Over the weekend a deadly tropical storm slammed into the Philippines, causing severe flooding in urban areas and affecting tens of thousands.

Tuesday, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a tsunami with waves 15 to 20 feet high that crashed into the Samoa islands, destroying homes and taking lives.

Then yesterday and today two successive and devastating earthquakes struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leaving thousands buried in rubble and in desperate need of aid.

Groups funded by the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership are deployed in all three Pacific Ocean emergencies to provide vital communications services that enable relief workers to deliver food aid and emergency supplies.

I don’t have much to say except that I’m finding it difficult to find links to the appropriate aid agencies that will help the victims in this crisis. If you have any links I should place in this article, feel free to include them in the comments.

Chart of APA for Progress site traffic

What we have above is a chart detailing the last six months of traffic for APA for Progress. In return for my volunteer work with them, I asked that I be able to blog freely about the site’s growth and how I did it on basically a very, very tiny budget.

Be aware that the time period in the chart above begins the day before Obama’s inauguration so there is no bump from the political campaigning of last year. Also, the group had a very low number of new blog entries on it and was unable to get a bump from the campaign. Site traffic has grown from 91 visits a week to an all-time high of 2,356 about two weeks ago. The site is probably going to undergo a summer slump as many students will be on vacation but I expect the traffic to grow again during the fall. At the time I found them, APAP had suffered the loss of a previous Drupal site and was temporarily on a WordPress site as a stopgap measure. In other words, they were simply like many other tiny nonprofits in terms of the transitory nature of their IT assets.

First, let’s list APA for Progress’s online and offline assets:

• Email list of around 3000 people
• Facebook group of 1000 people
• APAP’s Volunteer Executive Director does offline organizing with college campuses showing a film about Vincent Chin
• Extensive contacts with Asian American political figures and the Democratic party
• Overcrowded WordPress blog (way way too many widgets)

With little money and no traffic, APAP had to figure out how to maximize their current assets. I ran into them as a way to work off my Obama addiction. I decided that they would make a great lab for many ideas swirling around in my head as to how nonprofits should carry out their advocacy campaigns on the Web.

Over time, I’ve had to seriously rethink the role that nonprofits can play on the Web. Most of the time, nonprofits like to use Web sites to promote their mission and monetize their traffic. It’s basically a 20th century industrial model akin to radio and TV. The nonprofit broadcasts and the donor listens. The problem with this model is that it’s a guaranteed way of falling straight into the black hole of mediocre web design and low site traffic. There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years given to email marketing and social media but primarily email and social media end up being used in the same way: to broadcast a nonprofit’s news and events. Just because your site has some moderate interactivity given you by an email vendor or your CRM, it’s not going to fundamentally change the nature of your site.

And unfortunately, much is made of social media’s ability to break up this model to the detriment of what I believe should be the cornerstone of a nonprofit’s online strategy: the Web site.  Social media (in this case, Facebook and Twitter) simply cannot carry the burden of the work. It cannot generate traffic on a consistent basis and relies all too often on the most mercurial of personal relationships. If your nonprofit has little penetration with the right digital media rockstars, it’s difficult to get your message out there. This is not to say that your nonprofit should NOT have a social media inititative. If your constitutencies include young people, you should definitely have a Facebook fan page or Facebook group for your organization. You CAN use Facebook to drive traffic to your site but mostly for increasing traffic to your already popular blog entries.

What APAP needed was a surefire way of generating site traffic without hoping on hitting a social media jackpot and absent a compelling event that would organically drive interest in a nonprofit like APAP that dealt primarily with Asian American politics. It’s difficult to raise interest in politics regardless of your ethnicity if you’re not in an election cycle.

