And still more awards! From the press release:

The deadline for nominations for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards) is April 14, 2008. The MATC Awards consist of up to ten $50,000 or $100,000 prizes, which a receiving institution can use in a variety of ways to continue its technology leadership. The awards honor not-for-profit institutions that have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the development of open source software for one or more of the constituencies served by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the arts and humanities in higher education; research libraries, museums; performing arts organizations; and conservation biology.

You can find more information at http://matc.mellon.org.

The Case Foundation-sponsored "Make It Your Own Awards" just announced the 20 finalists.  In a sign that I'm not the only NPTechie who likes watching basketball, they even have a "Final Four" theme.

> Vote for your favorites

According to Rich D'Amato of the Case Foundation, "Make It Your Own is another of the Case Foundation's efforts to introduce the use of new technologies to NPOs, to do so by incentivizing the use of the technologies with grants, and to make the participation easy for them and for their supporters."

The 20 finalists have already won $10,000; the 4 finalists will receive additional funding.  And, in a cool, NCAA-pool-style twist, the first 10 voters who correctly identify the Final Four will receive $2,500 for their favorite charity.  They've even incentivized the vote!

The Flash-based site running the vote is pretty cool in itself, so go check it out and vote for your favorites today.  Voting will be open until April 22nd, 2008.

Flickr Photo: booskittyThe late, great Mr. Rogers has been asking us this question for decades now: "Who is in your neighborhood?" Though we have learned a great many lessons from our avuncular, becardiganed friend, the nonprofit sector is still struggling to master this one.

I think we all know, intuitively, that all donors are not the same. They engage with us for extremely personal reasons, and are inspired to continue their engagement for equally personal and diverse reasons.

Technology has come a long way in letting us customize our relationships with donors. Our donors can tell us what issues they care about, and how often they want to be contacted. With social media, we can let super-engaged donors participate in a variety of ways. We can provide financial and other administrative information easily to donors who value transparency and accountability.

But doing all of this, in any way, has always felt like finding that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. If every single donor has unique needs and expectations, how can we possibly keep up?

This week, Convio released a new white paper with Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research that provides a nice tidy framework for thinking about personalizing donor experiences.In " The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors," the authors surveyed more than 3,000 donors who gave $1,000 or more in an 18th month period and had valid email addresses.

There are lots of really useful tidbits in the report, but I thought the most interesting piece was the result of the cluster analysis.