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Online fundraising strategies and tactics have their roots in the direct mail world, where fundraisers view individuals’ behavior in aggregate and carefully scrutinize campaigns for small adjustments that can lift the overall return.

But as the field matures, online fundraising is taking on characteristics all its own — as Conservation International’s Vinnie Wishrad (disclosure: a Beaconfire client) and Krista Harte Sassaman of Epsilon discussed at the Bridge Conference in Washington DC earlier this month.

Fundraising Success was on hand to cover the event, and shared many nuggets of wisdom, including these:

• Direct mail is more predictable than online fundraising
• Online donors are more likely to respond to direct mail fundraising than the other way around
• Online giving really surges in the aftermath of high-profile crises
• And no surprise, trends point towards a larger role for online fundraising future in the future

More wisdom in the full article over at Fundraising Success.

I’ve got a confession to make: I’m having an uncharacteristically productive day. I’ve dinged off everything on my to-do list before lunch, responded to all those emails with the “eventually” flag, caught up on the latest news at TechCrunch and Personal Democracy Forum, and even cleaned my keyboard. Yet despite this, I’m anxious. Because when I logged in this morning, I got a most unsettling message:

Now, to be clear, I’ve got profiles on a lot of networks. Most of them are just to test them out and do research, but Facebook is one of only a couple SocNets I actually use for social purposes. I glance through my mini-feed a few times a day to see what’s going on with my friends, compare movie preferences with co-workers, check out applications for both cool potential for clients and to see what I’d actually use.

And while I’m nowhere near as active a Facebooker as someone still in school who has hundreds of friends, I’m still feeling a sort of strange nervousness to be off the network. And that, of course, makes me a little more nervous. It’s not genuine withdrawal - just a vague feeling of anxiety that I might need to poke someone and be unable to do so (does anyone actually know a poke means?).

And I’m not even a Facebookaholic. There are times when I don’t check it all weekend or when I’m out of town. On busy days at the office I just forget to log in all day. And I won’t check it at home some nights. But to go there and see that I can’t get in - that’s causing anxiety similar to leaving my cell phone at home - I know where it is, I know that I’ll have it when I get home, and I know nothing will happen to it or me while apart, I just feel vaguely unsettled.

Is this a symptom of the new superconnectedness of the 21^st century internet? That we become psychologically connected to the hive mind and are unsettled when we can’t make that connection? And it only gets worse as you get more connected - look at Blackberry users on the Metro where they can’t get a connection - or are nearing the dreaded dead battery. Look at how quickly everyone powers up their cell phones after a long flight lands - some of them are calling friends and family to let them know they’ve arrived, but some are just powering them up to get back on the grid.

Well, time to get back to work. I think I’ll just change my Twitter to let folks know I’ve posted something new…

Uh oh.

“Fifty-seven percent of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day,” according to the Pew Internet and American Life project, which published its first major report on the subject this week.

You read numbers like that and it’s no wonder why so many nonprofit organizations are venturing into the wild world of YouTube. Here at Beaconfire we’ve helped a number of clients create new video for the web, or adapt their TV-oriented videos to display on the web.

Here are three quick tips for understanding the difference between TV and web video.

YouTube videos should be short. Producers should aim for about three minutes. One minute is even better. If you have a longer piece that was originally prepared for TV, give serious thought to having a videographer edit it down into short, self-contained pieces.

YouTube videos have a long shelf life. Some of the videos we’ve helped clients post continue to rack up impressive numbers of views and build the brand long after the campaign in question has wound down. Check back on your YouTube video every few weeks and make sure you update your reports on views.

YouTube offers a tradeoff. If you host the video yourself, you may be able to insert clickable links into the video, so viewers can move straight from the video to your donation form, petition, etc… That’s good. But if you host the video yourself, you won’t be able to tap into YouTube’s huge built-in audience. That’s bad.

We’d like to welcome Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to our client base. Beaconfire is helping WCS find a new content management system that will power their family of Web sites for The Bronx Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society main site, and 4 other NYC urban wildlife parks.

Since I last blogged about Facebook Causes, they’ve continued their meteoric rise as one of the most popular Facebook applications available. Causes currently boasts 1.7 million users, making it the 18^th most popular application available (though sadly still lagging behind the ubiquitous albeit less socially conscious Fortune Cookie application). That’s more than 154% of the user count at the time of my last blog post a few weeks ago, and eight and a half times as many people as used Causes when I first blogged about it. This growth is partially attributable to the growth Facebook continues to experience and partially due to Facebook’s uber-viral effect that make the best applications grow the fastest (By the way, as a side note, all app statistics in this post come from the handy appaholic.com, which measures user counts on all Facebook apps and lets you compare them against each other).

