Making the site

On Helpalot you can leave messages on the guestbooks of personal pages, but there wasn’t yet a good place to have a more general centralized discussion. We thought about adding groups and having different types of them (organizations, companies, soon to be non-profits, etc) and we might add those features in the future, but we felt it would change too much of the fundamentals of the site. We first want to learn more about the core of the site, before we want to alter the structure. 

The now the plan is to have a forum somewhat seperate of the rest of the site. Then we will send a newsletter every month or two with some updates on what is happening on the site, trends we spot, and we will ask a question to the community. With idea to drive traffic to the forum and via the forum back to the site.

The idea is that using a newsletter people are more likely to be on the Helpalot site when others are too, making it more relevant for them to ask questions to each other and share their knowledge.

At the moment we have set up a forum, but its not fully integrated with the rest of the site yet (for instance the design and navigation part). So a bit prematurely I’ll give you the link:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/

Introduce yourself over here:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8

You don’t need to register to leave a message.

Helpalot is now linked on the social actions site. Thanks Peter!

http://www.socialactions.com/meet-the-platforms

We now have over 100 projects on Helpalot. Mariana added a number of projects that pushed the site over the 100 mark.

This blog was very slow the last couple of weeks. Our host changed some settings and somehow that made everything slow. I just found out that when I deactivated a plugin I used, the site came back to speed so here we are.

I’m starting to track, in a very low-tech way, how well Helpalot.org shows up when you search for some keywords.

Goede doelen

• Dec 27th 2007: page 21, item 3
• March 30th 2008: page 10, item 2

Goed doel

• Dec 27th 2007: page 28, item 5
• March 30th 2008: page 7, item 10

Charity project

• Dec 27th 2007: I didn’t track it..
• March 30th 2008: page 10, item 3

The growth of the site on these dates
December 27, 2007: 190 users, 81 projects

March 30, 2008: 210 users, 210 users, 97 projects

These figures show Helpalot is still rather small, but it also shows that there is growth.

In theory there is a feedback loop that should help us. The more people find and use Helpalot, the more content we have for Google to index and this increases the chances of people finding relevant information on Helpalot and clicking the search links. This increases the ranking for us on Google, making us more findable. And that’s without making use of external databases or seeking media attention.

The problem is that at the moment we only have a piece of the long tail of charities, and that will be somewhat relevant to some people. It would be better to have a cluster of projects around a theme or location, to make the site highly relevant for some people. That would kick off the feedback loop a bit stronger I suspect. So while all are welcome, we try to focus on getting more projects based in the Netherlands and perhaps it’s also a good idea to focus on projects in a certain category. Any suggestions?