At CafePress.com, you can create and sell a variety of customizable products with zero upfront costs and zero inventory investment.

You can sell

- Merchandise you design including t-shirts, posters, mugs, bumper stickers and much more.
- Books printed on-demand.
- Audio and Data CDs.

What CafePress.com does

1. Gives you a FREE online shop to promote your products
2. Produces each item when ordered using our unique print-on-demand technology
3. Handles all payment transactions including major credit cards
4. Ships your products worldwide
5. Manages all returns/exchanges
6. Offers customer service via toll-free phone and email
7. Sends you a monthly check for your earnings on sales!

All Shops Include the Following Services:

- Ability to create and sell over 80 different products including apparel, books, music, CDs and more, produced by CafePress.com
- Reliable online shipping hosted on our servers
- Secure checkout and credit card payment processing
- Domestic and international shipping of your unique products
- Phone and Email Shopkeeper Support
- Phone and Email Customer Service Support
- Ability to list products in the CafePress.com Marketplace which receives millions of unique visitors
- Promotional Tools to help drive more traffic to your shop

Try Cafe Press out. It’s totally free and easy to use. If you need help setting up a store for your non-profit, don’t be afraid to contact us!

What is CanadaHelps?

CanadaHelps.org is an e-donations portal that allows donors to make online credit card donations to registered Canadian charities. The web site provides access to e-donation technology without having to bear the full cost associated with operating a secure online donation website. This can save charities a great deal of money – money which can then be put towards serving their missions. They have created a centralized e-donation solution that uses the most advanced security features available and is capable of processing hundreds of donations per second.

How does it work?

Donors go onto the CanadaHelps website (www.canadahelps.org), select the charity or charities they wish to donate to and process the donation on their credit card. Donations made through CanadaHelps are donor-directed gifts. Donors choose which charity they want their funds to go to, and CanadaHelps disburses those funds (less the 3 or 4% transaction charge) to the charity. An official tax receipt for each donation is instantly issued to the donor. When a charity is registered with CanadaHelps, they receive these funds weekly by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) directly into their bank accounts.

What are the advantages of registering with CanadaHelps?

Signing up with CanadaHelps is easy. It only takes ten minutes, is free and bears no obligation on your charity. Once your registration is processed, you will receive a secure username and password that will allow you to access the MyCharity administration area features. Here are some of the advantages of registering:

Complete donor information

When your charity signs up with CanadaHelps, you have access to your donor information at any time; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By logging on to the MyCharity administration page you can collect donor mailing addresses, email addresses, names, transaction histories and more. We recognize that maintaining close ties with your donors is very important, and our complete donor records – which can be imported into virtually all spreadsheets and fundraising packages – help you to maximize your outreach efforts to your supporters. If you don’t register with us, we have no way to provide detailed donor information in a secure, automated way.

Enhanced charity profiles

When donors visit the CanadaHelps.org site and search for a charity, you want to know that they can access complete and accurate information about your organization and its work. By registering with CanadaHelps, you can add this important information about your charity to your profile page, including a link back to your own website, your mission, contact information, your logo and a description of what your organization does and why it needs the support of donors. This information helps donors to perceive your organization as well-established and accountable.

We reward charities for enhancing their profiles by listing them first in donor searches which increases their exposure to donors.

Donation notification

When you are registered with CanadaHelps, you will know the minute a donation is received for your charity. We send you an email when the donation is made which prompts you to login and access donor details so you can thank the donor immediately if you wish.

You are also advised by email when we transfer the funds into your bank account. This will help your financial people reconcile the donations made on CanadaHelps.org with the credits that occur on your bank statements. From the donation notification to the donation reports to the email letting you know that a transfer of funds has occurred, you will know where your donors’ money is every step of the way.

“Donate Now!” button

Only when you register will you have access to the “Donate Now!” button for your website. The “Donate Now!” button creates a link from your website directly to your donation page on CanadaHelps.org. This eliminates the need for donors to search for your organization when making a donation, and reduces the number of steps in the donation process. Once you register, you will be able to access the code for the “Donate Now!” button (which your webmaster can easily add to your website) in the MyCharity admin area.

