It can be hard to decipher what is and what isn’t worth an investment of time and money. Add to that the challenge of successfully upgrading or integrating your Web site to take advantage of these new communications tools.

In short, there is a lot of information with funny little cute names that you’ve never heard before to sort through and get your head around.

M+R Strategic Services and NTEN have completed their 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, analyzing online messaging, fundraising, and advocacy data from 32 leading nonprofit organizations, covering all of calendar years 2007 and 2008.

In combination with the previous two studies, it presents a four-year landscape of nonprofit email, fundraising, and advocacy results.

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.