Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar: Do Web Analytics Equal Accountability?
Allan Benamer posted something interesting on his blog the other day. He contends that nonprofits should post their web site stats publicly on their sites, because it will make them more accountable. His contention is that any data that is not made public is de facto private data, and inherently bad.
I challenged that notion on his blog. I just don't see the logical connection between web site traffic and accountability. What do an organization's web site stats NECESSARILY have to do with the good it creates? For some orgs, there is a clear connection between web site visits and part of their mission. For most, though, tracking web site visitors will not tell me how many hungry people they feed, whether that's helping the community, or whether the program is well managed.
All it tells me is how many people came to their site.
I wholeheartedly believe in transparency. Ask me anything about NTEN and I will tell you. What I will not do is publish numbers without the proper context. That's not transparency, that's foolishness.
Allan posted in response to my comments:
I would like to see all the major players put their numbers up. This will allow people like me to see whether or not these organizations are worth writing about, worth paying attention to and even better, whether or not they are paying attention to racial, economic and gender diversity on their site. Wouldn’t it be odd if a nonprofit directed towards serving poor people of color didn’t actually have poor people of color going to their site?
Let me respond to his points:
- Heavy web site traffic does not = important in the field of social change. NTEN is not the largest network of nonprofit staffers in the country; you can go somewhere else and find nonprofit tech oriented sites with more traffic. But we have an amazing invested community that actively participates in deeper, more meaningful ways than the average web visitor. So who's creating more social change? The site with many, shallow visits, or a small but engaged community?
- The idea that any web site analytics tool can accurately track the ethnic diversity of visitors is a pipe dream.
Ultimately, I applaud Allan's objective: nonprofits should evaluate the effectiveness of their technology tools in relation to their mission, and they should be open about the results. But web site statistics don't equal transparency. Publishing thoughtful evaluation does.
Also, he owes me a martini.
I have been following both threads (Holly's and Allan's) with interest. My opinion has been swinging between the two. And that is why I have not commented until now.
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.