One of the most popular panels at the DemocracyInAction User Conference was -- no surprise -- fundraising.

This information-dense presentation from OMP's Katherine Watier and Courtney Ussery had the whole room scribbling notes furiously. (More of Katherine's brilliance at her Search Marketing for Nonprofits blog.)

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We'll be pulling this presentation and others together on Salsa Commons, but this highlight has been a hot ticket, so why wait?

Thanks again, Katherine and Courtney!

What with the holidays, things have been a bit quiet on the DIAtribe lately, but DemocracyInAction has so many fish to fry, such a plentitude of balls in the air, so awfully many buns in the oven, there'll be chatter aplenty right quick.

We're cranking on some new tools and some new documentation and help sections that'll be exciting to share and get feedback about. And with the end of the year, we'll be diving back into our data for updated intelligence on last year's popular series of the best Hour/Day/Month to ask for donations, along with whatever else we find.

So things ought to get friskier hereabouts as well.

Do be sure to ask for money at least once before New Year's.

Happy December.

Snuck right up on you, didn't it?

That cold sweat breaking out might the realization -- knowing full well that December is the development sweet spot, and especially the last week of the year -- that you've got to get that holiday ask out right quick, and you haven't had a chance to give it a speck of thought up to now.

Best Practices for a 3x5 Notecard

There are 18 business days from Wednesday, Dec. 4 through the end of the year, assuming you're actually working all of them and none fall victim to office parties, inclement weather, holiday sniffles, or miscellaneous NGO emergencies.

For those also scratching out grant reporting, board cozying, postal mail soliciting, major donor massaging, admin drudging and -- oh yeah -- that part of the day that's actually about the mission all this is supposed to uphold -- finding as much as half a working day over that span to devote to online giving might very well be an achievement. And even that might be a questionable return-on-investment proposition if the idea is to, say, bump up your donation harvest by +50% ... from an expected 20 donations.

I question how well those of us with the chutzpah to speak from Olympus on the subject treat with that reality for the small and the strapped.

Take The Procratinators' Guide to Year-End Fundraising (.pdf), a new joint publication of Care2 and Sea Change Strategies. These are smart cookies, and there's some very good stuff here for building an online fundraising presence.

But four chapters of 10 are about what you should have been doing for the other 11 months, which is rather the opposite of what the title promises. And many of the other suggestions (videotape test donors interacting with your pages?!) could only be implemented quickly by an online department so well-resourced that it wouldn't have been procrastinating its year-end fundraising to begin with.

Other organizations may have a more basic and pressing question:

How do you get the most return for four hours' work on your online ask?

A couple of weeks ago, Network For Good hit the streets with The Wired Fundraiser (pdf), a report on the growing phenomenon of ordinary people raising money for causes and organizations they support ... without said organization's involvement, and sometimes without even its awareness.

The key finding?

When Wired Fundraisers Talk, People Listen: Wired Fundraisers are regular people with a cause and a keyboard, and they are proving highly effective at fundraising for their favorite charity in an ever-widening personal sphere of influence online. That’s because today, the messenger matters even more than the message. People trust messengers they know, like friends and family. These messengers naturally communicate in the most effective ways – through personal means, in a conversational tone, and with great stories. A promotion from a charity can’t compete with that level of intimacy, authority or authenticity.

Once again, we've assembled an assortment of gift-giving options that span the gamut of DIA's members and their respective causes. There are many awesome gifts available through our community that you can feel good about giving.

The gift-giving ideas are seperated into easy-to-navigate categories. Make sure to visit them all!

Below are some handy suggestions I pulled from the presentation Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses which was presented at NTEN’s Technology 2007 Conference.

The Serial Approach - Consider offering a series of short videos (2-3 minutes) that explain your issue, instead of making an expensive project video (or in addition to). See how I Love Mountains features short videos about the destructive practice of mountaintop removal on their homepage.

Fundraising widgets are all the rage--I just created this one at Change.org for Friends of the National Zoo. Not only can you customize a widget, you can create actions and track your "change" impact. The best part is that the call to action comes from you, so the ask is genuine.

I referred the other day to the rising importance of small-dollar fundraising online.

So how important are they? Can nonprofits really adopt smallball as a development strategy?

More than one might think.

A breakdown of online contributions received by all our organizations in 2006 by gift range reveals, unsurprisingly, that smaller gifts are by far the most frequent -- with gifts of exactly $50 (the most frequent donation amount) or less accounting for over two-thirds of all contributions.

There's nowhere like the nation's capital for turning out nonprofiteers in record numbers, and NTC had the scale of, like, Battlestar Galactica or something: a minor metropolis afloat in the stars. The number 1,200 was murmured, which would be enough bodies to outvote Vatican City. People talked about going the whole 2-3 days without the serendipitous run-in with someone they were hoping to meet.

Almost any thematic takeaway for the NTC would be a plausible one, simply because there were just so many different ways to look into the kaleidoscope.

My personal version of the theme -- having hit sessions on screencasting, mobile, and radio both online and off -- was multi-channel engagement. It feels to me that the sector is straining against this membrane, looking for the next ah-ha moment, the next breakout into open country. Can we get Internet everywhere? Can we mate it with television, telephones, voice, thought, shoe leather? Can the multiplying tools and gizmos combine and connect? Can it get from niftiness and even effectiveness to really game-changing?

We catch glimmers. A citizen video flips control of the Senate -- hybridized data sets present the occasional but isolated dazzling perspective -- rumors circulate of flash mobs on distant shores. The Twitter froth, I suspect, emerges fundamentally from its hint of gathering blogging, texting and social networking into a bridge tenuously connecting meatspace and cyberspace identities.

It -- whatever it is -- just isn't quite there yet, and some days it seems it's on the next train after Godot. But the hope for the Next Big Thing might be one of those cases of generals fighting the last war.