Ah, the holidays, and a responsible fiduciary agent's thoughts turn to tin-rattling. It's the time of year to fatten up the nonprofit calf on one too many slices of pumpkin pie, and at least at my family's table, shyness never got you seconds.

So, braced for the inevitable onslaught of garlanded maudlin pitches of a thousand charities worrying the inbox, what to do to stand out?

New times call for new thinking. It wasn't but five years ago that online fundraising was itself regarded as a touch addle-headed. So why not be the first on your backhaul to try out the new toys?

I'm Your Singing Telegram! The only singing telegram I've ever actually seen was in Clue. But the ubiquitous YouTube embeds can not only spruce up a donation page, but let your users send friends a clip of It's A Wonderful Life instead of the boring ol' e-postcard.

Fun With E-Activism. The 109th Congress seems headed out with a whimper. You don't have to deal with the 110th until January. So let your web activism tools kick back and have some fun of their own: create a deadpan-serious online campaign to the Grinch to return toys to Whoville (motivated consultants can deploy this as a weekslong story arc). Make a signup page to submit letters to Santa online, then actually deliver them.

Party Like It's 2099. Throw your holiday party in Second Life instead, or use ornamental Widgets to decorate friends' MySpace pages with links to your own donor push. U save on catering and cleanup.

Don't Party At All. A mainstay of useful development quirkiness, the un-vite is easier than ever on the Internets. It works like this: rather than deal with the expense and logistical headaches of organizing a donor soiree, the nonprofit creates a fake "event" that it's not having, then (on tactfully printed invitations) invites donors to have a quiet, low-stress evening to themselves, mentioning that for the suggested donation, they won't have to get dressed up on a cold night and have awkward conversations with people they don't really know. An evite adds to the frisson, and lets respondents create that convivial spirit of community without having to rent a room.

Gifts Need Tags. Uploading well-tagged images to Flickr, saving links to social bookmarking sites, and using Technorati tags takes advantage of the serendipitous quality of online searches that could pull in new supporters from surprising places. This is the time of year to blog that old family recipe for fruitcake.

TXT. This time next year, text-messaging will be much more mainstream. For now, it's pretty edgy ... and text messages get mad open and response rates that figure to plunge towards e-appeal levels in the months to come. Now's the time to try it.

Got, or seen, others? 'Tis the season to share it in the comment box ...