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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Burma charity response

October 04, 2007

The crisis in Burma has caught the attention of the press and public alike. Searches for 'burma' increased 17 fold last week, with the largest proportion of traffic going to Wikipedia and the news sites. However, the fourth and fifth recipients of traffic were aid sites: Burma Campaign, specifically set up in response to the current crisis, and Witness, a more general human rights campaign group.

For our presentation at an Institute of Fundraising event last week, we touched on a number of ways that the charity sector can benefit from the internet, including utilizing social networks and search. The most popular search terms sending traffic to our Communities category (which includes charities) are typically the large charity / NGO ‘brands’ such Oxfam, NSPCC, VSO, etc. However, during a crisis or an appeal, another effective way that charities can pick up traffic is to take advantage of the relevant search terms sending traffic to news and information sites. This is exactly what Burma Campaign and Witness have done, although they have taken different approaches.

Burma Campaign has picked up a lot of organic traffic from terms such as 'burma', 'burma campaign uk' and 'aung san suu kyi' (the Burmese democratic opposition leader). It has clearly optimized its site around these terms and is currently the fourth highest placed organic search result in Google when searching for 'burma'. Witness, on the other hand, does not appear in the top 10 organic results, but is currently the highest placed paid result. Over three quarters of its search traffic currently comes from paid search, with ‘burma’ and ‘myanmar’ accounting for the majority of this. As a side note, there were 4 times as many searches for ‘burma’ as ‘myanmar’ (the country's official name) over the last 4 weeks.

These examples nicely illustrate two different approaches that charities can take when a humanitarian crisis hits. Burma Campaign is less reliant on search overall (which accounts for 57% of upstream traffic to the site), and has managed to pick up organic search traffic in addition to traffic from news and media sites (17% of upstream traffic) by clever use of a URL and search engine optimization. Witness, which has a broader human rights remit than just Burma, has managed to use the interest in Burma to drive traffic to its website in order to raise awareness of some broader issues. Currently, 71% of its traffic comes from search engines, and of this 78% is from people searching for ‘burma’ or ‘myanmar’ – i.e. 55% of all traffic to its website site is coming from these two terms.

Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 10:59 AM | (1) | (0)
In Categories Charities | Search

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