So what happened to September’s list? Consider September’s list to be the prototype for an upcoming list that I will present shortly.
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
| Site URL | Monthly Visitors (in millions) | Nonprofit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| wikipedia.org | 40.50 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wikimedia.org | 3.78 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| consumerreports.org | 3.18 | CONSUMERS UNION OF UNITED STATES INC | 501c3 Public Charity |
| pbs.org | 3.15 | Public Broadcasting Service | 501c3 Public Charity |
| pbskids.org | 3.00 | Public Broadcasting Service | 501c3 Public Charity |
| thinkquest.org | 1.99 | Oracle Education Foundaiton | 501c3 Public Charity |
| kidshealth.org | 1.97 | Nemours Foundation | 501c3 Public Charity |
| aarp.org | 1.64 | AARP | 501c4 Public Charity |
| bbb.org | 1.61 | Council of Better Business Bureaus | 501c6 Public Charity |
| archive.org | 1.58 | Internet Archive | 501c3 Private Operating Foundation |
| npr.org | 1.53 | National Public Radio, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| worldcat.org | 1.35 | OCLC Online Computer Library Center | 501c3 Public Charity |
| lds.org | 1.24 | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints | Unknown |
| familydoctor.org | 1.10 | American Academy of Family Physicians | 501c6 Public Charity |
| kaiserpermanente.org | 1.09 | Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc | 501c3 Public Charity |
| caringbridge.org | 1.06 | CaringBridge | 501c3 Public Charity |
| americanheart.org | 1.06 | American Heart Association, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| akc.org | 0.93 | American Kennel Club | 501c4 Public Charity |
| alternet.org | 0.79 | Independent Media Institute | 501c3 Public Charity |
| mayoclinic.org | 0.72 | MAYO FOUNDATION FOR MEDICAL EDUCATION & RESEARCH | 501c3 Public Charity |
| cancer.org | 0.72 | American Cancer Society, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| redcross.org | 0.69 | American National Red Cross | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wikibooks.org | 0.66 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| volunteermatch.org | 0.65 | Impact Online, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wiktionary.org | 0.65 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
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!
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Your blog is interesting. It is only sad that according to your criteria there are only US non profit organisations.
Thanks,
GerardM
You’re right. I will expand the criteria to include nonprofits outside of the US next time. However, part of the problem is that Quantcast only covers US audiences. Again, if UK orgs would be kind enough to place the Quantcast Javascript tag on their site, they would be more likely to get included on Quantcast’s lists and thus on this list. However, there’s an easier workaround — if people could just post international organizations that are likely to have more than 600,000 unique visitors a month, just send me the URLs and I’ll see what compete.com has to say.
Allan,
I’m not sure I understand the point of this. Wikipedia and, say, the Red Cross are in completely different categories. It’s like apples to oranges to compare them. And I’d bet PBS could do no SEO at all, and still be exactly where it is on the list.
Why is Volunteer Match on here? As you said, it’s a for-profit – I thought your criteria would exclude them.
Not to cast aspersions on any of these orgs – they are all great, and of course, they clearly have audiences, but a much more interesting analysis would be to have contributions on one axis, and raw traffic on the other. I’d be darned surprised if there was a very strong correlation. (in fact, some of these top 25 get more revenue from memberships and publications than from anywhere else.) And then there is Kaiser, which is a *health insurer* – the traffic to Kaiser has more to do with people renewing their drug prescriptions or making appointments with their doctors than anything else.
These numbers don’t tell me anything about how good these organizations are doing their job, except that wikipedia is really doing it’s job, but we already knew that.
Why do you have Wikipedia and Wikimedia as separate organisations? It’s all the Wikimedia Foundation.
@Michelle Murrain: Sure, contributions vs. web site stats would be a very interesting thing. Wikimedia Foundation gets very little money compared to say, the American Red Cross. Wikimedia Foundation received $1.3 million in 2006 according to its last 990 statement. If anything, it tells me that money is not the sole determinant of Web success. Having a great product and very good mission alignment are probably better factors in understanding web popularity. It tells me that nonprofits are still doing their job well on the Web. I mean, imagine a world where the best .org sites were run by socially conscious for-profits and not by 501c corporations. That would be embarrassing.
