This is in reply to Holly Ross’ recent NTEN blog posting which itself was a response to my original posting about the Top 25 Nonprofit and Philanthropy Web site list.
Let it be said that Holly and I always chat all the time on Skype and we’re good chat buddies in general. There’s no “bad blood” between the two of us and we generally get along. Besides, I apparently owe her a martini the next time I see her. Anyway, I think she’s wrong on this one and part of the problem is that NTEN has a leadership position that it has to take on this issue.
Are web site statistics a matter of transparency? She thinks that context matters. This is true, but it especially matters for a nonprofit organization that seeks to represent nonprofit techies. To that extent, showing site stats for NTEN is especially relevant. In fact, within the context of NTEN’s mission, there are two salient ideas that address this topic:
- We are accountable to you and to your needs and strive to engage, listen, and be responsive to you, our members, in all that we do.
- We walk the talk. We want to surface new ideas and tools within this community, and we want to demonstrate, experiment, and play with them. We are eager to adopt the tools and practices that will matter in this sector.
Umm… I’m an NTEN member. Can NTEN be responsive to my demand for open site traffic statistics? Quantcast is not a particularly new tool but it is a new idea to demonstrate that we can show site statistics for every site within the nonprofit sector. Within the context of NTEN, its own values statement practically cries out for the site stats to be revealed. After all, NTEN cannot purport to represent nonprofit techies if it is not doing its job to increase site statistics usage or if it doesn’t have enough penetration into nonprofit techie user audiences. It has no choice but to walk the site statistics talk.
What’s also clear is Holly’s argument relies on a bait and switch. She proffers that web site statistics don’t equal transparency. She points out that “Ffor [sic] most, though, tracking web site visitors will not tell me how many hungry people they feed, whether that’s helping the community, or whether the program is well managed.” Granted, web site stats will not tell me anything about how many hungry people a nonprofit feeds. How odd is it then to teach Google Analytics to nonprofit techies but then say that site statistics had nothing to do with a nonprofit’s mission? Why bother having a web site at all? Properly used, web sites are more than just a payment solution for credit card bearing donors. They can be used for a nonprofit’s mission and that is why nonprofits should exercise transparency on web site analytics.
Just saying web site stats do not cause transparency, positing that other statistics are in fact more transparent, and then not offering those newly posited statistics is presenting yet another smokescreen. In fact, it’s eerily similar to earlier arguments by vendors such as Blackbaud that open APIs would result in lower security when in fact, they were using it as a delaying tactic to hold demand down within the sector for open integration.
Instead, Holly would leave us with this argument:
Ask me anything about NTEN and I will tell you. What I will not do is publish numbers without the proper context. That’s not transparency, that’s foolishness.
This is don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you transparency. This is the kind of transparency that most software vendors and parts of the US government likes. What Holly really wants is a chance to spin the numbers before they’re revealed. That’s certainly her prerogative but I think we all need to know this up front. It’s also exactly the same kind of attitude that nonprofit techies face when they ask their EDs to blog or add Web 2.0-like properties to their organization’s web site. How many EDs and nonprofit techies have faced off over a conference table at a web site design meeting about the need for greater online transparency? And how many times has the ED stated that he or she would rather not have that higher level of transparency using exactly the same argument that Holly responds?
Is it not clear that the same arguments that we apply to for-profit vendors of software products in terms of their lack of openness also apply to the very same advocacy organizations that purport to speak for us? Again, I have to reiterate, I know more of Blackbaud’s internal operations through its financials than I do of nonprofits through their 990s. Why should nonprofits get a free ride on transparency and accountability? And especially, the one nonprofit that even trumpets their accountability and transparency through its values statement on the web.
In summation, it’s clear that NTEN should release its web site statistics if it wants to retain a leadership role. What’s rather ironic is that the Blackbaud User Society and Beth’s blog as well as PICnet and ChipIn have already implemented the Quantcast script. As far as I know, the sky didn’t fall for either web site nor did people call them out as foolish. As more people eventually adopt the idea of opening up their site statistics, NTEN will be alone in its atypical and atavistic stance on open site statistics. I don’t think too many people give a fig about the size of NTEN’s traffic. We’re not stupid — we know that the NTC is growing, it’s getting bigger and better every year and that NTEN is very active on the Web. However, with this post, more people than ever will be curious about why NTEN won’t release its traffic statistics. And this is Holly’s new conundrum: figuring out how to step in time with the Web’s ever-increasing drive towards greater transparency even in the mundane topic of web site traffic.
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I have been following both threads (Holly’s and Allan’s) with interest. My opinion has been swinging between the two. And that is why I have not commented until now.
At first I thought that Allan’s comment were ridiculous. How could the number of visitors have anything to do with a non-profit’s performance? Visitor numbers don’t make a non-profit’s mission. There are non-profits that do wonderful work but get all their money from government. Their accountability is to government not to the few visitors of their much under publicized site. Conversely there are opportunistic web sites that generate a lot of publicity through a very clever web site but then ultimately do not really serve their mission most effectively.
