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Hi Paul,

I strongly dispute the claim that non-profits are famous for having terrible websites. See  http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/charity-editorials/anato...  as an example of a non-profit which is hugely successful online and www.our-africa.org as  a cutting edge non-profit website

Andrew

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On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:

...

Here's a crazy question.

Non-profit organizations are famous for having terrible web sites.  Generally they get a fixed budget and after they spend it,  they have a party and announced that they succeeded.  Nobody ever tells the users,  or rather,  the people who might have been the users if they found out about it.

For a long time I thought "non-profit" was a cause of failure,  or rather,  that profit was a cause of success.  Nobody at a library benefits from making a digital library 5% easier to use,  but if a company like AMZN improves its site by 5%,  that translates into happy customers plus a pile of money that can go into bonuses,  dividends,  etc.

That continuous improvement is missing in most non-profits.  At best they get a series of grants to do things and set goals for major upgrades.  Sometimes these upgrades fail,  sometimes they really help, often they end up spending a lot of money for 3 years to get something that's about the same as what they had before.

How does the Wikimedia foundation escape this trap?

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