Sustainability in Non-Profit Online Ventures

Among discussing a wide array of learning theories at the onset of class, we also got to dive deep into a few online ventures that Professor Kim thought would be great to discuss. The particular website that my team was focused on was http://teachaids.org/ which is a non-profit online venture that is focused on HIV/AIDS education through the production of video lessons.

While investigating how some of the theories that we have been learning in class could be applied to this particular website, my team and I determined that it seemed probable that the efforts by this non-profit were fairly sustainable. In my own opinion, I felt that this was the case particularly because of the ability to maintain funding. HIV/AIDS education in my opinion is something that will undoubtedly continue to receive large amounts of funding from large corporations because it is such a humanitarian effort and because to some degree it inhibits market growth in the disease stricken regions which is arguably a market that many corporations would like to tap into.

During class, however, there seemed to be some shared reservation about the possible sustainability of this particular organization. Beyond funding the reason for the skepticism in sustainability seemed to be lack of possible growth of content generation.

I decided to do a little Google searching to see how other non-profit organizations manage to maintain sustainability in content development as well as in funding. I found a quote from an individual from e-democracy.org that I felt was a good summary of what online non-profit ventures should strive for:

“The non-profit online services that work, understand that what they deliver is more important than who they are and their public interest philosophy and approach. I think our challenge is to find ways that build from public interest motivation in such a way that they truly build better and more cost effective forms of online content and interactivity.”

Relating this directly to http://teachaids.org/ I feel like this quote helps summarize what will need to be done to maintain their content sustainable through the upcoming years. The questions to ask is how they will design content that will build on the current public interest motivation while continuing innovation and cost effective strategies. I’d be curious to know what type of strategies the developers have been doing, as well as how in touch they are with the motivations of the communities that they are targeting.

While looking for other non-profit organizations that have won the sustainability game over the years, I ran across a ranking of the most successful non-profit brands. I couldn’t help but agree that the more powerful brand the non-profit has the least likely content sustainability will be such a huge problem. While not totally relevant I figured I would include this chart as I felt it was fairly compelling.

I can only hope that any non-profit work that I become involved in grows a brand as successful as some of these.