Playing the domain game
Denver Business Journal - by Lyn Berry Business Journal Staff Reporter
A local nonprofit organization that strives to raise awareness about the issue of child abuse also is raising its profile on the Internet search engines, thanks to one vital electronic ingredient: a new domain name.
Denver-based Colorado Christian Home Tennyson Center for Children & Families (CCH) recently acquired http://www.childabuse.org, which joins its institutional site, coloradochristianhome.org, and two training sites, nsatraininginstitute.org and famtime.com.
Since the September 2000 inception of the new site, CCH has watched its Web hits grow from about 50 a day to more than 1,000 daily hits.
CCH Web developer Chuck Mallory said this growth is a direct result of the high search engine placement that a domain name like childabuse.org garners.
"Search engines read that domain name and they figure that if you have a short, concise domain name that very much fits what you do, then you have a higher level of appropriateness," he said.
On some search engines, the CCH site even has surpassed the more likely leader, childabuse.com, thanks to some "tips and tricks" about search engine optimization that Mallory has picked up along the way.
"The difference in traffic [to the site] is just vast," he said.
The CCH's new domain name actually was the result of a donation, which is a lucky break for the nonprofit. Though Mallory doesn't know exactly how much childabuse.org is worth, he said the asking price for childabuse.com was recently posted at a quarter of a million dollars.
"We would not have been in a position to be able to make that kind of financial investment and we would have been lamenting that fact," if it weren't for a California company called noname.com, said CCH executive director Bob Cooper.
Mallory stumbled across the Fremont-based noname.com on childabuse.org while trolling the Internet for a new domain name. He then made contact with the company to see if the name was for sale.
"We originally wanted to develop a Web site as a side project," said Jin Lu, vice president of business development for noname.com.
"But when the Colorado Christian Tennyson Center contacted us to purchase the domain name, we thought that they had more resources and experience in the field than we do, so we decided to donate the name."
Unfortunately, noname.com -- which provides shared domain names to the general public -- doesn't have many domain names that are suitable for nonprofit organizations. However, the company is happy to do what it can when the opportunity presents itself.
"Domain names are valuable only when they are put to good use," Lu said. "When we donate a domain name for a worthy cause, we feel that the value of the domain has been maximized."
Unfortunately, donations of this kind don't happen very often. In fact, some national nonprofits have been making headlines lately with their purchases of exorbitantly priced domain names.
For instance, The National Wildlife Federation recently bought San Francisco-based eNature.com for $4 million dollars, to be paid over four years. The purchase of the company allowed valuable hyperlinks between the highly trafficked eNature.com and the Federation's own site, nwf.org. And the Nature Conservancy attests that $250,000 is a reasonable price for a good domain name, after its purchase of nature.org.
"I hate to see nonprofits have to spend a lot of money on this," said Barbara Shaw, executive director of the Colorado Association of Nonprofit Organizations. "But I think having visibility out there on the Internet is very important to nonprofits."
Although some critics might contend that the purchase of a domain name is a waste of donor money, Shaw said funders generally trust the management of their nonprofits to make good decisions.
"In fact, I think that funders may be concerned about nonprofits that are not moving into this technological era that we live in," she said.
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