Social Ch@nge

Or, more importantly, what does the net think of your organization? As a non-profit, it’s often critical to try and understand the public perception of your organization: who you are, why you do what you do, and why it matters.

The internet provides a number of great tools to try and figure out what the public perception of you (or at least your organizational website) is. Here’s a few basic tricks using Google.

Googling yourself
This is the easiest step. Punch the name of your group or organization into Google, and see what comes up. Remember to put quotation marks around your name, to limit the terms of the search. You might also want to use some of the “Advanced Search” options in Google, to limit response geographically, etc.

The responses you get are listed in order of “PageRank” (PR). This is the technology developed by Google to measure the importance of web pages. It’s part heavy mathematics, and part black magic (want to look under the hood? Check this out). Essentially, your PR is determined by the number of websites that link to yours. However, all links are not equal: PageRank measures the importance and relevance of the website linking to yours and then passes on the appropriate PR value to your site, in a kind of cascade effect. Essentially, any websites that link to yours count as a vote of importance for your PageRank – but any website that links to yours and has a high PR score counts for more.

To view your website’s actual, no-fooling PR score, you have to download and install the Google Toolbar. Once you’ve installed it, you can view the PR of any website you visit, ranging from a PageRank of 0 through to 10.

Fundamentally, having a higher PR score means that you stand a greater chance of being rated higher in the search results – and you’ll be the first thing that a potential donor or client clicks on.

But googling yourself doesn’t just reveal where you stand in the popularity contest. It also shows the context that your organization is being mentioned in. Dig through a few pages of results, and you may be surprised at what you find: that funding proposal that you submitted 2 years ago is still out there online; a volunteer might be describing how fulfilling today was in her blog.

Reverse Links: Who is linking to me?
Another perspective on your organization’s public face can be gleaned from the “reverse links” to your site. Exactly who is connected to your website? This could be a painful job of detective work, but is made easier thanks to Google.

In Google search, type in:

link:your website name

So, for example, searching for “link:www.netfornonprofits” would yield a page of results showing which pages on the internet are linked to ours. Again, this is simply exploring the context in which your organization is being mentioned. It doesn’t put a number on how good a communications strategy you have. Instead, it informs your understanding of where your organisation is situated on the internet.

Website analytics
If you do want detailed data and raw numbers, examining the visitor traffic to your website is the only way to go. Most website hosts will provide some kind of statistical analysis of their traffic logs: the records of each visit to your website. This information can be surprisingly detailed: each visit can be tracked by length of visit, which pages lead to which, even what browser your visitor was using, or what region of the world they came from! Talk to your website administrator or website hosting company for details on how to access this data. (If, on the other hand, you are the website administrator and still don’t know how to gather and analyze this sort of data, Google Analytics is a good tool to start with)

Google News Alerts
Of course, it’s not just about your website. You need to know when your organization is getting some press as well. There are two ways to do this. First, you can browse to Google News, and search for your organization’s name. This will show you any online news articles within the relatively recent past that mention you.

To be sure you don’t miss anything, however, you can also set Google up to email you any time specific terms are mentioned in the news. Essentially, this replaces the high-priced news clipping services of the past. To set up a “Google Alert”, browse to http://www.google.com/alerts, and fill out the simple form. You can create as many alerts as you want – be careful to be specific with your search terms, otherwise your in-box will end up drowning in news items.

Other tools: YouTube, Digg
Google isn’t the only game in town. When building a picture of the internet face of your organization, there are a number of other resources to consider. A search on YouTube, for example, may turn up videos of your organization that you didn’t know existed – for example, participants in a charity event or demonstration may have uploaded their private footage. Another useful tool is Digg, a community-based news aggregator, that allows users to rank the popularity of items. A search on Digg, while not as comprehensive as Google, can be revealing in demonstrating who is talking about your organization.

And now what?
You’ve spent an hour playing with Google – now what? Knowing what is being written about your organization, and where, is useful in creating any communications strategy for non-profit. Just as notable is the absence of mentions: if your PageRank score is low, you may want to invest some time in considering how to boost your overall public profile. Over the next few months, we’ll talk about how to evaluate and reach your non-profit audience, and the importance of regarding this audience as part of your community: stakeholders, not simply clients or donors.