Yahoo!

Last week’s Net Tuesday event was everything I could have hoped for. It’s been almost a year since I took over Vancouver’s Net Tuesday meetup from Joe Solomon and I’m thrilled with the evolution of the event. There’s now a strong presence from local nonprofits every month, and because the events have become less technical we’re getting questions from people outside Vancouver’s Technorati.

As always it’s the folks who volunteer to be speakers that make Net Tuesday work. Mad props to Sarah Hall for sharing her fundraising wisdom, love to Rob from Mobio for the smooth introduction to their iPhone app, and most especially to everyone who came out. You ask good, hard questions and the presenters love how engaged you are.

Twitter:

The group decided that we’d all use the hashtag #ntvan because it’s short and clear. So if you’re commenting on Net Tuesday Vancouver on Twitter please append a “#ntvan” to your tweet.

And why should you bother using hashtags? Because you can do cool things like the automated event summary on http://hummingbird604.com/

So, what did we learn this month? That there’s clearly no clear answers when it comes to friends-asking-friends fundraising platforms. There’s a TON of tools and there’s no obvious winner among the bunch. Based on your particular needs you’ll have to do some laborious research to find what’s best for you.

But Sarah’s best practices for fundraising apply to ALL of the online fundraising platforms, so give her slides another look (see below).

Notes from the Canadian Cancer Society’s  Sarah Hall: (with annotations by Eli)

[slideshare id=2518828&doc=bbuc2009ifesevent360final-091117073408-phpapp01]

Facebook causes – stops working in Canada as of May 31, 2010
Give Meaning – Vancouver-based
Artez – Toronto-based
Blackbaud Sphere/Kintera – not cheap!
Convio / Get Active -also not cheap!
Democracy in Action – A nonprofit Company
Salesforce.com – free licenses to the to the core product for charitable nonprofits.
Raisin
Chip In – a widget for accepting Paypal donations. You don’t need to be a nonprofit
Pinc Giving – based in Delta, BC
Canada Helps –  if you’re a registered Canadian charity you’ve already got a page here. Includes giving pages that anyone can setup. (thanks Ben for the correction)
Paypal – love ’em, hate ’em… they’re ubiquitous and easy to use.
Gift Tool – Vancouver-based.
Civicrm.org – opensource software… the sandbox demo they offer is quite impressive.

Also recommended – checking out NTEN and Techsoup to read more.
And checking out Beth Kanter’s blog.