New cyber tools: office suite set for release. (Cyber Frontier).

Chicago-based B2P Commerce plans to release NonprofitBooks Office this month, a desktop software suite that will bundle and integrate accounting, donor-management and performance-measurement tools the tech firm has developed for nonprofits.

The suite will cost $999 and include NonprofitBooks, an application B2P launched a year ago for the nonprofit market to work with QuickBooks, Intuit's small-business accounting software.

After releasing the suite in January, B2P plans by March to unbundle the three software tools and sell them separately, said Jason Saul, CEO and co-founder.

Prices have not been set for the new donor-management and performance-measurement tools, which are based on Microsoft products. B2P has sold more than 1,000 copies of NonprofitBooks, which costs $249, Saul said.

All three tools eventually will be integrated with Impact Manager, a Web-based tool B2P is developing with Microsoft that is designed to let funders and parent organizations track and aggregate performance data of their grantees and affiliates or chapters.

Impact Manager, expected to cost as little as $100 a year for each affiliate, chapter or grantee -- depending on the number of users -- is being tested by the Chicago Community Trust, Greater Cincinnati Community Foundation and the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.

NonprofitBooks Office and Impact Manager are designed to work together, said Saul. Grantees of a foundation, or affiliates or chapters of a national organization will be able to use the suite to track critical information about their programs, finances and fundraising, he said.

After adopting measures or benchmarks for its general management, financial or fundraising performance, for example, a nonprofit would be able to use NonprofitBooks Office to track its results against those measures, Saul said.

Using Impact Manager, funders and parent groups will be able to "aggregate the same common reporting elements from NonprofitBooks Office," Saul said.

Charity news portal

The National Philanthropic Trust in Jenkintown, Pa., has launched Harvest Today, a Web portal for news about philanthropy and nonprofits.

The site, at harvesttoday.org, uses automated search technology to "harvest" news and nonprofit Web sites for stories, news releases, reports and research -- including PDF files -- and then feed them into "channels" organized by topics.

Topics of the site's initial channels range from domestic and international philanthropy news to content about estate planning, fundraising, managing nonprofits and volunteerism -- and subscribers can create their own topics and channels, said Andrew Hastings, vice president of the National Philanthropic Trust.

Harvest Today, developed by Topular in Harleysville, Pa., aims to be a "wholesale" distributor of online content to groups that want nonprofit and philanthropic news and information on their own Web sites, Hastings said.

Subscribers will be able to place a Harvest Today channel on their own Web sites for at least $1,500 a year, he said, with customized channels costing about $7,500 a year, plus a onetime set fee of $2,500.

Harvest Today hopes to reduce those costs by soliciting sponsorships of channels and topics, as well as donations.

The portal also plans to launch an email feature within six months that will allow its subscribers to deliver customized email to constituents.

Harvest Today, which searches more than 200 news and nonprofit sites and offers free news on its own site, plans to continue to build the number of sites it searches and the number of channels and topics it uses to organize its content.

"The goal is to keep the inventory at Harvest Today growing," said Andrea Michalek, Topular's president and founder.

Network for Good

Philanthropy portal networkforgood.org posted steady traffic and generated steady online giving and volunteer-matching in its first year of operation. Still, its organizers plan to revamp its site and strengthen its content.

The site also has helped spawn a local portal in Washington, D.C., that could serve as a model for other communities.

"The emphasis for us is going to be on usability and clear paths and useful content for both sides of the equation, donors and volunteers, as well as nonprofit practitioners," said Ken Weber, acting president and chief operating officer of Network for Good, a. nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

From its launch Nov. 19, 2001, the site attracted 3.2 million unique. visitors through Sept. 30, 2002, and generated $12.3 million in donations, Weber said. That included slightly more than 3 million unique visitors and $10 million in donations in the first nine months of 2002.

That compares to an estimated $3.5 million raised online in 2001 through helping.org, a now defunct site created by the AOL Time Warner Foundation, which later teamed up with Yahoo! and Cisco Systems to create Network for Good.

helping.org officials estimated that the site helped raise another $16.5 million in response to the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, 2001.

Networkforgood.org also matched nearly 60,000 volunteers with nonprofits in the first nine months of 2002. Weber said a growing share of the site's traffic and activity was being generated from other sites that use its donation and volunteer-matching tools.

New content for the site will focus on information and resources to help nonprofits improve their ability to generate support online. To boost activity during the end-of-year holiday season in 2002, the site added several features, including "gift baskets," each consisting of a handful of nonprofits that donors could support, "wish lists" that visitors could create and encourage friends to support, and "calculators" to help visitors decide how much they could afford to donate.

Building on the experience of networkforgood.org, a coalition of 20 foundations, nonprofits and media companies in the Washington, D.C., area has launched touchdc.org, a portal that aims to generate donations and volunteers for local nonprofits.

The portal is designed to address a local funding crunch resulting from government cutbacks, shrinking foundation endowments and flat corporate giving, said Elizabeth Miller, director of New Ventures in Philanthropy for the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers.

The goal, she said, is to generate support for nonprofits by connecting them with donors and volunteers.

The Web site, which is hosted by Network for Good and features online donation and volunteer-matching tools created for networkforgood.org, includes a database of 25,700 local nonprofits drawn from the larger national nonprofit database at guidestar.org.

Local media companies are promoting the site, linking to it from their online publications and providing news content about local issues.

"We just hope it will help nonprofits in the Washington region and be replicated in other parts of the country," Miller said. A major goal of the coalition, she said, is to help nonprofits improve their ability to "tell their story more effectively."

OMB Watch, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C., that supports nonprofit advocacy, has launched npaction.org, an online source for nonprofit advocacy.

The portal is expected to help groups already playing an advocacy role expand their work by highlighting what other groups are doing and providing reference and background material, said Ryan Turner, nonprofits' policy and technology analyst for the group.

It also is designed to help groups not involved in advocacy work understand what they can do.

In addition to offering case studies and summaries of laws and rules governing lobbying and other advocacy work, OMB Watch has teamed up with Capitol Advantage, an Internet directory and email advocacy firm in Fairfax, Va., to create a tool to let visitors send messages to national and state elected officials and the news media.

Todd Cohen is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].