You may have noticed that we've made some changes to the front page of the site.

Our focus has always been providing people with a one-stop site for ways to connect. We wanted to immediately hit our visitors with volunteer opportunities, upcoming events, and the latest news from non-profit information. No more digging around our site for it: you'll see it every time you come to the front of the page!

If you're an agency, the items you enter into the site will show up on the front page as soon as you enter them.

If you want to stay up-to-date on what's happening locally, bookmark makeadifferencemichiana.org or make it your homepage so you can see the latest information every day.

We had our Non-Profit Thank You Party on Thursday at the Woodward in downtown South Bend. I want to thank all the agencies who were able to join us, and also the local businesses and community members who came as our guests. Make a Difference Michiana is very dedicated to doing its part to help the community through a difficult economic time, and we're also very excited about new opportunities for 2009. One immediate step we're going to take will be visible soon: we're working on adjusting the front page of the site to provide more up-to-date content. Be looking for that change soon.

We are always excited to share about our website's growth, and recently we've seen several positive things: in December we topped 300 partnering agencies, and the last quarter of the year was our strongest quarter ever for website views. 2008 saw over 500 emails go through our site requesting information on volunteering, donating, or getting help, so Michiana people are really making use of the centralized contact information available.

We'll be mailing out 2008 stats and 2009 listing level information for the agencies that weren't able to join us at the Thank You party. Again, thank you to all 305 organizations that collaborate to make this site possible. There are big things in store for 2009...keep your eye on the blog and the website for more information.