Because of this, I had to think about the assets that tiny nonprofits have. All small nonprofits are mostly made up of a collection of people interested in working on a particular issue. Their main assets are their fundraising and community relationships. This means that you have to grow and nurture those relationships into an online design. I’ve got a couple of “theorems” about nonprofits as a result:

1. Nonprofits best serve as news aggregators due to their in-depth domain knowledge and consistent advocacy of particular public policy positions
2. They don’t have the ability to produce news content on their own easily and should use volunteers to help them out

These two observations have a strong impact on the way I believe nonprofits should create their sites in the future.  It suggests that nonprofits can use their staff to create a strong editorial “filter” on news items happening in their geographic catchbasin. It also suggests that they should use their existing community of volunteers to build out content that more closely matches their advocacy positions.

These observations simply hung in the air until I started thinking further about taking these observations and turning them into an operational plan that could be implemented into APAP’s website. After working on this blog for two years, I had learned a lot about SEO and was intrigued by the success of sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. I thought to myself: what can be gleaned from those sites and be applied to nonprofits? Here are my simple recommendations that I think nonprofit websites should adopt from news sites.

1. Big headlines get clicks
   There’s no doubt that Huffington Post does an amazing job of organizing the front page of its site to cue readers as to the most important thing that they should click on.  This type of headline design originated from  drudgereport.com. In fact, I consider this to be Matt Drudge’s singular insight on website information architecture.
2. Pictures next to headlines get more clicks
   You’d think this was pretty obvious but it’s not. However, most commercial news site have adopted this as a standard. Great examples are Yahoo! News and MSNBC.
3. Big pictures next to big headlines get even more clicks
   If you need more data on this, I can give it to you but this is pretty much common sense if you accept the first two ideas.
4. Give people an anchor to look at — i.e. headlines with pictures
   This means putting all the big headlines and pictures into one area in a prominent portion of your Web site – just like the Huffington Post. You’re making it SUPER easy for the user to understand what he or she needs to click on. No more random clicking from users looking for the good stuff.
5. Aggregate the news for your nonprofit vertical
   Use the strong editorial filter function that is inherent in your nonprofit to rearrange the day’s news in terms of how it affects your constituency or policy goal. Act like your nonprofit cares about the world’s current events.
6. The order of presentation for your news is YOUR value added
   What makes your editorial filter stronger is the sense imparted to the reader that you are making it easy for them to imbibe your view of the world. This means you really mean it when your biggest 30 pixel high headline is really important.
7. Tag, tag, tag, and tag again
   Tags are one of the ways Google tries to understand your blog entries and pages on your site. Don’t forget this part. SEO is everything.
8. Magazine-style layout is the future of nonprofit web sites
   And ultimately, what you’re doing is creating a news magazine akin to Huffington Post. This is not the same as creating a newsletter. Newsletters aren’t done on an ad hoc basis like the front page of your website. They also don’t tend to aggregate news sources and are more about the internal operations of your nonprofit.
9. Timeliness is everything
   Like all news magazines, your website has to thrive on timeliness both for more referrals from Google search and for establishing a reputation as a competent and driven nonprofit directly immersed in the issues of the day.
10. Allow your users to blog on your site
    Yes, I know established nonprofits would fear this user-generated content the most. However, small nonprofits have very little access to paid staff and should consider this to be their secret weapon to establishing mindshare within their constituencies.  That is, when you’re broke, you should adopt user-generated content.

So ultimately, my earlier two theorems and these ten tips combined together into the current site design for APA for Progress. I understand that these strategies would create a fairly radical shift in the way nonprofits organize and distribute their communications. It’s a user-centered model built on serving users with content that doesn’t necessarily originate from the nonprofit. Indeed, most of the people creating the content are not staff.

This has tremendous ramifications for the way a nonprofit will organize itself on the web. With the informal and highly opinionated nature of most user-generated content, it’s probably a good idea to include a disclaimer saying that your organization doesn’t necessarily share the opinions of its bloggers. It also means the traditional role of a communications director moves less from creating press releases to more of a “business development” role asking other blogs and nonprofits in the same policy space to syndicate content from the site by either linking to it or republishing. It also means using your contacts to generate good “gets” — getting good guest bloggers or having important individuals participate in conference calls to your membership or in live video conferences. There are many different ways to use traditional PR means to get more traffic for your site.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a remarkably labor-intensive endeavor. Writing content and/or getting people to write for your site is time consuming. However, it IS free. And when you’ve got more time than money, this is a fairly clear way of getting your nonprofit out there. Oh, and how much did this project cost? Less than $600 for the Drupal redesign.

