There are hundreds of nonprofit related blogs out there, but do you ever wonder which ones everyone else is reading? We do, which is why we have compiled a list of the world’s most popular nonprofit blogs.

What we measure.

• Traffic – Alexa Global Rank (AR)
• Buzz Depth – Moz’s Open Site Explorer Page Authority (PA)
• Buzz Scope – Moz’s Open Site Explorer Linking Root Domains (RD)
• Social – Twitter Followers

Note: Google Pagerank has been discontinued. As of May 2016, Google removed public visibility to their Pagerank metric.

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Scroll down past the list to learn how the rankings are computed and what the metrics mean as well as the answers to many more commonly asked questions.

Don’t see a blog you think should be on here? Let us know.

Note: If you are viewing this on a mobile device, some metrics might be hidden in order to make the list more readable. To view these click the “+” next to the rank of a particular blog.

Top Nonprofits Blogs (Summer 16)

FAQ :: Can you explain the metrics? 

• Traffic – Alexa Global Rank (AR)
  Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.
• Buzz Depth – Open Site Explorer Homepage Authority (PA)
  Predicts the website’s homepage ranking in search engines based on an algorithmic combination of the number of sites linking to it, the total number of links, Facebook shares & likes, tweets, and Google +1s.
• Buzz Scope – Open Site Explorer Linking Root Domains (RD)
  The number of unique root domains containing at least one url linking to the website’s homepage.
• Twitter Followers – Social Following
  Though follower counts aren’t a perfect measure of social media authority, they are certainly a great indication and are the easiest to understand and measure. These numbers can be found by going to the primary twitter pages associated with a blog. If a blog is associated with multiple accounts on a single social network, we only count the largest as this eliminates inflation caused by duplicate followers.

FAQ :: How was the list computed?

1. Over 400 blogs were reviewed in a preliminary screening to determine if they meet the criteria of posting frequency, and definition of a nonprofit blog.
2. Around 300 blogs qualified.
3. Data was collected for each blog from all 4 measured criteria (i.e., Alexa Rank, Open Site Explorer Page Authority, Open Site Explorer Linked Root Domains, Twitter Followers).
4. A composite rank for each blog is determined by averaging each blogs relative ranking for each of the measured criteria.
5. The top 150 blogs were published.

FAQ :: Are these metrics reliable?

Once a blog meets the topical criteria, it is objectively measured by 5 website metrics that are difficult to cheat and relatively consistent across all blogs. The metrics aren’t perfect, but it is the best formula we’ve found thus far. Check out Moz’s analysis on the reliability of Alexa and Compete traffic analytics. While imperfect, there isn’t a better alternative outside of the time consuming process of getting several hundred bloggers to all use the same analytics software and participate in reporting data (impossible!).

FAQ :: Why aren’t there any large nonprofit organization blogs listed?

For the time being, we have chosen to keep this list focused on blogs targeting the nonprofit sector as a whole and not just the interests of a single organization. We may create a separate list for these org’s blogs at some point in the future.