Lewis Kelley from the National Forest Foundation has asked how much it would cost for their organization to blog. The purpose of this post is to discuss a basic yearly budget that encompasses setup costs, labor costs and online services. Let’s do some of the basic math.
Assuming that your site is not going to get more than 40,000 users per month and no more than 20 GB of bandwidth, I suggest you simply go with a shared ISP account. This isn’t going to break the bank at all. I use NEXCESS.NET. They’re very cheap. The mini-me plan is $134.59 a year for site hosting, daily site backup and a dedicated IP address. If you exceed your monthly bandwidth, it’s roughly $1/GB.
If all of a sudden, you get a lot more traffic, you can move up to the “Gettin’ Hits” plan which is $259.18 but that assuming traffic in the 40,000 user range. Seriously, you’ll be extremely lucky to get to this level in the first year so consider it something GOOD to worry about.
You can have your choice of Drupal or WordPress and they’ll even migrate your existing WordPress installation for you for free. I haven’t tried migrating a Drupal installation to them but I’m pretty sure they can do it.
OK, so for less than the cost of an Xbox 360, your nonprofit now is on the web but wait! There’s more to consider. You need the following
- wireframes
- design
- front-end developer (someone who can integrate your design into WordPress or Drupal)
You don’t have a wireframe for your site and you don’t have a design yet. Generally speaking, a wireframe is going to be difficult for many nonprofits to carry out on their own. A wireframe is like a blueprint for what a site is going to look like. It’s not supposed to have colors or pics, just black and white boxes depicting where on the page everything is going to be. Technically, you should be able to print it out and pretend to navigate the site on your own. Just to help out nonprofits even more, I’ll be putting up a sample wireframe that will build out a site similar to the one at apaforprogress.org. If you don’t want to wait for me, simply go over to the site and copy the the way the featured headlines and the river of blog entries work. That’s more than good enough for a first pass. I would prefer that nonprofits follow a reasonably clear cookie-cutter information architecture than one that is custom-made, expensive but doesn’t follow good information architecture principles. Stay tuned for the wireframe!
As for the design, sadly, design is very, very custom and I suggest you find a designer that not only is a good designer but one that is also knowledgeable about the platform (either Drupal or WordPress) that you want to run with. Be aware that most themes in Drupal or WordPress don’t incorporate Huffington Post-like magazine sensbilities. Or alternatively, you can use existing themes and try to make them work with your wireframes. Just so you know the cost for designing the APA for Progress site was less than $600 but we also bought an existing theme and just tweaked the header and color set. Total cost was in the $750 range.
Once the designer is done, you will end up with a bunch of Photoshop files in .psd format. From there, you need to convert the .psd files into working XHTML and CSS files that will work with your Drupal or WordPress theme.
Luckily, there are a bunch of services that do that. I’ve never had to use them since I can do it myself but you might want to try PSD2HTML. The cost for moving the .psd over to HTML in WordPress with their hi-end solution (which you should choose) is $412 and $512 to move it to Drupal.
So you’re talking about $1200 for setup of the site’s look and feel but it’ll be cookie-cutter. Trust me, I have the feeling that even a cookie-cutter information architecture will be better than what your nonprofit has now. Over time, you can change the information architecture but by then, you’ll have a better sense of how the site operates and how it flows from a user’s perspective.
Labor costs are going to be a kicker. The problem is this: you need to someone willing to post a lot (on their own) while the site traffic starts to ramp and you get volunteers to your site. If your nonprofit already has a strong volunteer force doing offline work for you, I suspect that they would be the first group of people to approach. Let’s assume you get lucky. You have someone full-time who can dedicate 10 hours a week to blogging and a volunteer who pitches in 1 blog post every couple of days. A reasonable post takes about 2 hours to build but seriously, don’t go overboard. Half the time your posts could be really short and you’d still get your nonprofit’s message out there as long as it’s tagged and timely. Let’s assume your volunteer is the more timely person, just picking out news articles from the Twittersphere, blogosphere and any RSS feeds she or he might set up. Total blog posts per week from your staff member and from your volunteer? 7.5. It should take about a month before your SEO traffic starts to build. More than 1 post a day should be your minimum. These posts should follow good SEO guidelines and be well tagged.
Obviously, over 52 weeks, we’re talking about 520 hours of work during that year. Assuming a cost of around $20 an hour for the full time employee that’s $10400. With any luck, your blogging community should be up to around five or six good bloggers by the end of the first six months and by the end of the year site management will probably take more time as your media efforts start running through your new site and getting a lot more traffic to boot. And that’s pretty much how APA for Progress started.