The good thing is that we’re discussing the meaning of Web success here. Unfortunately, pooh-poohing Web site statistics and saying it has to have “context” just obscures the matter. Web site stats DO count. Period. It IS relevant to your mission and you don’t even have to be a megacharity to make it that way. I dare anyone to try to argue the counterfactual case: that organizations like American Cancer Society or American Red Cross would be doing their jobs with the same level of quality if their web site traffic was say, only 1% of what it is now. Could the orgs on that list even be considered relevant if they lost 99% of their site traffic? Anybody who tries to argue this counterfactual is going to be in a world of hurt over the next few years as the Internet just steamrolls through all the other media.
I don’t quite understand the objection to Kaiser when there are other healthcare organizations on the list. Also, I’ve just posted a correction to volunteermatch.org. They’re run by Impact Online, Inc. which is a 501c3 public charity.
@DavidGerard: They are separate URLs run by the same foundation. I didn’t want to aggregate the URLs together simply because it’s important to see the top URLs for the nonprofit sector. The same issue occurs for PBS with it’s pbskids.org and pbs.org URLs. Each URL serves a different audience and need so it’s important to note that Wikimedia and PBS have managed to hit multiple homeruns on the Web. It’s incredibly impressive.
@Allan,
There are health care organizations on the list, but Kaiser is the only health insurer on the list. So they have a captive audience that the other health care organizations do not.
What is the definition of web success? If I have 1,500 visits per month, with a bounce rate of, say, 20%, how does that compare with a site that has 150,000 hits a month with a bounce rate of 100%?
What does it mean if one organization with a mission of disseminating information through the web, has more hits than an organization that, for instance, helps people in disasters with on-the-ground practical aid?
I will argue the case: giving out food and blankets to people when a hurricane hits, and being in charge of the largest single blood products distribution system in the country (world?) *does not* require the Red Cross to compete with Wikipedia for site visits! My bet is that if they went offline tomorrow, their mission wouldn’t see much of a dent. The Red Cross was doing a bang-up job of what they do *way* before the web was a spark in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes.
Obviously, you and I are never going to convince the other, so we’ll have to just call this a draw.
@Michelle Murrain: You’re sidestepping the question. If the Red Cross would be just as effective without their web site, why did they bother setting one up and taking the time and effort to drive so much traffic to it? It’s clear that marketing efforts have been directed at driving traffic to the site. It’s also clear that it’s important enough for the Red Cross to have hired people, spent money, and rearranged their organization to accommodate the site. I have to say that many of the arguments for a contextual presentation of web site statistics are simply an attempt to sidestep transparency. You’re either transparent or you’re not.
The thing I object to the most is this notion that web site statistics can be controlled and contextualized. This argument then goes on to state that nonprofits should be allowed to shape the conclusions of people who are looking at the statistics. Frankly, it’s a waste of time. People will make their own conclusions about this data. NTEN and other nonprofits don’t have control over its own stats as long as Compete and Quantcast are around.
I asked the Wikimedia people if they were interested in presenting their web site statistics. One of them wrote back:
This represents to me a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to transparency that I’ve adopted as well. If the Wikimedia Foundation is doing it, I think it’s clear that everyone in the sector should follow their lead. Unfortunately, they have technical issues they have to surmount in order to present bulk site statistics due to their infrastructure. They apparently are under a 16k requests/second load! It’s an entirely different beast altogether to track user statistics. However, it’s clear that NTEN and other nonprofits aren’t so lucky as to get that kind of traffic. Frankly, this is a no-brainer to implement for the smaller site.
I know we won’t ever agree on web site statistics transparency but it’s clear that people are interested in this information if only to act as a benchmark for what is possible on the web for nonprofits to achieve. I’m at 100 hits and counting for this article already today. I think of it as open source marketing information. Who cares if lds.org, kidshealth.org and kaiser.org have nothing to do with one another? Does their web site traffic imply that somehow one nonprofit is obviously better? No, it does not. However, these sites have gained a following for whatever reason and it’s important to note who are the real nonprofit winners on the web. I think this list is a start towards understanding how to really get traffic. Notice that few of these sites are really Web 2.0 properties? Might a case be made that just simply executing well on Web 1.0 might be the best way to get traffic for now? How can we even ask or answer questions like this without a list?
@Allan, you said: “The thing I object to the most is this notion that web site statistics can be controlled and contextualized.”
