Google has been offering free donation processing to nonprofits for the past couple of years through Google Checkout. That free service will end on March 1 except for U.S.-based nonprofits that receive Google Grants. Other nonprofits will pay 2% + $0.20 per transaction (but at least there won't be any monthly, setup, or gateway service fees like others have to pay). You can see Google's fee list here.

To continue on the election theme, here's a fantastic project that's just sprung up in the past three weeks. Twitter Vote Report uses Twitter to compile and report on problems at voting sites. The application tracks everything from long lines and clerical mishaps to more serious problems like malfunctioning machines and voter intimidation. Using a simple set of hashtags, users can report locations, wait times, mechanical problems, and more. On Election Day, reports will be posted using Google Maps, making it easy for anyone to see problem areas. Serious problems are reported to the appropriate branch of the Election Protection Coalition. Some early voters have already started using Twitter Vote Report, so you can see it in action right now.

The project is supported by numerous nonprofits and for-profit companies , but what most excites me is how quickly volunteers transformed the project from an idea into a reality. From the looks of their Google Group, this relatively small group of coders is working around the clock.

Twitter Vote Report is still looking for volunteers. According to the Twitter feed, experts in Ruby on Rails or the Google Maps API are in high demand, as well as people who can translate the Web site into Spanish and other languages. If you have the know-how, why not get in touch with them and help out? You can make a big difference in just six days.

Last week, we published Getting the Best Prices for Processing Credit Cards as a companion piece to A Few Good Methods for Processing Credit Cards. If you're looking into accepting credit cards for purchases and donations at your nonprofit, I'd highly recommend reading both articles.

We've gotten some interesting responses to the piece, both by email and in the community. Both articles focus on merchant accounts — the same services stores use to process sales — but as a number of you have pointed out, these services are overkill for some nonprofits. If all you're looking for is a simple way to accept donations online, then you may not need a full-blown merchant account. Instead, you may be in the market for an online payment service. Although these services don't provide as much flexibility as merchant accounts, they do offer a clean, inexpensive way to accept donations on your Web site.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting post "If You Don't Need It Don't Keep It," referring to the fact that many businesses keep data that they don't need, for marketing and research purposes. The decreasing cost of storage has also increased the propensity to save data rather than to routinely clean it out.

TechSoup Stock is always growing — adding new partners and donated or discounted software and services to its long list of technology products available to nonprofits. Some of you may have noticed that another new product was added in June: Acteva.

What's Acteva? Well, the Acteva Plus event management solution is available to nonprofits and public libraries in the U.S. and Canada and tackles everything from event registration, to processing payment for paid events, and handling ticketing.