonprofit educational: One might well argue successfully that the use is a "nonprofit educational use." However, this doesn't mean that nonprofits have blanket permission to copy anything, nor do "educators."
The nature of the copyrighted work: News articles are somewhere in the middle between highly creative work and hard facts.
The amount of the work that is reproduced: A pretty clear slam dunk against fair use here.
Market use: Some newspapers charge a fee to access their older archives, and most newspapers sell advertising space on their website. This means that reproducing the article on your website would very likely be found to infringe on the market for that article.

There's been only one similar well-known case -- in 1999, the highly-trafficked conservative website FreeRepublic.com lost a lawsuit in which they raised a fair use defense.

Although the... Court found that the primary purpose of posting articles to the Free Republic site is to facilitate the discussion, criticism and comment of users, it nevertheless held that the commercial elements of the websites operations cut against the fair use defense. Because Free Republic solicited donations from visitors to its website, facilitated links to other webpages where donations to Free Republic and its affiliates were solicited, and ran advertisements for its parent company, its use of the newspapers articles was considered to be commercial.

The fact that the newspaper articles were republished in their entirety also weighed heavily against the fair use defense. Where media criticism is concerned, one can well understand a critic arguing that an offending article must be viewed in its entirety to assess the context and any subtle bias of the author. But the Court was unmoved by that argument, and it held that the Free Republic had failed to show how full-text copying was essential to its discussion forum. The Court implied that posting summaries of the articles or providing a link to the newspapers websites where the full articles could be read were alternatives that Free Republic should have employed. Finally, because the availability of the papers articles in full text on the Free Republic site fulfilled at least some demand for the original works on the papers own websites, and because widespread copying of this type would have a deleterious effect on the papers markets, the fourth factor weighed against the fair use defense.

In the end, in fact, the Court found that only one factor favored the fair use defense: that newspaper articles are predominantly factual rather than expressive in nature. Accordingly, the fair use claim was stronger than it would have been had purely fictional works been copied.

For more information

Stanford Copyright and Fair Use

EFF Fair Use FAQ

University of Texas Fair Use Information

TechLaw Journal's discussion of the FreeRepublic case