Online chat to focus on courting individual donors

How to better appeal to individual donors is the topic of the next online discussion hosted by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Click there at noon Feb. 24 to participate.

Obama Web strategist says ditch the e-newsletters

Thomas Gensemer, the brain behind then-Sen. Barack Obama's Web-based election campaign, says nonprofits should forgo email newsletters and focus on short, more personal email notes providing specific instructions for participation in fund-raising efforts. "Email newsletters don't get read, yet they take more effort to prepare than a 250-word email," he told an audience at City University in London this week. "Email is still a killer application, but only when used properly."

Muppets pop up on hot blog topics

The economic stimulus package was the biggest topic in the blogosphere last week, but guess what else showed up? Some 6 percent of bloggers mentioned Sesame Street's Muppet characters, according to a weekly survey by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. After CNN posted a story from the archives of the Mental Floss blog, online writers began to ponder their own fave Muppets. As one wrote, "My nickname in middle school was Fozzy the Bear because I was always constantly telling bad jokes."

BBC doc focuses on Kitchen Sisters

BBC Radio’s World Service offers an audio feature by Alan Hall about the Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson. “Programme one captures Davia at the duo’s production office in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope building in San Francisco. It then travels south to glimpse Nikki on the commune where she lives and where their radio stories take shape.”