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.

The American Cancer Society has set up an internal social network for themselves:

When two Divisions of the American Cancer Society (ACS) came together to form a new, six state Division that includes the territory of Guam, the Austin-based executive leadership team foresaw opportunity and challenges. The sheer size of the newly created “High Plains Division” – with its more than 600 staffers – brought great reach and potentially the sharing of talent and resources toward the ACS’ ultimate mission: eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives, and diminishing suffering from cancer, through research, education, advocacy, and service.

But this new, geographically dispersed group was a conglomeration in need of collaboration. The familiarity and cohesiveness staffers had previously enjoyed as employees of smaller, independent regional offices was threatened. Now, the challenge to leadership of the High Plains Division was to bridge the inter-office divide, encourage strong working relationships, and advance the cause of the ACS.

That’s an interesting new use for a social network, bridging the culture of a geographically dispersed organization. Here are some screenshots (click on the pictures to see a larger version of the screenshot) (UPDATE 7/25/2008: Due to privacy concerns, earlier screenshots have been replaced by pictures of someone named David Neff praising the Mighty Hall of Printed Web Screenshots):

For more information, here’s a look at the short case study they produced. They hired Small World Labs to produce the social network for themselves. I don’t know pricing but if you folks are interested in how all this was done, put down your comments and I’ll follow up.

One caveat: for those of you who belong to much smaller organizations, I think you can get by if you use Ning to set up your social network. It won’t have a lot of bells and whistles until you hire developers. I recommend it mainly because you won’t be painting yourself into a corner later when you want to expand and develop. However, don’t make the mistake of doing social networking BEFORE you get your basic infrastructure down. At the very least consider setting up Google Apps for your organization.

Ricketts [VP of information technology for Susan G. Komen for the Cure] added that one of Komen’s main goals is to increase revenue associated with Race for the Cure — its most significant fundraising event — by 15%-20%. The organization also aims to decrease technology costs by 30%-40% by moving to the shared platform.

That’s basically the promise of SaaS for the non-profit sector, the cost decrease comes about by the use of shared code and less server infrastructure. It’s a lesson that I hope other vendors, like Blackbaud, will adopt with their own infrastructure. Note to vendors of proprietary software: even IF you don’t want to open up your code, for God’s sakes, don’t waste your money and your customer’s money maintaining proprietary data centers. Seriously. Go over to EC2, fin d a decent provider and start converting your code to run on those boxes. And yes, Blackbaud, you can move to a .NET infrastructure there too.

Convio seems to already have taken this advice with Aikido. By moving hosting costs over to the SaaS provider and just writing code, it allows them to be a lot more nimble in dealing with the Blackbaud beast. All things considered, I would like to see more resources going into business analysis and software development then in maintaining uptime for boxes. Time will tell if this newfound agility will allow them to gain market share in the same enterprise space that Blackbaud has dominated in the last few years but starting out with Susan G. Komen for the Cure isn’t bad.

Again, Aikido hasn’t been reviewed thoroughly by me or anyone else so we’ll just have to wait and see until later in the year how good (or bad) the software is. The question for me though is whether or not Susan G. Komen was an earlier customer of Convio. It looks as if affiliates of SGK were earlier customers of Convio, I’m not sure Convio had all 120+ affiliates as their customers previously.

I don’t always get a chance to commend nonprofits for their great use of technology but I ran into a paper article in ArcNews (it’s a newsletter about ArcGIS software — and no I don’t subscribe to it, it’s my wife’s!) that discussed a remarkable GIS project conducted by the IRC to plan for the location of school sites in Ethiopia.

