Does Your Nonprofit Website Measure Up?

Last week as Google unveiled its list of the world’s top 1,000 most-visited sites on the web, it was no surprise that Facebook topped that list. Even amid the privacy backlash the company has seen in recent weeks,  and the subsequent yet seemingly unsuccessful declaration of May 31 as “Quit Facebook Day” there’s something that keeps all of us -- 540 million unique visitors a month that is, or roughly 32 percent of the current online population -- coming back for more.

When looking through Google’s list, perhaps what could be seen as more of a surprise, (especially for those of us who live our lives at the intersection of technology and social change) is the fact that it takes quite a while to get to a site on the list that’s devoted exclusively to charity or social good. In fact, as Peter Panapento over at the Chronicle on Philanthropy pointed out it’s not until 854, that Causes.com appears as the first true “social good” site.  A special thank you to Peter for spending his lunch hour culling through the list to determine that one!

While this may not be encouraging news for nonprofits who are spending significant staff time and dollars perfecting their social media strategies, it does strengthen the case for meeting your donors, volunteers, or constituents where they are.  A case we’ve been trying to make for quite some time. But, before your boss gets too carried away asking how you’re going to position your organization to show up on Google’s next list it’s important to take a closer look at the sites who did make the cut, and how you can best leverage them.

Many of the top sites are resources that people use to find information about their friends, what’s happening in the news, or products they want to buy or sell - but most of those sites don’t produce all of their own content. Even better, they allow opportunities for nonprofits to give them content. As much as we aspire to, we might have to accept that most us with social good sites will never find ourselves on Google’s top 1,000 list.   Even so, it's up to each of us to make sure we take advantage of the opportunity to include information about our causes on some of the most visited sites on the web – be it Facebook, Wikipedia, blogspot or wordpress, flickr and youtube.  All nonprofits should take the necessary steps like perfecting  search engine optimization to make sure they are showing up on Yahoo, Microsoft, bing and other popular search engines.

With approximately 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States alone - we already know that everyone is competing for the same pool of donors and volunteers, but now nonprofits are also competing for our clicks. So, how are you positioning your organization to emerge and stand out among them?