Two Exciting Resources

I fell down the rabbit hole of work, but as I emerged two particularly interesting resources caught my eye:

eNonprofit Benchmarks study [2]
This report uses the all-too-infrequently applied method of solid quantitative analysis to look at nonprofit email, online donation, and online action logs. This research yields enormously useful benchmarks to answer the age old questions: So is this click-through rate good? How many should I expect to donate? How do our numbers compare to others organizations? I’d love to see more of this type of work – perhaps delving down into different types of nonprofits, or even investigating the actual cost/benefit of different types of internet strategies in the sector. Heck, I’d love to do this type of work. I only regret that Idealware didn’t have anything to do with this original study.

Google Page Builder [3]
Google’s released a simple and nifty online website builder. To my mind, it’s more of a hobbyist than a professional tool right now (particularly as websites currently have to reside not only at a Google domain, but one that reveals your Gmail address), but I’m really excited about the possibilities. Hope they will allow people to use their own domain? Well, the Google-owned Blogger already does that, so presumably they can port that feature. Want to create your own custom templates with a great branded graphic design? Again, Blogger allows that already. Wish that you could have some database-driven content (to populate a member directory or event calendar, for instance)? Google Base kind of does that – potentially they could pull that in too. If they could get all of those things going, they’d have everything that 80% of small nonprofits need in a website, all presumably wrapped up in a friendly and easy to use package. Now that’s exciting.<