I never, ever suggested nonprofits should actively try to hide their web stats. And certainly, people will make of web stats whatever they want to. People make of all sorts of data and information whatever they want to, and that is beyond our control. But I do think that they do have to be contextualized. To compare monthly visits of Wikipedia, whose *sole* mission is the dissemination of information via the web, with the Red Cross whose mission is so much more on the ground and hands on, is not, IMHO up to your usual intellectual prowess. It doesn’t make sense. It’s apples to oranges.
Why the Red Cross decided, like many nonprofits, to spend time and resources on their web presence is probably an interesting story, and one you should ask them about. It probably had a lot to do with trying to shift to online donations, decrease direct mail, get their word out in this new medium. Maybe it was just because a bunch of nonprofit technology types told them they should. But I sincerely doubt it was so they could make the top 25 list.
What I object to the most is the whittling down of an incredibly complex set of issues relating to the relationship between organizations mission and web communications strategy, and what success at being an online presence looks like, to a simple number, and a ranking on a list.
@Michelle Murrain: Once again, you dodge the issue of why the Red Cross bothered to get all this site traffic. Either it’s important for them to get traffic on their site or it’s not. You don’t get this kind of traffic without some effort. So why did they do this?
Obviously, it wasn’t because it wasn’t so they could get on my Top 25 list. It’s because they could perform their mission BETTER (in whatever way these folks have determined). And that’s the thread that unites all these sites and THAT’S why it’s not an apples to oranges comparison. Nonprofits cannot truly consider themselves to be accomplishing their mission unless there is a significant Web component to their activity and one of the ways to measure that is with web site traffic statistics.
I still don’t understand your need to contextualize web site stats. Can’t we just trust people to do the contextualizing for themselves? I don’t see the point in distrusting users. I mean, isn’t this what Web 2.0 is all about? Let the users decide. It’s not for nonprofits to make the decision for them.
I know we still don’t agree on this and I know I have the minority view. However, my guess is that my view will eventually win out over time as the Web takes a larger and larger presence in people’s lives. (And I know plenty of people who aren’t talking who intuitively understand that open web site stats go hand-in-hand with transparency).
@Allan,
Thanks so much for the shout out to CaringBridge.org! Great questions, too. We’re ten years old, and for the bulk of that time, you’re right — our growth has been mostly word of mouth, friend-to-friend, organic growth. How and why?
I think it’s the power of what we call “The CaringBridge Experience.” It was and is really focused/specific “social networking” (which we were doing before it had a name, I think) — connecting friends and family to share info, love and support when someone is facing a serious health situation — cancer treatment, premature birth, transplant, accident, war injury, etc.
That organic growth has been pretty explosive, which is why we’re on your list. People are so moved by that experience — by those connections, by that hope and healing that their “community” of friends and family experience — that they spread the word. A lot.
Today, of course, we’re doing a lot more proactive outreach! Anyway, would love to answer anything specific you’re wondering about. Thanks again for the love for CaringBridge.org!
Chris, I’m definitely going to follow up with you! I’m stunned by caringbridge.org because CaringBridge itself is an agency with revenues well below $2 million a year. It’s another example of a Web Goliath run by a nonprofit David.
Any of you web marketers aspiring for greatness should be heartened by caringbridge.org’s pure Web play.
I very much like what you are doing here Allan. We are often questioned about whether we are doing enough online. It is very helpful to point to a benchmark and say, “here is where we are compared to others in the industry”.
Hmmm. Not sure where that photo came from on my previous post. I don’t sport any facial hair currently. But it is probably handsomer than any I could send you.
LOL, no worries Paul. It probably came from Gravatar or MyBlogLog. Change your pics there and it’ll automagically change the one people see on the site for you.
Hi, Robert from VolunteerMatch here. Not sure how I missed this great post and discussion!
I just wanted to correct one thing. To Michelle’s comment above, VolunteerMatch is and has always been 501(c)3. Not sure where she got the idea from that we were anything but nonprofit, and it’s surprising as she is a nonprofit consultant!
Thanks,
Robert
Director, Communications
VolunteerMatch (.org!)
Hi Robert,
Actually, I think I misread something in Allan’s post – I wasn’t taking it from my own (faulty) knowledge.
Volunteer tracking is something that I haven’t been well connected to, so the status of VolunteerMatch was something that I hadn’t been aware of.
Sorry for the mistake, and thanks for the correction!
[...] compiled this list using the same methodology I used for my October 2007 list. Unfortunately, I still can’t compile a list of nonprofits outside the US. Quantcast and [...]