A couple friends of DIA, Free Range Graphics and Care2, collaborated on this Earth Day piece, being used by Care2 to drive traffic, especially outside the U.S., to its Earth Day Pledge. Free Range Graphics, the creator of the piece, is offering a chance to get some of that action for yourself through their Gratitude Grant, but hurry -- the deadline is May 1.

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(Susan Finkelpearl of former DIA roommates Free Range Graphics has this week's Tuesday Tips entry on a little spring cleaning for the web site. This post is also available as a .pdf, and will be one of her handouts at the Nonprofit Tech Conference this week. We could probably stand to take note of a few of these tips ourselves ... thanks, Susan! -jrz)

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Have you given your website some design love lately? Here are some fast tips for taking your site to the next level. 1. Don’t forget the fold. Just as old-fashioned newspapers have a fold line, if a web page gets too long, people will have to scroll to see all of the content on the page. When designing your home and interior pages, make sure to put important items such as news features, donate buttons, and e-newsletter sign-ups above the fold, where they can be seen easily. 2. Be a creative conformist. The web works because key site elements appear in consistent locations across all well-designed web sites. While you want your website to have a look and feel that is unique to your organization, make sure you also follow design conventions. For example, people have come to expect that search bars be placed in the top right of a webpage while logos are most often in the top left position. Nine times out of ten you should stick with these conventions. Groups like Amazon play with these conventions, but again it’s generally wisest to plunk key navigational elements where people expect to see them. 3. Make your asks contextual. Don’t let isolated "donate buttons" do all the fundraising legwork on your site. Work donation asks into areas where you are telling the most compelling stories about your accomplishments. 4. Let thy people donate! When someone does click a donate button, reward them immediately with a donate form. Don’t make them click more or wade through a lot of copy before letting them help you. In fact, it’s highly recommended that the form be the default first page of your donate section.

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Our friends (and former landladies and -lords) down the way at Free Range Graphics are offering Gratitude Grant(s) for compelling progressive causes. Free Range -- the brains behind such design/marketing brilliance as The Meatrix -- tantalizes with the prospect of:

up to $15,000 worth of our communications services from our menu of core offerings: strategic communications consulting, organizational identity, print design, web design and Flash animation. Need to rally activists around an issue or capture critical media attention? Modernize your logo? Chart out an online fundraising strategy? As long as you have a concrete goal and a mission that makes a positive difference for our planet and its people, we encourage you to apply!

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Free Range Graphics -- DIA's old landlords -- just dropped this YouTube to promote the upcoming release of Fast Food Nation. Free Range always does tight video agitprop. The movie's got another nice viral hook with DoYouWantLiesWithThat.com, which solicits admissions of on-the-job indiscretions. (You can get the site itself to "confess" that it's actually a marketing page.) [Sort of like Allan Benamer's "confessions box" on the Confessions of a Nonprofit IT Director blog. Something about the idea of anonymously baring the soul is powerfully -- even mythologically -- alluring...]

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