It has been my experience that nonprofits fall into two buckets: they are either fundraising focused (and further subdivided into pursuing many small donations

It has been my experience that nonprofits fall into two buckets: they are either fundraising focused (and further subdivided into pursuing many small donations or few large ones), or mission focused (this is most local orgs). The former have a Communications Department of some sort that handles their website, for the latter an online presence is an afterthought and even if you give them a website it won't be maintained (although if you think you can get students to put in an ongoing effort to run such a website going forward, that could be pretty awesome) There are less obvious ways to help that can have a larger impact: Your city probably has (many) duplicated and conflicting directories of non-profit orgs and services that may not be up to date. Fixing that (verifying contact information, locations, hours) is an ongoing effort, as is identifying opportunities for connecting people to the services that can help them. Aside from a few standouts that get regular media coverage (eg. annual toy drives and the like), any and all local nonprofits can always use more press. Student journalism, viral videos, Twitter campaigns, etc. Note that success stories are often more effective in driving a call-to-action such as a donation than stories focused on unmet needs.