Every day, millions of rural children in Ethiopia do not attend school. Instead, they work on farms; dig in mines; or perform strenuous household tasks, such as gathering firewood or fetching water, which together can take several hours each day. For them, education is out of reach, both because poor families require the additional income and because many areas lack elementary schooling altogether.

Beginning in 2005, the United States Department of Labor funded the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to build schools and train teachers for community Alternative Basic Education (ABE) schools, which would serve as institutions to transition children from the labor force into more formal educational institutions, such as primary schools. Simultaneous community awareness and education programs promoted the benefits of education and encouraged families to send their children to school…

…The Ethiopian Education Office lacks the infrastructure and funding to maintain information on primary school locations, village school age populations, and distances between schools and village populations. Low-level road maps are also not available for most rural districts. The IRC Ethiopia program therefore had to build its geographic database from the ground up. Behar Hussein, the IRC Ethiopia GIS coordinator, trained eight people in the use of Garmin eTrex Vista GPS units to aid in the survey of 491 villages. The surveyors used Garmin eTrex Vista GPS for the survey. While four of the eight surveyors gathered geographic data about village boundaries, roads, health centers, water points, and primary school locations, the remaining four gathered demographic data from each village: the number of households, number of children of each age, and number of children of each age attending formal schooling. The data took more than 50 days to collect and was cleaned and compiled at IRC’s Addis Ababa office.

Good job, IRC. You are rocking the techno-goodness. Next steps? Why not release this data using an open content license so that other nonprofits can use it.

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!

Wow! At least one nonprofit gets it! Housing Works is looking for a Ruby on Rails developer and they posted it on 37signals.com too!

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Looking for an individual or company who can help us put the finishing touches on our online Thrift Shop Point of Sale system built in Ruby on Rails. Would be looking for someone with extensive rails experience and experience with point of sale or e-commerce. Ideally this arrangement would also include some sort of second level support agreement where the company or individual could be called upon for bug fixes when the internal team is not available.

Those of you who know Housing Works here in the City should know that their cafe is frequented by many techies as well. They seem to be expressing my fear about RoR development by asking for a second level support agreement. I don’t know if they’ll get that since there are still very few RoR developers out there relative to the other languages. What’s funny though is that I’m not sure RoR would have been something I would have chosen for a Point of Sale system since up until version 1.2 RoR forced programmers to use a Float to represent money. This caused all sorts of hassles since this meant rounding errors. And no one wants to see rounding errors with their money. There were workarounds but it’s all been resolved.

Anyway, I wish Housing Works a lot of luck on their system. And I’m just super happy to see a social services based nonprofit follow the Ruby way!

If your organization is considering a redesign and needs to understand how much work goes into the process, please run, do not walk to Designing Inward Out. Putting my IT Director hat on, every organization needs a devoted person to their Web site. Even now, more than ten years after the Web came into our lives, there are still many nonprofit organizations out there that have more people devoted to direct marketing (snail mail) campaigns than their Web site. It’s hard to imagine that this disconnect still occurs (even at my org and I do all I can to push for a single Web content development person). I’m ready to say that a well-managed web site with devoted staff will almost always result in a positive ROI for any nonprofit willing to hire a dedicated staff person. If you’re a very small organization, formalize the Web duties to a single person but with a forward-looking plan to hiring a full-time Web content manager once you’re sure the Web site proceeds can pay for that salary.

Peter Gulka has launched the Blackbaud User Society. The Blackbaud User Society is a next step in the evolution of the RE Users Forum. It’s a very nicely done Joomla site that really enhances the ecology surrounding Blackbaud. With blackbus.org and blogbaud.com, Raiser’s Edge users are now getting a taste of what it’s like to have a strong support infrastructure that stands above and beyond the typical technical support that you get from Blackbaud. Blackbaud is very lucky to have a user like Peter around and we’re lucky in the nptech community to count him as one of our own. Kudos to him!

I guess I should make the call now that the Convio-Kintera merger has come up. Is there room for a nonprofit eCRM user society along the lines of the Blackbaud User Society? Are there resources for eCRM users that allow users to support one another? Please comment.