Monthly Giving

Donors are able to make scheduled monthly pledges to their favourite charities through the CanadaHelps website. Donors can only schedule monthly donations with charities that are registered with CanadaHelps. Monthly donations help build ongoing relationships with your donors, secure ongoing commitments to your organization and are a predictable source of monthly income.

Receipts

CanadaHelps is a public foundation and registered charity (Charitable Business Registration No. 896568417RR0001) and issues receipts using our charitable number. Official tax receipts are issued for all donations made through CanadaHelps – so you don’t have to. Each receipt clearly indicates which charity the donor has chosen. Your donors will receive an e-receipt within minutes of their donation, which they can save and print out at any time. Donors appreciate having an immediate receipt, and charities can enjoy the reduced postage and processing costs. Please note that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has approved the use of secure PDF e-receipts for tax purposes.

Low cost = High return on investment

E-commerce, accepting online donations, receipting via secure email PDF receipts, and advanced online reporting features are costly for charities to create and maintain on their own. CanadaHelps has created the www.CanadaHelps.org website to give charities across Canada, regardless of size or operating budget, access to a low-cost online fundraising solution.

Each donation received by a charity on our site is assessed a 3% transaction fee, which goes towards credit card merchant rates, credit card transaction fees, bank account settlement costs, and disbursement charges. There are no set-up, registration or monthly fees associated with using CanadaHelps.

Charities that aren’t registered are assessed an additional 1% (for a total of 4% per transaction) due to the cost of manually processing donations and issuing cheques.

Registering is easy

Signing up with CanadaHelps is easy. It only takes ten minutes, is free and bears no obligation on your charity. To start the registration process, visit: https://www.canadahelps.org/RegisterCharity/RCRegister.aspx

If you have any further questions about CanadaHelps, or registering with us to enhance your online fundraising potential, email us any time at: info@CanadaHelps.org.

Aggregation – The process of software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and video logs in a single location for easy viewing.

Archive – The collection of content organized in some fashion. Blog entries are usually sorted by date. Another popular way to sort content is through “tags” added to each item specifying important terms found in the item.

Back-end – The code that runs behind the scenes on a website or piece of software, which the average user will never see.

Blogs – A type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Browser – A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. The major web browsers are Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

Categories – The process of organizing web content into sections for easy browsing or searching. Another common term for this is taxonomy.

Comments – A service that enables other users to leave comments for the author in regards to the specified content.

Communities – Groups of people communicating, socialising and collaborating. They may simply have a shared common interest to talk about, or have come together for some purpose such as to learn from each other or find solutions to a problem. While communities do emerge organically, some community-building is necessary if there are specific goals to achieve. Online communities may use email lists, forums, blogs, social networking groups or other services where content is centralised.

Content – Internet based material like text, pictures, video, etc.

Embedding – A tool to display content that is stored elsewhere on the Internet (like videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr) but can displayed on your website or blog without hosting the files yourself.

Feeds – A method of reading, viewing or listening to items from blogs and other feed-enabled web sites without visiting the site, by using an “aggregator” or “feed reader”.

Forums – Discussion areas that are managed and facilitated on web sites where user can post messages or reply to existing messages.

Search Engine Optimisation – The process of refining the content and technology of your web site to increase its visibility and ranking in search engines.

Servers – Special computers which host websites.

Social bookmarking – Social bookmarking is an activity that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others.

Social media – A term for the tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online. The tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts, and sites to share photos and bookmarks.

Social networking – Online places where users can create a profile for themselves and socialise with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging.

Threads – Strands of conversation. A term typically used in Forums or Comment discussions.

Tweet – The term for a post on Twitter. Each tweet is 140 characters or less.

Viral marketing – A technique aiming at reproducing “word of mouth”, usually on the internet or by e-mail, for marketing purposes.

Web 2.0 – A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Web analytics – Web analytics is the study of web site performance metrics to understand whether business objectives are being met.

Web-based tools – Term for the free or low-cost tools including email, calendars, word processing, and spreadsheets that can be used on the web rather than your desktop.

