Team Mightybytes (Tim, Joy, and Steve) recently returned from the 2011 NYC - DC Climate Ride, biking 300 miles over five days to support sustainable solutions and eight environmental organizations.

Yes, our legs and butts are sore, but we have some great take-aways from the trip. Before and during the ride, we learned a lot about each other, how to effectively raise funds using social media tools, and met dozens of sustainability experts who shared their wisdom with us. Here were some of the take-aways.

According to a new report by Nielsen Norman Group, giving money on charity websites is 7% harder than spending money on e-commerce sites. Donating physical items is even harder. For non-profit websites, social media is secondary; the top priority is to create clearer content.

The Non-profit and Charity Website Usability Report offers 224 pages and 116 design guidelines for improving the usability of essential information and processes on charity, non-profit, and NGO websites. How does your site stack up? We looked over the report’s criteria to compare our work to its findings.

Social sites offer great tools for cultivating donor relationships, but you may need to tweak your approach a bit.

I recently embarked on a 320 mile bike ride through the California wilderness to raise money and awareness for the climate crisis. The Climate Ride experience was exhilarating, educational, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in challenging themselves and doing good work for a great cause. It was the fourth ride of this kind—long distance road touring in the name of a good cause—that I have done, but the first in which I used social media almost exclusively for my fundraising efforts. I found social fundraising to be a quick and effective way to meet, and eventually exceed my goals, but discovered that it requires a somewhat different approach than your standard plea for donations.

With the recent success of so many cause-driven crowdfunding campaigns for good causes (think Pepsi’s Refresh Everything or Chase Community Giving), non-profits, arts organizations and other institutions are flocking to social networks in droves, hoping to cash in on current corporate social responsibility trends.

Tim just had firsthand experience using social media for fundraising via his fundraising efforts for the Climate Ride and Barrel of Monkeys, a Chicago theater and education company that features Tai of Mightybytes as a member, just received two grants thanks to their efforts with Chase Community Giving. In that spirit, we thought we would share a handful of tips for maximizing your social media fundraising efforts.

In the spirit of giving, Mightybytes donated to the World Wildlife Fund in honor of our clients, friends and family this year for the holidays.

This gift is already hard at work protecting endangered species, preserving threatened spaces, protecting habitats, and addressing global threats such as deforestation. Contributions help WWF build the resources necessary to carry out conservation programs, which focus on establishing and managing parks, training and equipping park rangers, guards and anti-poaching teams and helping to meet the needs of local people without destroying natural resources.