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Units of Service

The Impact of Your Donations

We want to give you some idea of what various improvements in Nonprofit Online News will cost, so that you have some idea of the impact of your donation. (All donors will be invited to help us set priorities, so you are not voting with your money.) We've broken up our suggested donation amounts to reflect the kinds of things we will be able to do with what we raise.

The marginal cost of each resource that we post on Nonprofit Online News is $6. Informal feedback has told us that a single valuable item can make all the difference for a subscriber, but we know that's not the same item for every person. So, we see five resources as the minimum number we need to have a reliable impact. A $30 donation would pay to help us increase our output by five new resources.

As we have moved more and more toward publishing downloadable and printable versions of our articles (most of them available for free) our use of bandwidth has increased dramatically. We want to move further in this direction, because our PDFs have been very popular. A $70 donation will allow us to double our monthly PDF downloads.

Our research indicates that a very simple HTML version of our email editions would be well received. A clean and reliable design for an HTML edition would be completely paid for with a $150 donation.

While Michael Gilbert and our other occasional authors donate their time for the articles they write, it does cost us to manage and edit the process. Every $300 donation pays those direct costs for an additional feature article.

Once upon a time, we were a leader in standards and accessibility of our web site, but standards have advanced and we have fallen behind. We want to make our site usable by as many people as possible. A $700 donation would pay the consultant costs of revamping our templates and components so as to adhere to the latest web standards and accessibility requirements.

Finally, we have been wanting to make our archives more available to our subscribers. The most important way for us to do that would be to improve our search engine. The consultant costs for a handful of improvements could be paid for with a generous donation of $1100.