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.

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.

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’.

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.

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