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.

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!

I’ve decided to give people some heavily opinionated, hardcore and hard-won tech advice about what it is they ought to do. To wit, I’m writing down a list of technologies and ideas that I think are incredibly important in our space. If you don’t know how to program or don’t have a background in statistical analysis, I suggest you read the Wikipedia articles for these technologies. If you notice, I include both “hard” and “soft” skills as things to learn. So here’s the top 10 list of things you need to know as a nonprofit web 2.0 entrepreneur:

1. Learn about the Borda count and the Condorcet voting method

I’m leaving it to the smart programmer to figure out what this technology means. Hint: it’s about crowdsourcing.

2. Learn about decision, preference and prediction markets.

Hint: this is also about crowdsourcing.

3. Learn about ratings systems and why Bayesian filters are important

Hint: this is also about crowdsourcing.

4. Learn about Markov decision chains

Hint: this is another kind of ranking system

5. Find out who Stamen Design is

Great designers have the capacity to turn your work from a mess of potage into gold. I love these guys. I wish I could hire them. There’s a gleam in my eye that says… “someday”.

6. Take a look at what JiveSoftware and spigit.com are doing

Great software, great ideas but it’s clear they haven’t read anything about tips 1-4. That said, you could graft those techs onto these systems and come up with something incredibly great for nonprofits.

7. Learn about Rails and what it can do to instantly build an API for you

I do not care if all you know is PHP. Boohoo for you. There’s this thing — it’s called the Intarweb – use it.

8. Learn about agile software development

Yes, yes, I know there are some people who are hooked on waterfall (if you don’t know what I’m talking about — go read Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development. It’s a great book but dated. And yes, Virginia, you can develop in PHP and still be agile. It’s not a Rails-only technology.

9. Learn how to network (in meatspace)

Don’t be a dork like me and forget your business cards. Be somewhat presentable (don’t smell bad, wear matching socks). Say, “Excuse me” and “Please” (just like your momma told you). Feel free to admit your nervousness when meeting people (“OMG, you’re Beth Kanter!!!”). Don’t be a jerk. Remember people’s first names if you can. Always think about what you can do for people. People are not URLs that you can simply scan and move on to the next one (although I admit that’s one of my major follies). Always look at people’s business cards when you get them. Try to show up on time and try not to be the last one at an event if you can help it.

10. Learn how to talk to the press

I still don’t know how to do this. I tend to speak in long discursive themes that are intricately presented and rely on secondary and tertiary definitions of words. (Umm, just like that last sentence.) So, I suspect all nonprofit web entrepreneurs need a lot of coaching on this matter.

11. Did I say 10? I meant 11 — Friends don’t make friends sign NDAs

As Guy Kawasaki said, “If you’re asking for an NDA to merely discuss your idea, keep your day job because you’re clueless.” Folks, making me sign an NDA to discuss your technology with you on the basis of free work, is actually imposing a cost to ME. And as Guy points out, if your idea is so easy to copy in one conversation, then maybe your idea isn’t really worth doing. Don’t worry I won’t tell anyone about your idea. However, you’re asking a BLOGGER with 3500 unique visitors a month to keep his mouth shut. Seems a little insane not to use me for free press, no?

Anyway, think hard about your ideas. Think about how these tips apply to your work. I’m looking forward to your questions about this!