The 59 Smartest Nonprofit Organizations Online

Now visionary marketer Seth Godin turns his attention to orgs. Together with NetSquared and Get Active, Godin has gauged nonprofits' success in engaging audiences online, and made some top picks.

These 59 picks, which range from top-rated Room to Read to mid-listed American Association of Architects were evaluated by these criteria:

• What does the org's Web site look like?
• Does it just ask for donations?
• Do they have a way for members to share their stories?
• Do they have lenses or Groups on Squidoo (a bit of bias here, since Squidoo is Seth's baby)?
• Do they have MySpace groups?
• You Tube videos?
• Flickr sets?
• Do they value microdonations or only $1000 and more?
• Do they run contests or challenges to engage their members?
• Do they send out weekly or monthly newsletters?
• Do they have RSS feeds?
• Are people blogging about the org?
• Are they stuck in the land of direct mail, control, and offline fundraising?
• Are they optimized for the new cadre of young philanthropists?

I love the ratings, I love the agenda, I love the opportunity for nonprofits to check out some colleague orgs that are using the Web for all its worth, I love that you can vote on your favs. But of course, whether any or all of these strategies are right for your organization depends on your marketing goals, and other communications strategies in play.

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