My eye was caught by this interesting account,
by Dave Chakrabarti, of working with a nonprofit organization on optimizing its site. Or, more accurately, shoving SEO
down the nonprofit's throat. The story resonates with me because my wife worked at one time for a nonprofit agency in
NJ, USA, which maintained a Web site and made abortive attempts to publicize its programs on that site. The Web
property was a disastrous, nearly invisible thing. During the writing of Building Your Business with Google For Dummies I, with my
wife's help, used the agency and its site as one of several test cases in Adwords and in basic SEO. It was a tough sell
to an oblivious and resistant group of people, just as Chakrabarti describes in his case.
Resistance to
online marketing is not a new story in all business segments, of course. But resistance to SEO in nonprofits is a real
shame because it can be so helpful, and it is so free! Just accepting and knowing the basics can improve visibility,
enhance the stream of volunteers and job applicants, and deepen community involvement.
SEO for Nonprofits
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. My company has been working with nonprofits and trade associations for several years, and have found our clients very appreciative for the SEO work we've done.
The challenge for us has been to educate nonprofits' staff to understand who their sites' audiences are, and how to speak to those audiences clearly. It's often a question of addressing the real needs/desires of site visitors, rather than making the website architecture and content reproduce the organization's internal structure. Usually having staffers work together on compiling a sample list of keyword phrases provides a catalyst for a lot of revealing discussions.
3. Agreed, but this education process is the problem. Many non-technology nonprofits are staffed by people who simply do not think in a search-engine friendly way...so educating them becomes a process of retraining more than training. I've found this even more of a problem with academics; nonprofit staff from academia are very fond of long, non-SEO-friendly page titles that look like something out of a research paper instead of something short, concise, and descriptive. Similarly, this kind of content creation makes it hard for users to find relevant content, or choose from available content, even if a site is content rich and ranked highly in the search engines. I'm hoping to add more content in this regard on my site ( http://www.digitalraindrop.com/Nonprofit-SEO-Advantages ) in the neat future.
Posted at 4:33PM on Jan 24th 2006 by Dave Chakrabarti
1. Brad,
Glad to see someone reading / commenting on my DDN blog. I agree with you completely, of course...nonprofits are really in a position to benefit enormously from ethical, organic SEO and SEM techniques, even if they'd learn enough to just be aware of basic strategies in optimized design, but most insist on remaining ignorant of the field. Non tech-savvy businesses understand the value of SEO, and either learn it in-house or contract it out to a team, but nonprofits seem to insist that it's not important and they don't have the resources for it...even while most nonprofits actually have advantages in SEO that their for-profit competitors often don't have.
I just started a new section on my site to outline some of the advantages nonprofits have in SEO and SEM...this content will be live on my DDN site soon. The original content: http://www.digitalraindrop.com/Nonprofit-SEO-Advantages
Hopefully, if enough writing is published on nonprofits and SEM, some organizations will start to take note of it and begin opening their eyes to what can be possible with just a little relevant learning.
Take care,
Dave.
Posted at 1:47AM on Jan 9th 2006 by Dave Chakrabarti