During these difficult economic times, it's inspiring to see so many organizations coming to the assistance of those in need. Here's a list of a few websites where you can go to help in an immediate and personal way:

When I need quick facts on Internet usage and how the Web is shaping our world, I turn to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. An initiative of the Pew Research Center, Pew Internet explores the "impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life."

Pew Internet Project reports are primarily based on national telephone surveys but also draw from qualitative research methods and data shared by their research partners.

Reports and Presentation topics include:

In the 2008 CMS satisfaction report by NTEN, a Non-Profit Technology group, Drupal received very high marks. This is great news for us since we recently decided to make the shift to Drupal rather than building our own CMS. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who have embraced Drupal. NTEN evaluated hundreds of nonprofit groups using a wide array of CMSes like Plone, Joomla, Convio, Blackbaud, and Antharia. Drupal had the highest number of responses and the highest number of respondents using Drupal as their primary CMS.

I'm always looking for novel and inexpensive ways to get user feedback, especially for our non-profit clients. Formal online survey tools offer organizations an in-depth look into the users' minds, but many are expensive and time consuming to create and execute. Here are a few crowd-sourcing sites I’ve found to supplement my user-research toolbox:

Ask500People