If you had the foresight to use the Obama win (and then the contest) as a way to drive traffic, then no matter what others say, that was genius….Harvard Business School case study genius. You, no doubt, will continue to get crap as your success grows.

I am interested to see how Obama’s team will respond to change.org once in office…whether they will embrace it or try to confront the branding problems between change.org and change.gov straight on.

Either way, congrats what looks like the beginning of a successful run on change.org.

Sincerely,

Martin

Martin Smith
CEO
JustMeans

http://autisminnb.blogspot.com/2009/01/changeorg-opposes-human-rights-of.html

Yes, we’re excited about the launch of our Cause channels, as they make it easier for folks to find what they’re looking for on Care2. It’s sort of a one-stop-shop approach to all the good things on Care2 related to Human Rights, Global Warming, or whatever your interest is.

With so much content on helping people live a more healthy and sustainable life, navigating it all has always been a bit of a challenge. We’re just getting started with the Cause channels, so I think within a few months we’ll have learned a lot and hopefully have a very compelling offering.

While I agree with you that search traffic is an important issue to consider, historically at least, we’ve found the *vast* majority of our traffic comes from word of mouth and then repeat visitors. Perhaps that says we’re not very good at SEO, but it has helped us get to 10 million members. That said, I very much agree with your fundamental premise that great content, around a central premise, is key to success.

Cheers to that.

It’s my policy not to respond to angry anonymous comments (nothing constructive ever comes from it), but I’ll give a quick response here since this was posted by Max.

In truth our rapid growth began immediately upon our launch, and our traffic has doubled every month since (in October, November, and again in December).

We no doubt enjoyed a hit of traffic when Obama kindly announced change.gov (very nice of him), and the brand association doesn’t hurt. But that sort of thing is fleeting, and in total we received about 60,000 more hits than we normally would have expected last month from type-in and search traffic. In the context of our overall traffic, which was more than 350,000 in November, that’s pretty small.

It’s also true we’ve been getting a decent amount of traffic from our successful Ideas for Change in America competition, although it comprises less than half of the more than 750,000 people we’ve had on change.org thus far in December.

As a final note before signing off on this topic, I hope people who care about using the web for social change can keep things constructive and try to support, rather than rhetorically tear down, others working for change. I’m all about constructive feedback about how we can improve, and actively solicit it on a regular basis. But random anonymous attacks with ill-intent and misinformation don’t serve anyone and are a blight that I hope we can all fight, Max included.

“Change.org’s traffic has little if nothing to do with their new blog strategy.. in fact, it was going pretty much nowhere. There is one reason for their traffic, and that’s Obama’s victory.

The initial surge in traffic came from Obama’s announcement that his website is “change.gov”, and lots of people are typing in the wrong url. The graphic from Compete shows when the change in traffic actually occurred…on the day Obama announced the new website name.

The second wave has come because they did something smart, and that was capitalize on Obama’s statement that he wanted input from the public. So, they set up a contest to capture that Obama traffic and solicit ideas / vote for the best “ideas for change in America”. This contest has spread well in the blogosphere.

Based on what we’re hearing, they’re not getting much traffic to the actual blog posts (and the # of comments on most posts would suggest that’s true). That said, they have done some clever things to drive quick traffic hits such as (http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/is_digg_sexist)

Time will tell whether they can hold on to this traffic and/or whether they’ll move their entire strategy to an Obama-centric one, but there’s no question Obama was the catalyst.

Things have indeed taken off since the re-launch of our site in October, and for largely the reasons you mentioned. In our experience Compete’s numbers are less than half of our total monthly traffic per Google Analytics (partially because it only reports US traffic, and partially because it seems to systematically under-count traffic for smaller sites), but either way the trend, and the lesson, is clear: quality content wins.

Keep up the good work,

Ben