Allan’s thread first started as pointing to the criteria for entering the top 50 Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector. To say that a non-profit should be judged on its web traffic is absurd. To say that an organization representing non-profit technology should publish statistic is perhaps not so strange. If a person is deciding whether their interests are best served by two competing similar sites one indicator (but by no means all) would have to be how popular the site is. However once again this is somewhat of a fallacy. It is easy to make a site popular. Add some popular content and web traffic increases. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization as a whole is better or more useful but there clearly is some correlation.
So on balance I do not think that there is a black and white answer to this question. I do think it is crazy that non-profit performance should be based on website traffic but I there is some merit in technology sites being judged on their stats.
David
I think my argument is both contextual (to NTEN) but also universal to nonprofits. All nonprofits are going to be judged by their websites in the future. It’s silly to think that this is not going to be so. Why? Because websites are not just places for people to donate to anymore. This is yet another implication of Web 2.0 that most people haven’t picked up on. If all you know about Web 2.0 is how to write about Facebook or Myspace, sure, that’s what Web 2.0 ought to mean to you. However, if you take a broader view of the ethos behind newer trends in Web development and stretch that view out to the 2012 horizon, it’s not merely a technical issue. It’s also an ethical one. Accountability and transparency go hand in hand with technology that make it easier to do so on the Web. There are an estimated 875,000 nonprofits in the US, don’t be surprised if one of the determining factors in deciding which nonprofit is better is whether or not the website is used to serve constituents. Even the poorest of constituents can access a Web site these days and this ramp to the Internet will slowly be enhanced by cheaper and cheaper technology access over time. If Google gPhone takes off and free and universal access to the Web is provided for by the phone, even more of the digital divide is closed. Historically, nonprofits (and in fact, Holly makes this same argument) have used the digital divide to clothe themselves in an argument that said, my clients are not on the Web, ergo, all I have to do is just make a site for donors. This is less and less the case these days. You have to serve your clients on the Web too. And one way to serve them is to release your site statistics so that they know how relevant you are to their needs.
Again, I urge you all to really and I mean really rethink what a web site is for. It’s clear that people are stuck in the my-web-site-is-for-donors mentality. That is no longer the case. When I worked for the Coalition for the Homeless, we saw a sea change in Web site usage among our clients as apartment and job listings left print media. They were always demanding more Internet services from us. I suspect that this will continue to the point that they will seek out nonprofits that serve them over the Web via chat in the next couple of years. Their Internet onramps were created by local NY libraries. My suspicion is that as NY libraries upgrade their Internet terminals, the Coalition’s clients will adopt more and more sophisticated uses of the Internet.
This is interesting. I definitely think Allan is looking to the future, and in the future this may be a PART of a viable way to judge non-profits. However, releasing website stats for many non-profits now would result in a skewed and very narrow view. My org is not ready to be judged on web stats alone. If I could provide some other numbers on clients served, outcomes, and fiscal allocation along with the web stats it would give a better view of what our org actually does. Without the additional data though, the web stats themselves would be pretty meaningless (besides proving the obvious – that we need to spend more time on our web presence). My org is definitely not able to compile and release all of this data at this time.
I have to say that the notion of providing context for web stats seems to be a necessity, without which most stats would not be very useful. It should also be understood that sharing web stats is not as simple as pasting a piece of JavaScript into your HTML. If we are doing this for fun, that’s one thing, but if we are going to start attaching value to the shared data, that’s another. This kind of openness would be a fundamental shift in the thinking of most orgs and would be a process. This is not to say it should not happen, but it’s not as simple as ‘paste this on your page and let’s see who the “real deal” is’.
I know, Carlos. A lot of organizations don’t have the resources to compile and release that sort of data. I think organizations that don’t gather metrics are going to be the ones that are going to have the toughest time raising money in the future simply because foundations and other philanthropic sources are looking for more metrics. There are certainly arguments for and against this movement but discussion of those issues would probably be better done at Tactical Philanthropy or Philanthromedia.
One other point though is that Compete.com, Alexa and Quantcast aren’t going to go away any time soon. Your choices are limited in terms of “contextualizing” their metrics of your website stats. You ought to control your traffic site stats now or you’re going to have them dictate it to your org.
Funny… I see you’re on Quantcast (because I searched), but I don’t see a demographic breakdown of your stats on Quantcast nor do I see a link here in your blog to your Quantcast stats.
Look again — I already linked to the Quantcast site for this blog at http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/philanthropy-and-nonprofit-top-25-list-september-2007. It’s one of the first links in the article.
Also, the demographic breakdown is not under my control. I don’t have enough traffic that Quantcast can estimate properly. My guess is that many of the people who look at this site do it at work. I know that’s definitely the case for all the Convio, Blackbaud and Kintera people who visit this site. The site is a bit of a ghost town during the weekends if you look at the traffic stats. Someday, we’ll be consistently at 4-5k a month, then hopefully we’ll get a breakdown. I’d love to see it myself.