Web conferencing – A live, synchronous conversation online, where participants are invited to a virtual meeting. Skype is a popular software program which enables such events.

Content

People are searching for something- an answer, a recipe, a service, a product. Your content must use or pertain to the keywords people are searching for. Good content is the most important thing.

Coding

Your content is supported by a scaffolding called code – the html used to structure and present your copy to end users. That scaffolding can be optimized to help search engines better index your website.

Community

Your site isn’t an island but is part of a larger community of websites that are related by mission, audience, and/or content. Being an active part of this community helps increase your relevance.

Copyright CivicActions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Why use our Web Site Maintenance Service?

- Have a web expert at your fingertips whenever you need one–no need to train your staff.
- Fast Turnaround. Most requests completed the same day.
- Cost-Effective. Fresh websites get more visitors.
- Detail oriented. You already have enough to think about.

Benefits of our Web Site Maintenance Program:

- Free consulting – expand your web site and your reach.
- Professional edits – your web site maintains its quality.
- Economical and convenient.

All Web Site Maintenance plans include:

- Testing after every edit.
- Monthly, detailed invoicing.
- Communication by e-mail, 7 days a week.
- Communication by phone or Skype, during office hours.
- Friendly, personal service!

Contact us if you have any questions or if would like to discuss using our services!

Copyright ©2001-2009, CompuMentor. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

An open source Content Management System (CMS) can help. Generally speaking, a CMS is a software package that lets you build a Web site that can be quickly and easily updated by your non-technical staff members. These open source systems are created and supported by a community of developers, and can be downloaded without cost. Both their feature sets and their price tags make open source systems particularly attractive to nonprofits.

What Is an Open Source CMS?

At its most basic, a content management system (CMS) is a software program that makes building and maintaining Web sites faster and easier. Let’s say you’re using a Web site without a CMS. If you want to post an event and have that event show up in five different places on the site, you have to perform the same activity five separate times on five separate pages. With a CMS, you only have to post the event once, and any staff member can do it, regardless of their technical expertise. How does this work? Content management systems store the actual content (text and images) in a database. The system can then automatically pull the content out and show it on the appropriate pages based on rules that you set up in advance. The ways you can organize it, and the types of rules you can use, depend on how structurally flexible the CMS is. This setup makes it easy for all your content administrators—the staff members who are writing and publishing the actual information on the site—to create content without worrying about technical issues, or even knowing all the places the content should go.

Content management systems also separate graphic design from the content itself. This is accomplished through the use of “themes”—graphic design layers that control graphic elements, font and navigation styles, and page layouts for each page on the site. You simply choose a pre-packaged theme for your site, or create a theme that’s completely customized to your own look and needs.

The term “open source” is a key distinction. The term means the software’s source code is freely available for everyone to see and change (as opposed the source code for MS Word, for example), but it has many wider implications. While proprietary software is created, distributed, and maintained by a business, with open source software these tasks are handled by a community of developers and users (recently, for-profit consulting and development firms have also become important vehicles for support). Just how effective that community is at its job is an important consideration when choosing an open source CMS.

Open source content management systems are free in many ways. They’re free as in “free speech”—you can do what you wish with the product and the code behind it, extending and integrating it as you see fit. They’re free as in “free beer”—there’s no license cost for the software. Anyone can download them and install them on a Web server without cost (though you’ll likely need to pay for the Web server, or someone to install the systems). And they’re free as in “free kittens”—that is, an open source CMS takes work. You’ll either need to put a lot of time into implementing and maintaining your system, or hire someone to do it for you. And no CMS will magically design and write your whole Web site for you—that’s a job for humans.

Recommendations

What CMS should you choose? It depends on your own needs and situation. All four are solid systems with robust communities and a huge amount of functionality that will allow your technical staff to update your site.

If your needs aren’t very complex—that is, if you’re planning to hire someone to build you a site that’s less than several hundred pages, is generally hierarchically arranged, and will be updated by only a handful of people in your organization — any of these systems will work fine. In fact, the person you hire to build the site will be the much more important choice. Look for someone who understands your needs and your organization; is responsive; can speak in a language you understand; and seems eager to work with you… and then use whichever CMS he or she recommends.

If you’re planning to build your site yourself or if you’re planning a site that requires complex cross-referencing of information, a number of owners and editors, or significant custom functionality, it can be worth carefully comparing the systems to choose the one that’s right for you. It’s time-consuming to switch Content Management Systems once you’re up and running, so it’s worth taking time up front to define an infrastructure that will work for the long run.

WordPress

WordPress is a great choice for straightforward, simply arranged Web sites. It’s the easiest system to install and understand, and is easy to maintain and update, putting site setup within reach of anyone with a sense of technical adventure. There are many predefined graphic themes available, and adapting them to your particular needs is a relatively straightforward process for someone familiar with HTML and CSS. Updating and editing images and text is also quite straightforward, and multiple add-on modules are available. However, WordPress won’t scale to support complex sites as easily as the other three systems. It’s designed primarily to support simple arrangements of two types of content—blog posts and pages—so if you’d like pages or posts to appear in many different places based on automatic rules, this is not the system for you. There is only limited support for differentiation of user roles, with no easy way to support permissions based on section or type of content.

Joomla

Joomla is a solid utility player, good for a variety of different situations. It’s relatively straightforward to install and set up. The system is divided into three types of pages: Sections, Categories, and Articles. There’s a bit of a learning curve to understand how they work and interrelate, but once you’ve got it the system provides a strong infrastructure for straightforwardly creating useful site structures to support even very large sites. Add-on modules support a wide variety of functionalities, from shopping carts to community features, providing a solid base for many different kinds of sites.

Joomla is not the best choice for sites that will be edited by many different internal content authors, as it doesn’t offer an easy way create a workflow based on section or type of content. And while Joomla supports more complex site structures than WordPress, it is not as flexible as Drupal or Plone. Each piece of content is typically associated with a single page. This makes the system more straightforward to understand, but limits very advanced structures (like structuring a site around a multifaceted taxonomy). It’s not easy, for instance, to create your own types of content (for example, a directory of state schools that includes key information about those schools), and then show it in different views on different pages of your site. If you’re not sure what any of this means, you probably don’t need to worry about it—these are advanced considerations that won’t apply to the vast majority of sites.

Drupal

Flexible and powerful, Drupal is a great choice for more complex sites. It supports a wide variety of site structures—you can define very detailed rules as to what content should be displayed where, and build your own custom content types. It has particularly strong support for Web 2.0 and community functionality, including group blogs and user-submitted content. It’s also easy for your content administrators to find and update content.

But Drupal’s power comes with complexities. Understanding what the system offers and how to configure it is more difficult than WordPress or Joomla. The administrative screens for configuring a site have a huge number of options and settings, making them harder to interpret. And the flexibility of the system means it’s important to think through the best way to accomplish what you want before diving in. Most people will want to hire a consultant familiar with Drupal to help them set up a site rather than trying to go it alone.

Wrapping Up

While none of these systems is perfect for every organization, open source Content Management Systems work well for many nonprofits. They’re community-minded, cost nothing to acquire and can put editing Web sites within the reach of even the most non-technical people.

The time you take to make the right choice will be well worth it compared to what you’ll save in resources over the long term.

Copyright © 2009 CompuMentor. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Why Do a Technology Assessment and Technology Inventory?

An assessment lets you avoid duplicated effort. Perhaps someone in your IT department has been researching and testing donor management software.

An inventory prevents duplicate purchases. Did someone in another department already buy licenses for the latest version of Intuit QuickBooks? Did you buy it yourself and then forget? A thorough, up-to-date inventory helps prevent wasted time and wasted money.

A good assessment lets you know if any critical procedures or policies are missing. For instance, what steps will you take if you find out that one of your servers has been hacked? Do you have a regular backup routine in place? Do you have a disaster recovery plan?

A good assessment lets you know where to spend your technology training dollars. Are staff lacking in email skills? Word processing skills? Do they want to know more about Web 2.0 and cutting-edge technology? Also, what sorts of hard IT skills do you have on staff?

Copyright © 2009 CompuMentor. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.