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Five Year Anniversary of Nonprofit Online News
by Michael C. Gilbert, Apr. 2002
Nonprofit Online News was founded in early April of 1997. It was started as an outgrowth of our own organization's needs to stay informed about what was happening in the world of social change and social service organizations, and the community of people that make them succeed.
I want to take this opportunity to celebrate: to share with you what we have accomplished, to tell you about the changes coming in honor of this anniversary, and to invite your input.
Accomplishments
We have a lot to be proud of.
Nonprofit Online News predated and outlasted the dotcom boom. We've covered all the major events related to the online world of nonprofit organizations over the last five years, in many cases being the first to do so. We have amassed an archive of thousands of online resources. We've published groundbreaking feature articles that have had impacts on the practices of many other content providers.
I'm most proud of our standing as an authoritative resource. How do I know this? The answer lies with the Google search engine. Google uses a system called Pagerank to determine how relevant any give page is to your search terms. It ranks its results by how many other highly ranked web sites point to a particular site. For several years now, if you type "nonprofit news" into Google, our site has been the top ranked result every time. I offer my sincere thanks to the thousands of web sites that have linked to us over the years. It is you who have established our credibility.
A year ago we started a campaign to see what proportion of our subscribers would be willing to support our content financially. It is my hope that, in the coming year or two, we'll get to a point where 5% or more of our readers are financial supporters, a number that compares with that of public broadcasting. I'm pleased to say that after a low key campaign, we already have 1.5% of our readership contributing.
Nonprofit Online News takes no advertising or sponsorships. We remain an independent voice that is driven by our passion to understand the nonprofit sector and to share that understanding with others.
Next Steps
In addition to a variety of small improvements to our web site -- more visible links to recent features, easy to find donation option, more flexible typeface sizing -- we are launching three major improvements in honor of this anniversary.
The first improvement is designed to give us feedback on the success of our news and the popularity of our resources. You have already seen the signs of this initiative in our new URLs, which allow us to track the appeal of certain items by tracking which ones people click on.
The long term possibilities of this are quite interesting. It may even allow us to develop a personalized content relevancy system for our subscribers. In the short term, we're already learning what's popular. In the last 30 days, for example, Jason Scott's After the Bubble and my own Preventing the Nonprofit Spam Epidemic were both very popular. The agenda for the 2002 GEO conference exceeded my expectations of popularity, which is encouraging.
The second improvement will be better access to our archives. We are cleaning up our archives, for one thing. More importantly, we will be making our search engine available to our subscribers. Now you will have full text access to the annotations on thousands of resources and news items.
Finally, we're launching an Affiliate Program. We want to offer something back to the thousands of web sites that have referred people to us over the years. Because of the close connection, it will work like this: Organizations that apply to be Affiliates will have to pass our standards, which include credibility, authoritativeness, privacy policies, etc... Once approved, an affiliate will be able to do two things: 1) syndicate our news onto their own web site, free of charge, and 2) get the chance to form their own relationship with the people they refer.
The Future
We need your input. We want to know how we're doing, both technically and in regard to our content. If you're a subscriber, you will receive a survey request shortly. In keeping with our standards, it is very quick and easy to fill out.
If you are not a subscriber, you should be. With your input, readership, and support, we eagerly look forward to the next five years.
If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!
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