December 17, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
It looks like Google might be getting into the business of providing information about nonprofit groups in one central location.
Visitors to Google Finance who enter the name of a national charity, such as the American National Red Cross, will probably pull up a page that provides a summary of the organization’s work and links to recent news articles and blog posts about the group, Sean Stannard-Stockton reports on his blog, Tactical Philanthropy.
“I think this is a game changer,” he writes. “If these Google pages resided at the top of the search results when people look up nonprofits, then these pages will become de facto home pages, but with blog posts, new stories and discussions that are both positive and negative.”
The site also allows visitors to leave comments in a discussion forum. A question Mr. Stannard-Stockton asked on the Red Cross’s page has already prompted a response from the organization.
He notes that the pages are clearly in a testing stage. A section called “Key Stats and Ratios,” which on company pages in Google Finance list profit measures like “net profit margin,” remains blank on the nonprofit pages.
What Google eventually decides to highlight in that section will have significant implications for the nonprofit world, says Mr. Stannard-Stockton.
“The choices they make will influence donors and the flow of charitable dollars in a big way,” he writes.
What do you think? How important a development is this? What measures do you think Google should list on its nonprofit pages?
Click on the comments link below to share your thoughts.
