I came across an article today with 10 excellent tips and tools for marketing your nonprofit on the web.  The best part is that most tools are free and should take you little time to implement.

The article was written by Allyson Kapin and originally appeared on Beth’s Blog on July 24.  The 10 tools mentioned by Kapin are (in her words):

1. RSS Feeds: Add an RSS feed to your blog and news sections so people visiting your site can subscribe to your feed and stay updated on your nonprofits latest news. I like Google Feedburner because it gives visitors a choice to subscribe via RSS or email.

2. Add This: A widget that allows website visitors to share your content via 50 social networks and bookmark communities.

3. Pick Two Social Networks: My two favorite social networks are Twitter and Facebook (Fanpages). Spend 15 minutes a day talking to the community and cross promoting your campaigns, news, etc. 

4. URL Shorteners: Bit.ly, Tinyurl, and Pagetweet make links more manageable by turning them into short 20 character links. This is a great tool for sharing links and decreases the risk of links breaking after it’s been shared. Also bit.ly tracks data such as click-through rates, geographic locations, etc. Bonus points!

5. Care2’s Petition Site: Start a free petition on the Petition Site to rally support around one of your latest campaigns. You can even list a signature goal and download signatures.

6. Google Grants: Google gives nonprofits $10K in-kind grants for their AdWords program. Check out Robin Reed’s great tips for managing an AdWords grant.

7. YouTube Nonprofit Program: YouTube offers nonprofits some pretty cool benefits like branding, promotion on YouTube’s nonprofits channel and call to action overlays in your videos.

8. Listservs: Participate in listservs that align with your nonprofit’s mission and where your organizations’ issues are being discussed. Listservs provide great opportunities to not only promote your organizations initiatives but to listen to what other people are saying about your issues.

9. Widgets: Create widgets to share content or actions. One of my favorites is the Rock the Vote/Credo widget that helps to register people to vote.

10. FreeCause Toolbar: A nifty toolbar that is customized with your nonprofits branding. Link to your social networks, post current news, stream video and audio clips, etc. Bonus – for every click generated, FreeCause will donate money to your nonprofit.


Click here to view the original article.

Posted by Elizabeth Beachy, Upleaf Co-Founder