Charities Win Honors in Web-Awards Program

August 23, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes

By NICOLE WALLACE

Nonprofit organizations made a strong showing at the 2001 Webby Awards with charity Web sites taking top honors in seven categories.

Given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, an association for online-communication professionals, the Webbys honor Internet sites in 30 categories, such as arts, finance, politics, and travel.

VolunteerMatch (http://www.volunteermatch.org), a charity in San Francisco whose Web site matches people who want to volunteer with nonprofit groups that need assistance, won for both activism and services — the first time in the awards program’s five-year history that a site has topped two categories in the same year.

VolunteerMatch beat out for-profit nominees in both categories, but Jay Backstrand, founder of the organization, believes that too much has been made of the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit Web sites, and says that VolunteerMatch has a very different mindset.

“The notion of a commercial partner or a nonprofit partner really doesn’t enter into our thinking all that much. We’re just trying to accomplish our task, and we’ll work with anyone to do that.”

PBS Online (http://www.pbs.org) won its third Webby in the television category, as well as the People’s Voice Award, which was given to the nominee in each category that received the most votes from more than 150,000 visitors to the Webby Awards Web site.

Other nonprofit winners included: Nationalgeographic.com (http://www.nationalgeographic.com) in the education category; Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (http://www.ppgg.org,) health; Campaign for our Children (http://www.cfoc.org,) living; and in the politics category, Open Secrets.org (http://www.opensecrets.org,) a Web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Webby Awards ceremony is known for its irreverent spirit and the five-word limit placed on winners’ acceptance speeches.

Accepting the education award, Mark Holmes, vice president for programming and content development at Nationalgeographic.com, said, “Preserving endangered species. Say cheese!”

For more information: Go to http://www.webbyawards.com.

About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.