Where to get it:

Email/ENewsletter Tools:


Click&Pledge
Drop-in content, follow-up messages, built in donate button. $5/Month Up to 500 Emails + $0.01 per email. Price per thousand is halved after 1000.

Email Now from Groundspring.org.
Part of a suite of products for nonprofits. Manages email addresses and lets you send formatted enewsletters or fundraising appeals. Setup $49, Monthly $19.95 (includes 10,000 emails per month)

Donate.Net
Part of a suite of products for nonprofits. Designed to work with their donation tool. (See Using the Internet to Get Money for your Nonprofit) $50 for up to 8000 email addresses plus setup fee.

 Royal Responder Create formatted emails and send them to database of subscribers. Tool gives you ability to build a subscriber form. Free for small subscriber lists. For unlimited use, $99 a year. (That's 267 first class stamps.)

Forums:


Free Forums Network Customizable forum, free if you display their ads. For 70 cents a month you can remove the ads.

MyIkonboard
Free online forum. Displays one banner ad. Can't customize design. $5.95 a month for an ad-free, customizable forum.


Event Calendars:


Calendars.net
Free. Hosted on their site.

Calendric
Free. Hosted on their site.

Branch Office Locator:


Free DealerLocater.com
Free!! What a deal!


Displaying pictures:


Snapfish Free.

Kodak Free.

Photoworks Free.

PhotoSite Build slide shows. $49.99 yr.

Books from Amazon:

Provide Useful Articles to Your Clients and the General Public

You probably already have materials such as brochures on "What to Do When You're First Diagnosed With..." or "A List of Legislators to Write to About..." Those materials should be made into your first web pages. After that, get your service providers -- nurses, social workers, lawyers, pastors -- to write monthly articles or stories.

If you have your site built by a developer, make sure they provide you with an easily updateable form to create your own pages on an ongoing basis. If you have no budget or expertise for creating web pages, set up a blog and link to it from your site. Blogs are free and easy to use

Post relevant news, along with events such as your annual meeting or fundraising dinner.

The same form you use to upload articles can also be used for news stories. If you don't have the staff to write stories, you can link to other websites that carry relevant news about the latest Federal Budget Cutback, legislation or medical discovery related to your cause.

There are sites such as Calendars.net which will host your calendar of events. Some are free. Others charge a small fee. Usually you can customize the calendar's appearance to blend with the rest of your site. It is then your responsibility to keep it up to date.

If your organization has several local offices, here's a good deal: Free DealerLocater.com will provide you with a free local office locator. Visitor to your site puts in her ZIPcode and a window opens with a list of nearby offices and a link to a map. No ads except a small "brought to you by" acknowledgement.

Send your printed newsletter out online as an enewsletter

You don't need a lot of unique material. Just link to the new material on your site with little teaser paragraphs. Newsletters are very good for reminding people of upcoming events.

If you give your clients or donors a choice of receiving the newsletter online instead of in the mail, you can even save on postage.

Provide a Forum For Your Clients to Share Their Experiences

Forums, also known as bulleting boards or Message Boards, are sites where people can post messages to be read and replied to by other people. They can be a very effective tool for sites devoted to a disease, religious sites, or political sites. Not only are you providing a real service to people who can offer each other online support and advice, you are demonstrating to every visitor to your website that you are a provider of helpful services.

Some web hosts provide free forums as part of their web hosting fee. There are also free websites such as Free Forums Network that will host a forum for you. If you are willing to put up with an ad or two, they're free. Otherwise there's a small fee. Be sure you put a legal disclaimer up, noting that the people dispensing advice to each other are not necessarily experts and not your employees. Also, be sure there are enough people interested in your cause that you will get messages posted. An empty forum is embarassing to the webmaster.

Create a page of relevant links

As long as your links open in a separate window, thus keeping your site open, you can afford to be magnanimous about suggesting helpful sites. For example, a website devoted to children's issues might link to the local schools or to high quality children's sites such as Sesame Street on the PBS website. (For you techies, the way to make a link open in a new window is to add the parameter "target="_blank"" to the link tag.)

Reciprocal links can be a way to build traffic to your site. For more, see Getting Traffic.

Have Something for the Kids

Materials for children will make your site "stickier".

• Provide an email address and, if you have a scanner, a USPS mail address for kids to send their drawings, stories or photos, then post them on the web, using a custom tool or a site like PhotoSite or Pixagogo
• Provide simple outline drawings on web pages that children can print out and color. An informative caption is a gentle way to spread your message.
• Provide fun facts and quizzes. Again, this will help educate people about your organization and your mission. A quiz can be constructed simply just by putting the question on one page with a link to another page with the answer. Or have your developer build a templated tool that allows you to type in different questions and answers.
• Suggest projects or experiments related to your mission. This is especially easy to do for environmental causes, but you're really only limited by your creativity. For example, a child can start a scrapbook related to the country or area your organization helps. Or she could conduct her own survey related to your cause.