Analyzing 200 nonprofit blogs

I took advantage of the long weekend here in Rome to do a major redesign of the back end engines in my network of blogs and social media tools.

Over the past two years, I have collected over 300 sites which cover aid and humanitarian issues, development and philanthropy, advocacy and “social media for a cause”. I decided it was time for some “Link Weeding”: I checked every single collected blog and website to make sure the URL was still valid.

Out of the huge list of nonprofit sites, I filtered out about 200 nonprofit blogs, which I fed into an RSS mixer. Amidst fighting all kinds of technical hurdles, I also made a new aggregator blog, so I could scan the latest posts of all nonprofit blogs: NonProfitBlogs.info.

While weeding the links, I also scanned through the sites, and checked their RSS links. A lot of clicking… But on the bright side, it also gave me the opportunity, in the span of 24 hours, to go through the most prominent sites and blogs in our nonprofit sector. It was a front seat opportunity to see what’s going in the blogging world. I jotted down some observations as I weeded my way through the jungle of blogs.

I would like to share some of these notes, meshed with some recommendations:

• If I wore my cynical hat, I’d say there are as many blogs by advisors to the nonprofit sector (marketeers, fundraisers, social media specialists, “business consultants”) as there are blogs from the organisations themselves…
• The number of nonprofit blogs is definitively on the rise. Most nonprofit organisation nowadays have a blog added to their website. While the website gives the “corporate” information, the blogs clearly have a more informal conversational and informal tone. Excellent trend!
• The difference between websites and blogs becomes more narrow. Have a look at Mobile Active, for instance. Blog or website? Well, technically, it is made in Drupal, so it is a website, but the whole look and feel is like a blog, with all features that make a blog, a blog: social bookmarking, comments, serial posting,…
• I can understand some blogs maintained by a single individual might have a problem with an RSS feed, but I surely can not understand why some of the blogs (or corporate sites) of larger organisations don’t have RSS feeds. Or have a broken feed. Check your RSS feeds, people!
• While we are on the subject of RSS feeds: some sites feature a pleiade of feeds, split up per subject, country, project… Nothing wrong with that, but please give me one for the entire site too! When I want to get updates from your organisation, I do not want to put 30 different RSS feeds in my Google Reader!
• Sometimes I have to look real hard to find an RSS feed. Even Firefox would not detect it on the homepage.. I advise to feature RSS feed icons,  together with the Email subscriptions and social bookmarking icons prominently. It looks like some organisations are shy of their feeds. Show them what you got, people!
• If, as an organisation, you no longer have time to update your blog, I suggest to delete it, or to put a prominent notice it is discontinued. It gives a sloppy impression when you come onto a blog, and the latest post is September 15 2008…
• The use of Twitter is on the raise! The smaller the organisation, the more common it is to find the Twitter icon on their site. The larger the organisation, the slower the acceptance of new media is, it seems.
• Some of the blogs are just jewels. Others don’t follow the basic sense of aesthetics and are as chaotic as a teenager’s nightmares. Yak.
• Similarly, some blogs seem to waste their prime real estate, the surface of the site visible when you load the homepage, with useless information: a banner most likely. I think I need to write a post about the sensible use of blog real estate!
• Many need to read my post on How to speed up your blog… Too many high resolution pictures, too many widgets, too many calls to external scripts… “Nice” is fine, but “nice and fast” is better. Clutter is bad.
• If, as part of your corporate site, you start a field blog, with posts sent in from your staff on the ground, please don’t call it “Voices from the Field” or “Notes from the field”. There are already 20 field blogs around with those names.
• When I land at some blogs, I have to spend minutes trying to figure out what the blog is all about, who is behind the blog, what projects the organisation is involved in, how to contact that person or organisation, etc… This way, a blog looses a part of its visitors.
  Dear nonprofit bloggers: please include a clearly marked page or navigation button titled “About”, “Our Work”, “Contact”… The random visitors will be grateful !
• And now slightly geekier: for the webmasters, please use meaningful (canonical) URLs. Not only does it look better, but the search engines like it!
  Bad is: http://www.myorganisation.org/COC2/C10 (no kidding!)
  Good is: http://www.myorganisation.org/news/Asia/
• Boy, for those blogs in WordPress, that Thesis Theme is used a lot… I wonder if it is the only good theme around?
• Talking about the choice of blog platform: It seems larger organisations are a bit shy and try to wring a blog into their corporate website CMS (Content Management System). Not always with great success, by the way.
  WordPress is the most commonly blogplatform. Blogger follows at a greater distance. Some use Typepad. Those using Blogger are mostly individuals, or smaller organisations who clearly don’t have staff or sufficient time dedicated to web -or should I say- blog management.
  I am finalizing a large series about the choice of blog platform for nonprofit, so stay tuned..

Picture courtesy BBC News

Tagged as: design, social media (general), speed, trends