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The Interactivity of Environmental Web Sites

I surveyed over 500 web sites belonging to environmental organizations. As their "entry" page I selected the page that they had submitted as such with a respected online index of environmental resources. Eliminating those pages for which there were errors or insufficient data, for each page I determined whether it had email links or forms for user interaction.

In summary: I found that at least 65% of the front pages surveyed provided no online mechanism (either by email or by form) for contacting the organization sponsoring the site. I will discuss the value of these measurements in assessing the utility of a web site, explore the limitations of the methodology and develop some further ideas for future study.
 

Purposes | Methods | Results | Discussion | Conclusion
 

Purposes

I had the following objectives in mind: (1) To continue my studies of the use of Internet tools by nonprofit organizations with a focus on organizations working on environmental issues. (2) To develop a second simple tool for assessing nonprofit web sites. (3) To start to develop a set of tools for measuring a web sites "interactivity."

As with the first study, I had several "meta" objectives: to test my ability to continue to study nonprofit web space, to gather feedback on the study, to build momentum for further studies, and to develop my relationships with the organizations who can benefit from such studies.
 

Methods

I chose as my sample the 551 web URLs indexed at the Environmental Organization Web Directory as of late November 1997. I chose this index over other because of the ease with which I could gather all the records and because it's specialized nature might provide me with a higher quality sample.

My web robot collected the page contents returned from each of these URLs, fed them into a database, and searched for email addresses or forms. Out of 551 URLs in my sample, 408 of them returned useful data.

I defined my measurement of interactivity as the presence of an email link or form on this page.
 

Results

Out of 408 valid samples, roughly one third (33.8%) of the pages sampled had email addresses. Less than 2% had forms and only one had both email addresses and forms, for a total of about 35% that provide some form of interaction on the front page.
 

Discussion

Measuring interactivity is problematic. The first challenge is defining interactivity itself. For the purpose of this study, it is defined as the ability of the user to send information to the hosts of the site, rather than just consuming information.

The second challenge is that of choosing useful indicators of interactivity. I can think of several criticisms of the measurements I've chosen: (1) We are not counting interactivity provided by telephone numbers or postal addresses. (2) We are not finding out whether there is potentially rich interactivity buried elsewhere on the site. (3) We don't know whether these forms produce any meaningful interaction or whether these organizations answer their email in a timely fashion.

Nevertheless, when I think of the number of times I've looked for some way to connect with organizations online, I can't help but conclude that some avenue on the front page is valuable. As with my previous study, I feel that what's on the main page is important.

Why is "interactivity" worth measuring?

Many web sites are not part of an organization's communication systems. Some are the pet project of a single volunteer. Some operate in parallel to an organization's normal means of building support, but are not integrated. In such situations, perhaps interactivity is unimportant.

But I argue that this is a waste of the potential of the Internet.

Interactivity allows an organization to build two way relationships among supporters, partners, volunteers, funders, staff and others. It allows the Internet to be a powerful medium in support of an organization's mission.
 

Conclusion

The vast majority of these pages provide no immediate way for a visitor to contact the organization over the Internet and thus have little to no capacity for building relationships.

Like the previous study, this measurement doesn't give us a complete picture of the power of each individual web site to support an organization's communication mission. But we do have another strong indication that these web sites are not well integrated into the regular flow of communication of their organizations.

There certainly is no technical barrier to providing an email address on a web site. I can only guess that most organizations have not yet taken the step of accomodating and answering email inquiries. Remarkably, many nonprofits seem afraid that they might get too much email. But this is anecdotal evidence only.

The most important extension of this inquiry would be to go at least one level deeper into each site to look for signs of interactivity.

 
Your advice, criticism and feedback would be most appreciated. Please contact us with any thoughts you have to share on this topic.

Thank you,




-- Michael Gilbert

Published: 1998