Greatnonprofits

GreatNonprofits is a cooperative platform for aggregating of "stakeholder reviews" of nonprofit organizations. Partners join cooperative to receive technology and syndicated distribution of review content. We do not write any reviews ourselves; we aggregate and make accessible the stories told by stakeholders in all types of nonprofit organizations. In this way, we provide a "home" for this type of critical information. We do not edit the content of these reviews. Our partners and funders, as well as the reviewed nonprofits themselves, do not edit the content of the reviews, either. The database of user-generated content is presented for the benefit of community of stakeholders in the nonprofit community. Our goals include helping prospective donors and volunteers differentiate between nonprofits, find ones that they trust, and become more confident in giving or signing up to volunteer. We also aim to enable excellent nonprofits, regardless of the size of their marketing budgets, to harness their most authentic and most effective advertising, which are the stories of the people they've served. Ultimately, our intention is to promote nonprofit excellence through feedback and transparency. The main way we do this is through user reviews, whereby people can share their personal stories of what is like to work with a particular nonprofit. Just as today, travelers consult TripAdvisor for reviews of hotels before they choose where to stay, and hotel owners monitor reviews for customer feedback; that same type of bottom-up feedback can improve the trust and transparency of the nonprofit sector.

While the concept of user reviews is relatively new in the nonprofit sector, they are common elsewhere, as sites like TripAdvisor, and Amazon Reviews permeate the for-profit online world. Therefore, our initial strategy has been to educate nonprofits themselves to the value of user reviews, and how the feedback from stakeholders generated by these reviews can help them grow and improve in the future. We do this at present through monthly campaigns in the various issue areas where nonprofits are active, i.e., arts, green, and women's issues, etc. We partner with prominent nonprofits active in that area, and our partners encourage their networks to participate. This unleashes a viral effect whereby we reach far more organizations than we ever could on our own. Our long-term strategies include partnering with other organizations that are committed to ratings and reviews.

First, we have developed the leading technology platform for user reviews, and we are always improving that platform through iterative software development methods. We have developed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies with the help of a "brain trust" of the leading voices in the nonprofit world promoting transparency in the sector. We have a staff of nonprofit management, technology, community and marketing professionals, and the backing of major foundations that support what we are doing. An additional strength is our database of the results from our efforts to base. We have become the leading provider of user reviews of nonprofits, and we are currently documenting case studies of how they are affecting the operation of the nonprofit organizations themselves. We will need to continue to attract the financial and logistical support necessary to expand our reach and accomplish our long-term goals. We will need to continuously upgrade and maintain our technological platform and to develop the appropriate tools as new forms of interactive technologies emerge.

To date, we have gathered reviews of over two percent of our estimate of active nonprofits in the U.S. Through our partnership with GuideStar, we have achieved visibility for our efforts on a broad scale throughout the nonprofit sector. We also have received a great deal of press coverage all over the country, which is helping us spread the word about the value of stakeholder reviews of nonprofits. GreatNonprofits is frequently mentioned by reporters and bloggers covering nonprofits, and our methodology is recognized as part of a broader movement to promote transparency generally in the sector. We do not seek to accomplish our goals on our own; thus we enthusiastically partner with other nonprofit organizations, including GuideStar and our many campaign partners, to raise public awareness about the value of stakeholder reviews. Still, we understand that we are still at the earliest stage of securing the cooperation of the overall nonprofit community, and that much work remains to be done. We are pursuing new types of partnerships, such as technology-sharing arrangements, and distribution strategies that place our reviews on multiple sites all over the web, including blogs and social media sites like Facebook. We are also leveraging our technology expertise to create new tools for nonprofits to use in their social media outreach, including a specific initiative devoted to Facebook. The overwhelmingly positive reaction from nonprofits to participate in our first two focus groups in this effort indicates that we are on the right track with this work.