Non-profits and the Internet.

Everywhere you look these days, it seems that you see www.something or someone's handing you a business card with an e-mail address. The media hype surrounding the Internet makes getting on the information superhighway seem especially urgent.

Yet for non-profit organizations grappling with budgetary concerns and an abundance of perplexing or unnecessarily complicated technology, the Internet may seem impractical. However, it is technology that can do more than impress - it can improve the bottom line.

The Web Site

With online services such as America Online boasting a membership of 8 million and search directories such as Yahoo celebrating over a billion page views in one month (a page view is one electronic page displayed in response to a user's request), the potential exposure for a non-profit with a Web site is enormous. However, with so many Web sites out there, one group's message may get lost in a sea of information. The question is: if you build it, will they come? The answer is an overwhelming "yes!"

GuideStar, a non-profit group devoted to providing donors and the general public information about the programs, activities and finances of 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, unveiled its Web site (http://www.guidestar.org) in October 1996.

The site, which features a searchable database of more than 600,000 non-profit organizations, received an average of 56,000 "hits" and 5,800 "user sessions," or visitors, per week in the first four months of this year. Although some of those visitors were non-profit organizations viewing their own or their peers' reports, the majority of users identified themselves as individual donors.

In a reverse of the traditional direct marketing campaign, these computer-savvy, net-happy people drawn to GuideStar's Web site are conducting a "direct targeting" campaign to choose the organizations they want to support. It is an information revolution that GuideStar's parent, Philanthropic Research, Inc., was founded to serve - and has helped foster.

With the "transformation of the culture of philanthropy" as his guiding philosophy, Arthur W. Schmidt, Jr., president of Philanthropic Research (PRI), conceived GuideStar in order to "challenge donors to take the initiative in identifying those organizations they want to support with both time and money." In addition, Schmidt called upon non-profits to embrace the concept of accountability and provide financial as well as program information.