Australian NP Web sites say information sharing remains No. 1 reason for being on-line

Results of the second annual on-line survey of Australian non-profit organisations show that the major reason for non-profit organisations being on-line is still to share information (95%).

The survey, conducted by Martin Johnson, Senior Manager Corporate Communications at Sydney's Wesley Mission, was E-mailed to over 600 organisations who were asked to complete an on-line survey form during April, 2000. A similar survey was conducted at the same time in 1999. 

A new survey will be conducted during March and April, 2001.

The full results are available here http://www.wesleymission.org.au/publications/fr/results00.html

Australian NP organisations "still way to go" in Web use

Australian non-profit organisations still have a way to go to making full use of their Internet sites, according to research just completed in the second annual survey of Web use amongst such organisations.
Martin Johnson - Senior Manager, Corporate Communications for Sydney's Wesley Mission - and the founder of the Mission's web site in 1996 - said that whilst the survey showed that Australian NPs had increased their Web presence and the number of pages on-line, they still had a way to go to catch up with what was happening in the commercial sector.
Whilst acknowledging that NPs did not have the budgets of the commercial web site developers, such things as providing an e-mail news service and updating sites more regularly were not cost dependent, said Johnson.

There has been an improvement over the past 12 months in e-mail news services with 27 percent of such organisations now offering such a service - compared to only 6 percent the previous year. However when NPs depend on getting as much information as possible to their donor base in order to retain support, more NPs should offer this facility.

However the major concern is that only 8 percent of surveyed NPs updated their web sites daily. The majority (76%) updated their sites monthly.

"When the web has the capacity for instant updates - NPs are missing out on the benefits that the mere fact of having a site should be bringing to the organisation" said Johnson.

"Around the world, thousands of commercial web sites are providing new information moment by moment. Non-profit organisations need to grasp the fact that this is what the 'information revolution' - typified by the growth of the internet - is all about. Information. If visitors to NP web sites see that the content is static - then they will not come back."

The survey showed that part of the reason for this may be lack of staff. Only 7 percent of organisations employed additional staff to run their site - compared with 15 percent 12 months ago.

"The boards of NP organisations need to see the Internet as their 'insurance policy' for the future. Resources committed know will return dividends in the future - but the resources needs to be made available now."

Survey Report

In 1999 a survey I conducted among Australian non-profits showed that 'information sharing' was the number one reason for being on-line (94 percent).

The survey was e-mailed to over 100 organisations and showed that Web use was a relatively new form of communication with 80 percent of NPs having been on-line for only one or two years (80 percent). Most of those surveyed had only 20 pages of information on-line (6 percent) with a quarter of the sites being between 21 and 100 pages. Print was the main method of promoting the site (89 percent).

The same survey (this time e-mailed to 600 non-profit organisations) conducted a year later in April, 2000 showed that within 12 months there had been some interesting changes.

Some of these were predictable - the number of NPs who had been on line for three years or more jumped 100 percent (22 to 44 percent) which, given the growth of the Internet was to be expected. There was a shift away from using in-house resources to develop web sites - 73 percent did their web development in-house in 1999, compared to only 52 percent in 2000.

This shift was reflected in whether an NP employed additional staff to set up their web site. In 1999, 15 percent of NPs employed one or more additional staff - in 2000 this had almost halved to just seven percent.

(This drop in web staff might be one reason why NPs web sites are almost never updated daily. This is unfortunate as it means that NPs are not using one of the most valuable features of the Internet - the ability to do instant updates and changes.)

It was encouraging to see that the number of pages on-line increased although most only had a maximum of 100 pages (82 percent). Again this may be a result of not having specific Web staff.

Print still remains the major means by which NPs promote their site (93 percent) and although this is not revealed by the survey, this is likely to be by existing publications such as newsletters and magazines.

It was encouraging to see that 27 percent of NPs (6 percent in 1999) were now asking web site visitors to enter their e-mail address in order to receive regular news about the organisation. This is one of the most encouraging trends in their survey.

Another encouraging trend was the increase of Web sites that asked people for donations. Whilst the methods varied, 95 percent of those surveyed said that they asked people to make a donation - an increase over the 78 percent who did so in the last survey. Of those 95 percent, the methods were almost evenly divided between offering a SSL server connection (33%), a 1 800 number (27%) and an online form (27%).

However of those who asked for donations, only 43 percent had received any (69% previously). The average value of any donation was under $100 (65%).

Eighty-seven percent of organisations said they believed their investment in time and resources into their web sites was either 'very worthwhile' or 'worthwhile'.

The survey results are at: http://www.wesleymission.org.au/publications/fr/results00.html

Martin Johnson completed a Masters in Communication Management at UTS last year. His thesis; 'Non Profit Organisations and the Internet' is on-line at: http://www.wesleymission.org.au/publications/uts/project.html