But two new players have recently entered into the Facebook App for non-profits space, both of which are connected to larger mothership sites and make use of those sites capacities to offer additional features. More on them after the jump…
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Here’s the Power Point for the Web 2.0: Beyond the Buzz presentation delivered at the American Marketing Association conference on July 11.

The speakers were:

• Eric Eckl, Beaconfire Consulting
• Dave Patterson, Heifer International
• Josh Peck, One Campaign

Weeks after their recent purchase of Feedburner, Google annouced last week that they were going to make Feedburner’s two paid functions free for all users. Feedburner is already a fantastic free feed optimizer and stats tracker, and opening up their advanced stats tracking and custom branding just makes it better.

What’s more, rumors abound that Feedburner will be integrated into Google Analytics, making your RSS an integrated part of your web stats package. So what are you waiting for? If you’re not using Feedburner yet, go burn your feed now - and if you are, upgrade to Stats PRO and custom brand your feed. And if you aren’t subscribed to the Beaconfire Wire feed - pick it up here as well.

Update: Via Lifehacker, if you’re using Blogger you can integrate Feedburner directly into your account. Here’s how.

Read below the jump for more details on the formerly paid features that were just freed up:

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Every national election since the internet became relatively universal seems to bring with it a new "killer app" for politicos - it’s often something that connects the online and the offline, or something that helps campaigns do do something they already did in a whole new way. In 2004, it was the blog, in 2006, it was YouTube, and with 2008 looming, several technologies emerge for what could be the next killer app. Will it be social networks, with MySpace’s broad utilization and Facebook’s ability to leverage existing networks, and candidates own social networks, which let them integrate fundraising and list-building tools right into the interface (and keep their message from appearing alongside those annoying "<verb> the <noun> and win a free ringtone" ads)? Will it be Twitter, letting people alert their networks of apolitical friends when they’re going to vote? Maybe aggressive and innovative search engine marketing techniques to match paid search links with hot issues?

Two campaigns are betting that it might be SMS, which has been around since 1992, but which has finally achieved widespread use in recent years. Even if it’s not this cycle’s killer app, SMS will still have a role to play, and the Edwards and Obama campaigns have been experimenting with the technology in ways NPOs can emulate with their own members.

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The New Organizing Institute, “a unique grassroots program that trains young, technology-enabled political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations” which is sponsored in part by Beaconfire and a bevy of other progressive organizations, is training organizers at this very moment in Washington. And while the students are spending their day in lecture and discussion sessions, as with most trainings, at night they put their skills to the test running the internet departments of their own Presidential campaigns.

So which campaigns are the next generation of organizers behind? Did they come up with Clinton’s Sopranos video or Obama Mobile? Maybe Dodd’s “Change the Debate” YouTube or even Gravel’s infamous “Rock” ad?

Not exactly - NOI participants are running cartoon characters for President. 60 trainees have been divided up into teams and are running online operations for six fictional candidates. Check out the websites for Homer, Maggie, Lisa, Mr. Burns, Apu, and Family Guy’s Stewie. While they’re obviously rough, given the time constraints on the candidates, there’s a lot to appreciate here: Mr. Burns has a blog featuring his YouTube hit piece, Lisa has a clean and crisp design focused on capturing signups, Homer’s use of an issue quiz to list build, Maggie’s Facebook group, and Apu includes a Spanish version of his homepage.

The campaigns are competing to see who can get the most email signups by the end of the training, and they promise to scrub their lists at the end of the event. So check out the sites and sign up for the lists of your favorite candidates. And while you’re at it, check out the campaign posts on the NOI blog - it’s pretty entertaining.

Best of luck to all the NOI participants - and no matter who wins, don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Freedom. Truth. Design.

Creating social change through design has been at the core of our society since before the first quill dared to put the notion of freedom on paper. Designers have always been a little ahead of the curve in leaving the world a better place then when we found it. We have conceived of entire cities from dust, made history from a single perfect image, changed the face & fabric of society through our work, and brought people together in one voice - all though the power of the visual.

So, in honor of our nation’s birthday, I pose this question: In a world where there is no shortage of social challenges to tackle, how can designers continue to use our power for good in order to form a more perfect union?

Here’s a few to get you started — can you add to the list?

http://www.thehurricaneposterproject.com
http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/
http://www.childsplaycharity.org/
http://www.one.org/