So here’s a final rundown:
Startup costs
$135 for the web site
$1200 for design and front end development
$10400 for full-time employee (.25 FTE)
$11735 for the first year of operation
I think that a very reasonable upfront cost. The labor cost is interesting because your nonprofit may already be paying someone to do work as a communications director. However, don’t worry so much if the blog entries are coming from someone who isn’t trained to be a communications director. It’s more important to communicate enthusiasm and an all-encompassing curiosity about the topic at hand than it is to project a “message” to your blog’s readers. In some sense, a full-time staff person may be the wrong person for this. It all depends. Have people submit writing samples. You’ll find that good bloggers can come from anywhere (hint, hint, even interns and IT directors).
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Just a tip. We're a design firm, Design for Social Good http://www.designforsocialgood.com and we use Blue Host for all our hosting needs. You're right, the way to go is a shared ISP and it's really cheap now. Blue Host has a special for $4.95 per month. $60 a year! We've been very happy with them and they're consistently rated very high. http://www.bluehost.com/
The costs of designing and building the blogs are relatively nominal so that shouldn't really be a factor. The main factor is the man power to populate the blog. If you're not updating your blos a few times a week, it looks like you don't have an active organization and that's not good for anyone.
Best of luck.
Najlah Hicks
Design for Social Good
http://wwwdesignforsocialgood.com
Seriously? I work with small organizations.
The latest blog I did for an organization cost all of $96 a year to host (hostgator), and less than $500 for the WordPress design. Two staffers update the blog regularly.
I think that you're making this far more complex than it needs to be.
How much does it cost to get your nonprofit blogging? …
“The purpose of this post is to discuss a basic yearly budget that encompasses setup costs, labor costs and online services. Let’s do some of the basic math.”…
And what exactly was your blog's traffic? Did it grow? How much staff time was spent on the blog? Did you account for those counts? I ask these questions simply because your answer sounds more like a techie's answer and doesn't address the concerns of nonprofit management. "The Management" wants to know how much time is being spent on the blog and wants to know how much it will cost. Your costs are very similar to the costs listed in my blog post but without the wireframes and the IA, I don't think you're really helping organizations out. Seriously, I'm just as tired of techies who don't understand management concerns as I am of managers who don't understand tech. And just saying you did it for super cheap doesn't allow for any context regarding staff time. Let's get real here, for most nonprofits, tech is cheap. The problem is staffing.
I agree – much of this can be done for free. You can start your own blog for practically nothing through google. The design means little – it's just a matter of attracting readers.
Sorry AMH, but I laughed when I read your comment. I think you should always try free but the problem isn’t the free part so much as the lack of thinking on your part. Yes, you can start a blog for free but your traffic isn’t going anywhere if you stop at that point. There’s a lot of real thinking that needs to occur if you plan on growing traffic and your comments only serve to exacerbate an intellectual laziness that I find often among techies. If the technical object of a blog were to simply create the blog, then free would be fine. However, you’d have a hell of a time convincing managers that that makes sense as a business proposition.
I'd argue that everyone is right here. From a technical perspective I think that a free site like WordPress or Blogger is going to be a better solution for most nonprofits–not so much for the cost but because they're a bit less work. But, it is also true that the key consideration isn't technical, it's about staff time–and figuring out how much investment is actual worthwhile to advance an organization's mission.
In this case, however, and I have the analytics reports to prove it, the conversion from a basic WordPress 2.4 hosted system on the APA for Progress site to the Drupal version made a difference from approximately 400 – 1000 visitors a month max to now a very comfortable range of 12000 – 15000+ visitors per month.
That 12x traffic increase means additional eyeballs who are becoming engaged with the nonprofit and who have an opportunity to go through the "funnel" of involvement with the organization.
Put it this way: if you had about $1000 coming in every month in donations, and after your up-front investment in tech infrastructure, you now have $12,000 coming in every month in donations or membership signups, I definitely think it is worthwhile to lobby for that up-front investment in technology and staff capacity.
You reach more people and thus more potential volunteers, donors, board members, community members.
I do think Allan is trying to convey that staff time, combined with a proper infrastructure, will do much better.
The problem with 'FREE' is that there is never a guarantee that what you are using will work every time, or even nearly all the time.
Don't believe me? Ask the folks at Gmail where both the free and paid service went down twice in the last 2 months.
I agree with Allan that if you are serious about blogging and social networking, you need to make the *reasonable* investment of both money and time.
At the end of the day, even for the typical non-profit in America with an average revenue base of $100k-$250k, it pays off in the long run.
-Jon
Jon Biedermann
Vice President
DonorPerfect CRM Fundraising Software
http://www.donorperfect.com
http://www.donorperfect.com/dpoblog
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Great article with good points!
When thinking about free and a non-profit I would think about a professional service given for free.
For wireframing there are tools that are giving their services for free or at a special discount to non profits: pidoco.com and protoshare.com are a valid example
I would like to encourage non-profits to seek and ask services to professional companies, like salesforce.com, that give some of their time to non profit.
This is the way to achieve professional services free.
@Monica Flores do you have more information about wordpress to drupal benefits? I would like to know better if it is only a technical point of view or something else.
Keep Blogging
Francesco
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