Our pals at Climate Ride just announced that they will grant over $300,000.00 to 25 nonprofit beneficiary organizations this week. Impressive!

The funds—more than twice those raised last year—came from two cycling events in 2011: Climate Ride NYC-DC last May and Climate Ride California last October. With two teams on two rides, Mightybytes is proud to have raised nearly $17,000.00 of the total this year. Like Climate Ride, we hope to double that amount next year.

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.

Chicago's Barrel of Monkeys is a winning nonprofit in the Chase Community Giving competition, receiving 1,615 votes. This will go a long way to help a group which we personally know is a great cause. Congrats!

Our resident interface and user experience whiz Tai Palmgren is a member of Barrel of Monkeys, a local nonprofit that offers an alternative environment for children and creativity. Barrel of Monkeys teaches creative writing workshops in Chicago Public Schools. These actor-educators adapt the stories and poems written by the students into sketches and songs, and perform them in a show for the school. We profiled Tai about working with BOM and the ‘Art of Theater for Education’ in last year’s Chicago Artists Month series, talking specifically about creative process.

Big Brands and large Trusts aren’t the only ones funding cause-driven projects these days.

Pepsi’s Refresh Everything and Chase Community Giving are getting all the press, but small businesses can make big differences as well, which is truly admirable in such a challenging economy. Fellow Chicagoans Firebelly Design have been offering their annual Grant for Good, donating a year’s worth of strategy, branding and design services to a lucky non-profit, for years now.

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.