_{Original photo by Alan Light}

Oprah Winfrey did a special on philanthropy and giving on September 4th of this year. Highlights were a visit from Bill Clinton hawking his new book appropiately entitled Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World and Andrew Agassi discussing his Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. Also mentioned were Common Cents and Kiva. Below is a chart of the spike in traffic that resulted from the Oprah effect. clintonfoundation.org and kiva.org were well-positioned to take advantage of the Oprah effect. Unfortunately, commoncents.org and the Andrew Agassi College Preparatory Academy don’t register high enough on compete.com’s site analytics right now. Hopefully, stats for those two nonprofits will show up next month.

The Clinton Foundation did well primarily because there were two reasons to drive site traffic, Bill Clinton’s new book and the resulting publicity from it as well as the Oprah show. Kiva did get a boost of 24,000 users in one day before Oprah from being on the Today Show. Notice that for both Kiva and the Clinton Foundation, there were huge gains from the period of 9/4 to 9/7 and traffic was still at a heightened level even a week after after the show. I’m just shaking my head and thinking, “Incredible”. Not only does the Oprah effect cause a huge spike in traffic, it keeps it that way. Kiva was forced to actually impose a maximum donation because all the case listings on its site were completely subscribed. Kiva self-reports 134,000 visits in the for the day of the Oprah show and the day after. Kiva’s weekly average before that period was around 10,000 visitors. Oprah drove near three months of traffic in two days to Kiva!

If anything, this should get IT directors rethinking site scalability. Please see my earlier article on Amazon’s EC2 so that you too can start thinking about how to make your web site more scalable in the future should your organization be lucky enough to achieve an Oprah Effect of its own. Your Oprah effect may be something smaller such as a mention in CNN or the local paper or TV station. Traditional media is still one of the biggest drivers of large surges of traffic to your site. Don’t forget that Kiva was down for four days last year not because of Oprah but because the PBS news show Frontline covered them extensively. It’s quite possible that your Oprah effect may be enough to take your org’s server’s down. It’s actually a great way to gauge the effectiveness of the venue as well because you can certainly track site visits right after the show airs. In a sense, your publicity efforts, your IT efforts and the size of your organization are all aggregated into site statistics. You can’t easily pull those numbers apart but you can certainly tie the effectiveness of a recent public relations push to any significant change in traffic volume and user behavior. Think of site stats in this case as your organization’s public relations heartbeat monitor.