I had a great time at the NTC last week. When I wasn’t busy meeting the geeks (you know who you are) or collecting evaluation forms, I managed to find time to attend the "Not Your Mother’s Online Fundraising Campaign" session on Friday.

The presenters gave a lot of great examples of online campaigns that reach past the traditional get-an-email-address, get-that-person-interested, send-an-email-asking-for-money model (that would be Your Mother’s Online Fundraising Campaign, which is good, and the presenters hasten to add, still needed, it’s just "old skool").

Campaigns that fall in the “not your mother’s” camp are run by and for donors, changing the way nonprofit staff work and making us facilitators who help our donors connect with each other (and with potential donors too), rather than focusing on just one donor at a time.

Peter Dietz of the First-of-its-kind Philanthropy Network told us about an online microphilanthropy campaign by Mike Blacktopp, who suffered from Motor Neuron Disease, which slowly robbed him of the ability to communicate. Because he was almost totally dependent on the Motor Neuron Disease Association for support, he decided to start an online fundraising campaign to ask his friends, family, and others to donate to it. In order to publicize his $300,000 campaign, he jumped out of an airplane. I know we all want our donors and volunteers to be engaged with our organizations, but jumping out of airplanes is, I think, beyond most of our wildest expectations. You can learn more about it here.

The speakers mentioned other unique campaigns. Erin Anderson of the American Cancer Society talked about her organization’s Second Life Relay for Life that raised over $40,000 last year and is expected to almost double that in the coming year. Chris Phillips of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF talked about how his organization combined the tried-and-true celebrity spokesperson method with Yahoo! Answers in a ten day campaign when every day had a different celebrity asking a different mission-related question.

Everyone agreed that one of the biggest challenges will be seamlessly integrating information from online campaigns with existing donor databases, and we all know how frustrating integrating data can be. Another point to think about is that of all the companies and organizations that help nonprofits with these kinds of campaigns (i.e. Network for Good or Just Give) have different policies about sharing donor information, so make sure you know what you are getting into and what you can get out of a partner before you launch your own “not your mother’s” online campaign.

We’ll have materials and presentations from this session online soon, and I’ll link to them once they’re up for anyone who wants to know more about this topic.