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Marketing and Promotion

Implementing Online Donations for your Church or Christian Website through Network for Good

Today I am taking a look at NetworkforGood.org because it has the following advantages for your church or nonprofit website:

  • You can start receiving online donations quickly with very little setup
  • You can startup using the online donations service with little costs (their basic service has no setup fee and transaction fees are low)
  • Your donors can setup regular automatic monthly donations.
  • You do not have to worry about having a merchant account, managing secure transactions on your own website, or struggling to keep up with important privacy and security standards. Network for Good handles these issues for you.
  • You are able to track your online donor information.

 

Note: I and CWM are not affiliated with Networkforgood.org or Guidestar.org.

Using Network for Good to Accept Online Donations

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.

  1. Register and Complete the Guidestar Information Form
  2. Read their Giving System Agreement
  3. Create your Network for Good URL
  4. Apply for Electronic Funds Transfer (Recommended)

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.

Trends in Online Donations

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.

Significant Increases in Online Donations Prompts Help for Charities with Online Fundraising

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

Accepting Donations Online is Not Only Cost Effective for Non-profits, It May Save Your Organization Time and Money

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.)

What's in a name? : Summarising

Introduction
Keep it short and simple
Investing in domain names.
Summarising


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 ... : Introduction

Introduction
Continued


Introduction

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.

How to create your web site marketing plan : Article

Article


Article

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.

When to create your web site marketing plan.

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.

Why Do People Link To Sites? : Links Page 1

Links Page 1
Page 2
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Conclusions


Links Page 1

One of the best ways to get consistent traffic to your site
with by getting other webmasters to add your link to their
pages. This results in direct traffic from people clicking on
the links, and indirect traffic because modern search engines
use links to determine how to rank a site in the search engine
results page. The more "quality" links a site has, the higher
it appears in the listings (quality is defined as other higher
ranking sites).

Do You Need a Website? : MARKETING IDEAS (ATTRACTING VISITORS)

Introduction
WEBSITE DESIGN TIPS
MARKETING IDEAS (ATTRACTING VISITORS)
KEEPING VISITORS


MARKETING IDEAS (ATTRACTING VISITORS)

We have found the following to be very effective in building and sustaining traffic to our website. I hope it goes without saying that website sales are directly proportional to traffic!

Get listed with the major search engines. Don't do it yourself - it is very time consuming and there are plenty of inexpensive ways to get it done. I like the folks at 1-step(http://www.1step.com).

Identifying Search Engine Spiders : Search engine spider identification

Introduction
Banning spiders and agents
Search engine spider identification
Further learning resources:


Search engine spider identification

The following is a basic listing of search engine spider names and their "owners". This is by no means complete, as there are many thousands of search engines on the Internet, but it covers the more common beneficial spiders. Look for these in your traffic reports or search for the names through your server logs to discover which pages they have been spidering. You'll find that many of the entries will also have accompanying numbers or letters e.g Googlebot/2.1 or Slurp.so/1.0

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