Travis - one thing. When you open the SVG in GIMP you'll see the checkerboard background. That is actually a transparent background. If you save that image as is as a gif, then it can be imported into other programs and the checkerboard parts will be transparent (this does not work for jpg). E.g., If you park the image on top of some text in Word, you can still see the text between the black trace lines of the image. (I use GIMP ver 2.6.2)
One other thing - if you don't want the transparency, then after opening the SVG in GIMP, just use [Image][Flatten Image] to put in the white background (if white is set as the secondary color as it is as default). Then save as gif or jpg. I like gif - seems to be smaller, especially if just black and white are used in the image.