Philanthropic organizations have a significant presence on the WEB. According to NCIB they number in the thousands. The sites evaluated here are but a sampling. Through their exploration it is possible to gain a grasp of the issues involved with this type of site, primarily concerning solicitation and the potential for misrepresentation. Though currently significant, the presence of nonprofit organizations has an enormous potential for growth. There is an already developed infrastructure with which individual organizations may connect should they decide to develop their own web pages. This infrastructure consists of a number of WEB sites that serve as guides to charitable organizations, with and without WEB sites. There is no attempt here to assess the quality of the guides themselves. Some appear quite comprehensive but many are the work of individuals, leaving their long term viability questionable. The impressive aspect of the guides is the number of them that exist. This demonstrates a need and interest as well as a recognition of the issues.
It is notable that very few charity sites have links within Yahoo, the source of the links evaluated here. Yahoo contain links outside itself to other compilations of nonprofit sites. Some of these other compilations contain ratings and abstracts and may be preferred places to be listed.
In developing evaluation criteria, the initial step was to identify the objectives of the providers and of the users entering those sites:
Providers (the nonprofit organizations)
Users (those accessing nonprofit sites)
Working from the simple concept that a good quality site would be one that successfully meets these objectives, three broad measurements were identified:
A subjective approach, much like a movie critic, was taken in the evaluation of the criteria. Assigning weights, giving a score, and coming up with some quantitative value would be such a subjective exercise itself. Then with the consideration that a complete failure in one dimension may render everything else pointless, it was concluded that a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system would be appropriate.
indicates the site owner provided additional
information
Good: 
Fair: 
Poor:
Bad:
Indeterminable: 
Credibility:
Effectiveness
Ease of use and Presentation
Philanthropy Links is an good starting point. It places the charities into categories, provides links to them along with an abstract. In addition it recognizes exceptional sites (diamond award) on the basis of their direct community impact. It begins with the a pointer to The Meta-Index of Non-profit Organizations on the Web. This meta index provides an access point to all the many resource guides available and illustrates their proliferation. Impact Online's Best of Web Nonprofit Sites identifies sites that it considers the best directories for specific areas and sites it considers the best in those same categories. Another good guide to finding and using non-profit WEB sites is Internet Resources for non-profit public service.
NCIB's Quick Reference Guide provides a list of 300 charities rated by NCIB as to how well they meet their standards along with a method of ordering at cost additional information on the charities. These rating are looking at the charities themselves and not the information provided on their WEB sites. In correspondence with NCIB a representative stated that they do not currently review Web sites but nonprofit web site accountability is a major concern. They recommended involvement in a listserv devoted to that topic, cyb-acc@igc.apc.org . Nonprofits and the World Wide Web is an excellent essay on nonprofit's use of the internet and pointers to nonprofits on building their web sites.
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Steve Varga 
shv@u.washington.edu