The following blog post was originally featured on Socialbrite.

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The Global Brigades page on Empowered.org.

Platform offers free fundraising option & other services

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, social change advocates, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, community organizations.

Guest post by Christina Hirsch
Empowered.org

In the fall of 2010, a group of us launched Empowered.org, a free platform designed to help groups making a social impact. Our platform allows organizations to manage members, fund-raise effectively, recruit volunteers, grow organically and share your successes with their community and the world.

We’re made up of a group of passionate and proven leaders from the nonprofit sector, mostly volunteers, who want to share our knowledge to exponentially grow grassroots organizations using effective online strategies. We support nearly every type of service activity, including international trips, local community projects, run-walks and leadership conferences.

How we help the social good community

The Empowered platform allows organizations to conduct all of their fundraising, volunteer coordination, donor reporting, event planning and chapter management on one platform. The secret to our approach is that the Empowered platform can be integrated into your organization’s own website, allowing you to maintain you own branding and design all at no cost.

We believe that fundraising should be free. Because we work exclusively with social change organizations, we know that money spent on fundraising means less money toward the ground projects that make a difference in the world. We’re proud to be completely free for social good organizations, with custom features available at a low pricing.

Organizations can create activities, surveys and events and manage their volunteers with unlimited free access. Unlike other platforms, we allow for all fees, including merchant fees, to be passed to donors during checkout instead of as an additional cost to participating organizations.  This means that not only do we make fundraising free, but organizations can also cover their credit card and merchant processing fees.

How Empowered helped Global Brigades triple its members

Global Brigades, the world’s largest student-led health and development organization, turned to Empowered in 2010 to take over all of their online membership, fundraising and chapter management activities. To date, Empowered has helped Global Brigades to grow its membership by 300 percent!

Most successfully for Global Brigades, Empowered has leveraged social networking to exponentially grow the organization’s volunteer base. Empowered has customized Facebook share options, allowing volunteers to share with their Facebook friends when they have made a donation through direct wall postings and general Open Graph actions. Optimizing social messaging and sharing has resulted in Global Brigades receiving 100 volunteers through Facebook every month and one-third of its donations come through Facebook, all via Empowered’s social share functions.

Global Brigades operates on a chapter model, with hundreds of chapters across North America and Europe, representing thousands of volunteers. Empowered allows organizations to create unlimited “group pages” for their chapters across the world, while all being linked to the organization’s underlying account. This model has allowed Global Brigades to experience viral and decentralized growth with targeted messaging and opportunities to specific chapters and sub groups. Members are able to interact around specific initiatives while still being linked to Global Brigades’ underlying organization account. As a result, Global Brigades has tripled its growth to over 520 chapters with more than 12,000 members – all of whom are connecting, organizing, and fundraising through one centralized and free platform!

See how Empowered can take your membership organization and fundraising efforts to the next level. Visit Empowered.org or contact us at jack@empowered.org.

Non-profits usually start out with people so committed to their cause they’re willing to donate their time and resources to the organization. However, as the organization grows, there may come a time when it will need to hire one or more employees. Knowing when to hire employees for your non-profit and what kind of employees to hire is key to the future success of your organization.

When To Hire Employees

If one or more of the following statements are true, then chances are the organization needs to hire full or part time employees:

- You have applied for and received tax exemption status.

- You have the possibility to expand your projects but do not have the manpower.

- Dedicated volunteers are unable to continue working for the organization on a non-salaried basis.

- There are job openings in the organization that only a trained professional can handle.

Who to Look For

 Most volunteer organizations need a director, a treasurer and a secretary. Because these jobs require a fair bit of work, it can be difficult to find individuals to do them on a volunteer basis. Following are some tips on how to find the right people to handle these positions:

- A treasurer and secretary must have both educational qualifications and experience. If the organization has tax-free status, even small errors can bring about an audit or even more serious consequences.

- In many cases, the founder of the non-profit becomes its director. However, this does not necessarily need to be the case, as the founder may not be the most qualified person for this position. A good director must have organizational and people handling skills. He or she must be able to manage staff and volunteers as well as interact with the public.

What Does Hiring Employees Involve?

A nonprofit organization will probably get a lot of job applications, especially if the position is a full time one. It should expect to interview a number of candidates for any of the available job openings. The best candidate should not only have the appropriate qualifications and experience, but should be able to work well with the rest of the staff and believe in the goals of the organization.

After the appropriate employees have been hired, the onboarding and job training process can begin. Onboarding is fairly simple and usually takes only one or two days. Of course, since we live in the 21^st century, there is onboarding software available to help facilitate the process. It involves filling a person in on the details of the job, what is expected of them and how the work must be done. Job training is more complex, as it involves teaching a person how to actually do the work. This training is very important, especially if the employee is new to the world of non-profits or needs to learn how to work with a particular computer program or learn how to properly fill out forms, etc.

Not all volunteer organizations need to hire people, but when they do, it is important for the organization to choose the right people for the job at hand. New employees should not only be qualified for their job, but should possess a high level of personal integrity and dedication to the organization’s vision and cause.