I didn’t think a lot would change between now and the last list but boy was I wrong, especially in the lower half of the list. It’s interesting to know that a lot of new sites came on. Let’s welcome them.

Who’s in?

• ap.org
• medhelp.org
• familydoctor.org
• cpmsglife.org
• hsus.org
• newsbusters.org
• globalsecurity.org

However, not everybody could keep up with the torrid pace of the Web despite their efforts. Who’s out?

• worldcat.org
• alternet.org
• mayoclinic.org
• cancer.org
• redcross.org
• wikibooks.org
• volunteermatch.org

One note: Associated Press probably should have been included in the 2007 survey but for some reason, I didn’t.

I think a lot of the sites that dropped off simply hit their plateaus as they have built in audiences and probably have reached high saturation levels with them. The major disappointment here is redcross.org. I don’t think they have a plateau really. It’s a possibility that we’ll see them on the list again and it may be a case that their traffic is disaster driven.

Average traffic for all sites was 5.4 million visitors per month but that’s a high figure because Wikipedia so clearly bolsters those numbers. Median traffic was at a more reasonable 2.31 million visitors a month. Together these 25 sites gets 135 million visitors a month for an astounding 78% growth rate over last year. Wow!

The biggest mover was NPR. My guess is that this year’s election coverage helped them a lot.  The site that’s really impressed me is cpmsglife.org as they seem to have come out of nowhere. Take a look at the Quantcast site traffic for them. I’d love to get a spike like that. I’m a little circumspect about it and would like to dig into that a little bit. I don’t know of any traffic building strategy for a site like theirs that could go from 0 to 1.5 million visitors a month without a major media push and links to other sites.

Today, I’m taking a look at four online donation aggregators whose monthly visitor count is under 100,000 a month. As you can see in the chart above, I’m talking about change.org, Changing the Present, GlobalGiving and MicroPlace. It looks like some organizations did better during the Giving Season than others. The biggest riser was MicroPlace, which was purchased by eBay in the summer of 2006 but was not actively announced as part of eBay until Spring of 2007.

It’s clear that the eBay acquisition has really improved MicroPlace’s standing in this market. Their traffic shot up like a rocket during the Giving Season and I can only attribute that to front-page links to MicroPlace on eBay itself and the continued difficulties by Kiva in securing a strong inventory of giving opportunities thus ensuring that users move on to other sites such as MicroPlace which are somewhat similar. There’s another thing – MicroPlace will give you a return on investment in real dollars. That’s basically where Kiva cannot go right now. I suspect MicroPlace ‘s FINRA/SIPC affiliation was part and parcel of this strategy to actually do what many social entrepreneurs dream of — real financial returns combined with social returns. Basically, MicroPlace can tout securities. That’s a huge win for them and is going to mark them as a serious player in the space and not just due to their eBay affiliation either. UPDATE: There’s more information by the Rails programmer who designed MicroPlace on his blog. Another thing I found out while reading the blog, PayPal is the credit card processor for MicroPlace and thus all transaction fees have been waived.

In an article on Auctionbytes, it’s clear that eBay is also considering the acquisition of Microplace as part of a corporate social responsibility theme to its marketing:

eBay’s Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs was answering a participant’s question about what eBay is doing to help promote saving the planet. He said in part, “A third point to bring up is MicroPlace, which [is] a group that we purchased that is making microfinance loans available to the developing world in particular, and we think – particularly as it relates to PayPal – that we think that’s a great thing to be able to do for the global community.”

Changing the Present also did remarkably well during the same period of time. It’s clear that Robert Tolmach’s strategy of pairing a gifts model with traditional donations is very robust. However, it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in the first half of 2008. It’s also clear their communications director is doing a great job with public relations. There seems to have been a very directed PR push during the Giving Season. Almost all of the media articles cited in Changing the Present’s media section have published dates in November and December of last year.

I tend to think of Changing the Present as a kind of Personal Social Reponsibility strategy. It’s a way of trumpeting to your circle of friends your particular interests in saving the planet as it were. I think it’s very well connected to the way people actually perceive their own giving.

GlobalGiving also did well on the media front with many articles in its media room discussing GlobalGiving during the Giving Season. Its participation in the Giving Challenge turned out to be huge. Compete.com shows the following graph:

GlobalGiving was growing around two to three thousand visitors per day during the Giving Season. You can also see the traffic jump off at the same time the Giving Challenge started on the 13th of December. For whatever reason, Compete.com did not have enough data on change.org’s velocity at this time and could not report it.

Unfortunately, the most stagnant property here is change.org. change.org did not get significantly more visitor traffic during the Giving Season. They do have a saving grace though. It looks like out of all these four online properties, Change.org has the most devoted users with an appropriate spike during December.

User time spent on change.org is high commensurate with its position as the only social network among the four properties. However, as we have seen with Causes, it’s not clear that it’s easy to convert social networking affiliation into donations.

Again, I’d like to invite speculation as to how and why some properties are doing well and why others aren’t. And if you happen to be a principal of one of these Web sites (and I know some of you are), please feel free to explain how and what you did during the Giving Season to improve your traffic.

I’ve made some radical changes to this list in order to accommodate my new criteria. This list includes the following criteria:

• you must be a nonprofit or you must be a non-profit that is intricately involved with nonprofit work such as volunteermatch.org
• you must be listed in GuideStar.
• you must be listed in Quantcast

The visitor figures are an average from the latest figures from Compete and Quantcast.

I basically took the Quantcast list and started from the top searching for .org domains. If the domain was run by a nonprofit and it was in Guidestar, it was included. I stopped at number 25.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

Philanthropy and Non-Profit Top 25 for October 2007

As you can see, the Wikimedia Foundation and PBS are the only nonprofit entities that have more than one URL in the top 25. I hereby declare Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. the “most successful nonprofit on the Web” with an astounding 45.59 million visitors per month. Sorry folks, you can talk about quality and context all you want, but quantity has a quality all its own. To put that into some perspective, the Great Mall of America (America’s largest mall) receives 42 million visitors PER YEAR. PBS is not so shabby itself with 6.15 million visitors a month coming to pbskids.org and pbs.org.

There are lots of surprises here for me. There are quite a few URLs on the list that I’ve never visited. I’m really excited to ask questions of the people who run worldcat.org and caringbridge.org. How did they manage to build such a large site with little or no traditional marketing support and with no Web 2.0 buzz? I can understand how wikipedia.org became the biggest site in the nonprofit Web. The value proposition of Wikipedia became evident to everyone in the last few years. However, caringbridge.org and worldcat.org don’t exactly get a lot of blogosphere love so I’m really excited to learn about them.

And for those of you who still don’t think web site statistics don’t matter for nonprofits and aren’t an important part of assessing how a nonprofit should operate, I think it’s important to note that for some reason these organizations thought it was important to get site traffic. This isn’t a matter of Internet largesse that was bestowed upon these organizations. It was a lot of deliberate work involved. The vast majority of us are destined to live in the long tail — that’s OK. However, these people are in the fattest, juiciest part of the long tail. Don’t you think that they might have lessons to teach all of us?

This top 25 list is in recognition of the hard work and devotion to user communities, SEO, online and offline marketing, Web site design, application development and general operations management that it took to get these stratospheric traffic levels. It is a benchmark for any of us who strive to greatness whatever our missions are. Kudos to the management staff at these sites. They seriously rock!