Rate a Nonprofit on Charity Blossom.
Review a Nonprofit on Charity Blossom.
As co-founder and first engineers at MerchantCircle, Jason, Jeff, and I are well versed on the impact of online ratings and reviews of local businesses. While MerchantCircle was not focused on providing reviews for businesses, we watched how Yelp became *the* place to find good information on businesses such as restaurants, hair salons, and contractors. Consumers have increasingly turned to web to find user generated reviews to find the “go to” places in a city. The Yellow Pages, at least among the Internet cognoscenti, are left unopened and sent directly to the recycling bin. The professional reviewers in newspapers are no match for the “wisdom of the crowd” and their knowledge. The power of the masses, aggregated by Yelp, has become a dominant force. Local businesses owners depend on these reviews and reviewers — the collective masses of consumers validate and promote their businesses; ultimately, they have determined whether or not they would succeed or fail.
At Charity Blossom, we’ve taken note of this. Part of our mission is to be the “go to”place to find information about charities and nonprofits. In addition to objective information that we receive from the IRS and the information we get from the nonprofits themselves, we allow you — donors, supporters, and even detractors of nonprofits — a platform for you voice your opinions, comments, and concerns about nonprofits. We’ve democratized the knowledge available to you by allowing others to let you know what they think about charities and nonprofits. For every nonprofit/charity we have listing information (we get the exhaustive list of over 1.5 million nonprofits from the IRS), you can leave your thoughts and opinions.
User generated content shines light onto nonprofits. It provides valuable information to help you formulate informed opinions and conclusions about charities and nonprofits. Relying only on government, objective, or self-promoted information would leave a gap in the whole story. So, we’ve fully embraced social media as a mechanism to give more an better information about nonprofits.
Our implementation leverages Facebook to collect, disseminate, and authenticate information that gets generated by the collective masses. Using Facebook comments, Likes, and Connect, we’ve built a powerful platform to share user generated reviews and ratings.
So “Like” a nonprofit or write a review for a charity on Charity Blossom. You are helping charities and nonprofits as well as donors too. Much like Yelp, Charity Blossom is the go to place to ratings and reviews for charities and nonprofits.
I’ll close with a promotion of another place for you to find user generated reviews on nonprofits — GreatNonprofits. They’ve been around for awhile. And, while it’s a little “old school,” it’s a pretty good place to find out about 11,000+ nonprofits where there are over 92,000 reviews. We’ve poked around a bit to see how they’ve done over the years. Good job!
Here are some numbers from Quantcast too:
