On Monday, I "reviewed"  aspects of the Habitat for Humanity website. I was looking mainly at three things: online fundraising appeals, use of online video, and use of social media. In these areas, I don’t regard Habitat as a pacesetter. That said, they might have precisely the right web approach for their constituency.

Today, I’m looking at a quite different site … Charity:Water. This organization gets drinking water to people in poor countries.

In contrast to the now-venerable, 30-year-old Habitat for Humanity, Charity:Water is about three years old, founded by a 31-year-old. It can’t possibly have the brand recognition of Habitat, yet when I googled "charity water" I got 38,800,000 hits … ten times the hits for Habitat (3,840,000).

Something then inspired me to think … suppose I had never heard of either organization … just had an interest in the two issues.

So I googled "homeless," "housing," and "housing for homeless" (limiting my search to US sites). Guaranteed to find Habitat, right? WRONG! No Habitat in the first 50 items for each of these terms! In fact, no Habitat in the first 100 items under "homeless." Not even a paid search entry. Incredible! As far as the web is concerned, Habitat is a best-kept secret! I was about to send a scathing email to Habitat’s webmaster, but …

Moving on, looking for Charity:Water, I googled "safe drinking water" (no hits in top 50) "drinking water for poor" (#22 got me to Charity:Water via something called Hub Pages, but no direct hit in top 50), and "drinking water developing countries" (Eureka! #22 was Charity:Water). At least they exist in Google-world.

Clearly, neither of these organizations — and I’ll bet most most nonprofits — have figured out search engine optimization! But I digress a bit.

If you’re lucky enough to know Charity:Water exists (38 million direct Google hits says someone does), one can proceed to assess the website …

Online fundraising appeals — a fundraising appeal dominates the home page; there is also a less prominent merchadise offer. Click on the appeal and you bounce to a landing page where the appeal is driven home by a powerful (dare I say Infectious?) video. If the video drives you to Donate (it did for me), a click takes you to what is one of the best nonprofit offer pages I’ve seen — multiple ways to give at various levels (including monthly). Very cleanly presented. Good use of images and graphics. Very effective. Couldn’t ask for more.

Online video — did I mention there’s a "Share the video" button with the fundraising video?! But if you’re still on the home page in a pre-donate state of mind, you can click on a 4-minute video and watch the founder tell the organization’s story. Very compelling. And it links to a choice of 54 videos presenting the organization’s work from a variety of angles. All with "share" and "embed" features. Can’t ask for more.

Social media — the home page offers three social media options for engaging with the organization — Facebook (44,273 fans), Twitter (1,061,737 followers) and Tumblr (a blog). Each of these contains a robust and updated assortment of video, photo, event and other links. Somebody at Charity:Water clearly has the assignment of feeding these social net monsters regularly … no set-’em-up-and-walk-away here. And there seems to be plenty of interaction initiated by fans and followers as well. Nothing stale about any of this.

I haven’t a clue as to what Charity:Water’s donor demographics look like. But certainly the look and feel is "young" … or at least "younger" than your daddy’s favorite charity!

If you want to know what the web presence of the future looks like today, this is the site to study. A+

But, before I get too weak-kneed, let me note: Habitat for Humanity raised $88.5 million in cash contributions (and $141.5 in total revenue) in its FY2008. They have plenty of fundraising lessons to teach. Charity:Water has raised about $10 million in its three-year lifetime. I just hope I’m around to see Charity:Water’s balance sheet at its 30th anniversary!

Tom