I read a blog post today over at MarketingCharts.com about how many non-profits miss out on the opportunity to connect with so-called “wired wealthy” donors online.

A Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research study showed that “wired wealthy” give an average of $11,000 per year, are active online and becoming more so.

Donors prefer donating online as it reduces administrative costs, and non-profits must learn how to connect with donors online to encourage donation. Not surprisingly, many don’t understand how to use the web as a marketing tool. The study showed that most non-profit sites don’t make an emotional connection, aren’t inspiring, and less than half of non-profit sites are well-designed.

There are opportunities to market to donors via e-mail as they are receptive to donation reminders and updates about how past donations were spent.

Having worked at a non-profit for a couple of years, I think that non-profits need to think more like businesses. There have been multiple comparisons between non-profits and small businesses, and I think this is a good comparison because non-profits can improve donations through entrepreneurial thinking. Non-profits don’t have to sacrifice their social cause by marketing more aggressively to donors and potential donors. More aggressive marketing doesn’t necessarily mean more frequency of message — it means finding new ways to solicit donations and make connections.

Perhaps non-profits should re-define themselves as “social entrepreneurs,” learning how to better support their cause through blogging, e-mail marketing, viral video, sponsorship opportunities, mobile marketing and other new, emerging technologies. Yes, and having a compelling, effective web site doesn’t hurt either.

Normally, abandoned shopping carts make e-commerce retailers frown. Not in this case, however. Check out this video on You Tube and you’ll have a whole new view of the abandoned shopping cart (and a good laugh).

Whether you buy into it or not, there’s a lot of recession talk in the news today. Marketers and business owners consider curbing spending during a recession, which means that there’s often less to spend on online marketing.

There’s an easy way to improve your online sales to compensate for the lack of marketing spending. Recession proof your online marketing by focusing on your web site’s conversion rate. Whether your web site generates leads or sells goods/services, every web site could benefit from improving conversion rates.

It could be your web site’s usability or just your e-commerce checkout flow, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a site that can’t squeeze an additional 10% of revenue from the site by optimizing it.

Also, search engine optimization is a good way to improve your web site’s long term position in search engines, giving you free traffic over time.

There’s been a lot of convincing research released in the past few months around customer ratings and reviews. Clearly, web site customers find ratings and reviews useful and not only rely on them to make purchase decisions — they also participate and share their own experiences. Here are a number number of recent articles and blog posts that discuss customer ratings and reviews:

Forester: User Ratings Top Consumers’ Online Wish Lists

User reviews and ratings were the most-asked-for web site content and functionality, beating even coupons/special offers and price comparison tools.

Deloitte: Companies Must Learn to Compete in a More Transparent Age

User ratings and reviews are having a “considerable impact on purchase decisions.” Sixty-two percent of shoppers read customer-generated product reviews when shopping, and nearly 80% say the reviews have a direct impact on their purchases.

MarketingCharts.com: User Reviews a Must for Retail Websites

98% of surveyed shoppers read the reviews on e-commerce websites prior to purchasing. Many shoppers spend over 10 minutes reading reviews before making a purchase decision.

PowerReviews: New Study Analyzes the Positive Effect of Online Reviews on E-Commerce

Internet merchants say that customer ratings and reviews:

• enhance the customer experience
• ease the burden on customer service by answering many basic product questions
• improve trust and loyalty because of their unbiased nature
• are mostly positive
• are best utilized on the product page

eMarketer: Customer Reviews Increase Web Sales

Customer ratings and reviews increase site traffic, conversion rate and average order size. They also improve customer loyalty/retention and improve search engine optimization.

As you can see, adding customer reviews and ratings to your e-commerce site is not just a helpful tool for customers to interact with your site — they lead to purchase decisions.

This post from internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis was just too good to pass up, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with web site effectiveness. Jason shares 17 tips for running a startup on a budget, and I’m sure that we can all learn a thing or two from this list.

My favorites:

Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department
It’s no secret that Microsoft products require more maintenance and support, which is why I switched to Mac early last year.

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs
A good ergonomic chair and a trusty computer is all most office dwellers need to be productive (comfortably, of course). I picked up a few desks from an ad agency that moved into a new office and purchased two Humanscale Freedom chairs, which keep me comfortable all day long.

Outsource accounting
Who has time to fiddle with the books (unless, of course, you own an accounting firm)?

Outsource to middle America
Small firms can only do so much in a day, so building a reliable team of 1099 contractors gives you a way to quickly ramp up your productivity for large projects while saving the costs of employing a team you can’t keep busy full-time. And a contractor in Nebraska won’t charge as much as one in NYC.

I’ve also discovered two other ways to save money and be more productive:

• Use Skype for voice calls and iChat for video conferencing.
  I can call phones all across the country using my iMac’s built-in microphone for only $3 per month. I can also hook a Skype phone into my router for cordless Skype calls. That beats a $40+ per month Verizon bill.
• Buy software brand new on eBay.
  This tip from my CPA saved me about $70 on QuickBooks — you can pick up software brand new on eBay much cheaper than stores.

Having dealt with some large organizations and different kinds of personalities in my past work, I thought I would share a tip about how to share feedback effectively with your web design firm. Admittedly, this post is not for the do-it-yourselfer, but the company that hired a web design firm to design their web site.

The design phase of any web design project solicits lots of back-and-forth communication between client and designer. The key to a successful project is to communicate in a meaningful way. Here’s what I mean:

To be effective, the designer should share why they made certain design choices and ask the client specific questions that help the designer compile good feedback. The designer should interpret client feedback and create user-friendly solutions, then document the decisions that were made and why.

The client, on the other hand, should communicate the “big picture” without being too specific. For example, designers don’t usually respond positively when told to design something a certain way. For example, telling your designer to place specific clip art on your web site will probably make your designer mad. Designers like to hear what you want to achieve, then figure out how to best design it. Hint: this probably doesn’t include cute clip art.

I encourage clients to provide a general idea of what they want, and that I reserve the right as an expert to create a few designs that a) solve your problem in the most attractive, user-friendly way and b) solve your problem in a way that I’ll be proud to display in my portfolio (and won’t embarrass your CEO at the next networking event).

Communicating effectively with your web designer and being open-minded to their design concepts will produce a design that works better and is finished quicker. Oh, yeah, and you and your designer will be happy with the end result.