Do You Know Some Great Nonprofits?
Perla Ni, former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, has launched a new site that aims to be the Zagat guide for Nonprofits. Great Nonprofits has already been profiled in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, where Ms. Ni says, "When's the last time you bought a book from Amazon and didn't read the customer reviews? This site provides that: peer reviews, from honest people, about whether [the charities] are making an impact."
Customer and peer reviews have contributed greatly to the success of Amazon and Ebay, but have been arguably less successful detached from actual products: according to Alexa, epinions.com has a traffic rank above 2000, whereas Ebay and Amazon are both in the top 50. It will be interesting to see if the focus on nonprofits will enable Great Nonprofits to succeed.
Currently, Great Nonprofits has a limited number of reviews on fewer than 100 organizations, but Ms. Ni is aware of the challenge ahead: "This is going to be a long process. It takes time to build people's awareness of this, especially in the nonprofit sector, where you're serving people that are hard to reach."
Perhaps you can help them grow.
Thanks for the shout-out! You guys who read this blog are tech-savvy enough to take advantage of all the free and easy ways that even smaller nonprofits can promote themselves. The key to promotion, though, is that it's not promotion just for promotion's sake. It's about promoting your organization as trustworthy of people's time and donations. People interact on the basis of trust. You are reading this NTEN blog because it's a trustworthy organization. You can show the world, through reviews of you by your volunteers, board members, and the people you've served, that you are a trusted nonprofit. Nonprofits can do a 1-minute registration and then send their link to their stakeholders for them to click on and write a review. It's really easy and fast way for nonprofits to increase their visibility and credibility.