http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/the-long-tail-and-nonprofit-20 Confessions of a Non-Profit Executive Director Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:17:34 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/the-long-tail-and-nonprofit-20/comment-page-1#comment-65 Non-Profit Tech Blog » The Red Queen effect: corollary to the Long Tail Fri, 28 Jul 2006 05:05:03 +0000 http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/the-long-tail-and-nonprofit-20#comment-65 [...] Jon Lebowsky was kind enough to comment on his blog about my previous post about the Long Tail. I could tell from his comments that I didn’t quite fully flesh out the implicit point about the long tail. Jon Lebowsky clearly delineated how Internet leveling will affect nonprofits. There’s a name though to what he pointed out. It’s called the red queen effect. This isn’t an example from statistics, but from a field more prone to describing the network effects of single players, biology. It’s called the Red Queen effect because the Red Queen blurts out the quote at the beginning of this post during a race that Alice participates in during her second trip to Wonderland. I think people who think their particular non-profit will never have a growth cap placed on them are in for a shock once they learn about the long tail of the NPO world. The fact that there is a niche that they have no choice but to belong to should give a lot of people pause. Jon Lebowsky alludes to this when he says: All will find it harder to attract donations, but large nonprofits with established large overheads will be especially vulnerable. This will also affect large companies that provide relatively expensive support services to nonprofits (e.g. Convio, Kintera). [...] [...] Jon Lebowsky was kind enough to comment on his blog about my previous post about the Long Tail. I could tell from his comments that I didn’t quite fully flesh out the implicit point about the long tail. Jon Lebowsky clearly delineated how Internet leveling will affect nonprofits. There’s a name though to what he pointed out. It’s called the red queen effect. This isn’t an example from statistics, but from a field more prone to describing the network effects of single players, biology. It’s called the Red Queen effect because the Red Queen blurts out the quote at the beginning of this post during a race that Alice participates in during her second trip to Wonderland. I think people who think their particular non-profit will never have a growth cap placed on them are in for a shock once they learn about the long tail of the NPO world. The fact that there is a niche that they have no choice but to belong to should give a lot of people pause. Jon Lebowsky alludes to this when he says: All will find it harder to attract donations, but large nonprofits with established large overheads will be especially vulnerable. This will also affect large companies that provide relatively expensive support services to nonprofits (e.g. Convio, Kintera). [...]

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