 Hello again, for those of you who are just joining us, this is a TechSoup host webinar and today our webinar topic is Unlock the potential of .org for your organization growth and success. I am very interested in hearing this topic because I want to know is it important so you're going to learn that today. My name is Arita Simons. I'm your webinar host today and I'm also the webinar producer here at TechSoup. If it's your first time, let me show you how you can engage today. Of course you already know you are mute, so feel free to tag your questions in the Q&A. We have lots of team members to answer your questions. You can feel free to type them in the chat as well. We're going to email you the video replay within a couple of days, probably tomorrow because we're just fast like that. So if you learned something cool today, which I think you will, go ahead and share it on your social media. And when you share it, hashtag us at TechSoup. If you need to close caption, go ahead and hit that CC button at the bottom of your screen and you'll be able to use a closed caption. And I'm going to go ahead and introduce our guest speaker today. This is Tony. He has over 25 years experience in marketing and product management. Tony is the senior director of product management, senior director of product marketing at public interest registry. I'm going to get that right. He's responsible for the dot org and the family of domains to meet the needs of mission driven organizations and helping the dot org community maximize their impact on the communities they serve. So Tony, welcome and thank you for being here. I'm going to turn this over to you. Thank you. Okay. So I was going to share my screen. Welcome everyone. My name is Tony Connor director of product marketing at public interest registry. My role is to make sure that the domain is meeting the needs of the community. So I just like to say thank you to TechSoup this opportunity to speak to you all and please ask questions. And comments would be even better actually sharing some of your experiences with dot org and what you do with your websites. I'm joined by Kendall Rowe, our director of marketing. So if there's any hard questions on marketing, Kendall is going to answer those as well. But more importantly, what we want to do, what we want you to get from this presentation is why dot org is the domain of choice for nonprofits and mission driven organizations and go through some options on how you can use dot org, either for your main website, or for some other campaigns or other initiatives as well as your main websites as well. All right, so setting up your online presence is obviously really important. And the domain name, considering the only a few characters is one of the most important parts of your branding. So even if you're just starting up and you're just getting some supporters on social media, you should actually think about what you want your website to be down the road plan for success. You have some options. You don't have to build a website initially, but if you're going to be successful, you're going to need a website. The thing about dot org is it signals your purpose and your mission to your organization. And it gives you legitimacy. The big organizations are on dot org. And if you're part of that community, there's a knock on effect in terms of legitimacy and trust, which is one of the most important things that org actually gives people. It's a silly little example, but my neighbors were very worried about speeding on our road. They contacted the police and the local authorities, but they also got fairway drive.org. They didn't set up the website initially, but after talking to the authorities and things, they did a local campaign that signs out fairway drive.org had all the information on the options in terms of calming the traffic. And, you know, it was a great example of planning ahead, setting up your online presence, and actually having a resource there, not just for the immediate neighbors but a lot of other people in in streets in our neighborhood and now looking at traffic calming as well so it's a, it's a nice little example of planning ahead for success. Why.org. There are millions, as I said, established brands on dot org and that legitimacy does rub off on small, medium and large organizations as well. At the moment there are 10.8 million domains on the org. And it's one of the original domains. So 1984.com.org.net.gov.edu were launched. And the first org was in 1985, mitre.org. So that's almost 40 years ago, everyone assumes the internet is new, but it's been around for 40 years. And dot org is trusted. We do a brand survey every year for domain customers in general, but specifically nonprofits as well as well and dot org is consistently the highest score in terms of brand trust. And most importantly visitors. It's not just the people who set up websites on dot org. It's the people that come to your website. We did some research, probably three years ago, and 75, 77% of visitors to website trusted.org the next one was dot com at 60 something. So dot org naturally gives trust to what you're doing and your website as well. Don't be scared to ask any questions. Expanding your reach. So I pounded on about legitimacy. And it's not just visitors. It's all your stakeholders. So it's donors, supporters, brands organizations, other stakeholders, everyone that either worked with your organization to make a success, or people you want to reach out to to make your organization success. It creates confidence and does attract volunteers, activists, and obviously donations. Websites are a key part of fundraising and or can really supplement that as well. And the other thing I would say the dot org community is actually a community. And we as the owners of dot org, we do a number of things on social, but we also have the dot org impact towards every year. We recognize the dogs that are making a difference in their community. You don't. You don't need. You've got to be using all for at least a year. So it's not a play to get people to get a dog. It's really highlighting the community and who is successful. Recognizable dogs. The obvious thing in the middle there habitat for humanity habitat.org is a fantastic branding piece of their branding. It's their name, it's short, you're able to remember it, and people know that habitat.org is the place to go to volunteer. World Wildlife Fund, their main website is World Wildlife.org, but WWF actually redirects their main site, which is a lot easier in terms of social and people remembering it as well. United Nations, not a lot of people know this there is actually a domain called.int that was actually introduced specifically for organizations like like the UN. But the UN actually decided to go with.org they just felt it was more related to their community. Red Cross. That's probably the biggest in terms of usage of.org and immediately recognizable and then days for girls international days for girls addresses period poverty around the world. And they actually have a whole army of people making reusable pads. And when COVID happened, they actually pivoted and started making masks, which was a great example of using current capabilities but also flagging that and highlighting it on their website as well. Okay. So there's a couple of questions there. Joe, what's the website of choice to use a nonprofit organization. I think.org is the obvious piece, partly because it was designed for nonprofits, but the actual community itself is full of nonprofits. So if you join.org you're actually there with other nonprofits highlighting their good work but also your good work as well. And Mr anonymous. Yes, we did start at one Eastern. As well. Okay. So the obvious question is, I've already got a website. Why should I worry about.org. Well, first of all, if you're a nonprofit or a mission driven organization, you should be on.org anyway for your main site. But also a new.org domain can be used for so many things. Specific marketing campaigns. So if there's something in the news that you want to highlight and fundraise off, you can use a dot org domain specifically for that fundraise initiatives are obvious things that you can use.org for as well and advocacy efforts, a lot of nonprofits. You've got the 501 C three piece that's doing their good work, but they also engage with governments and other associations in terms of advocating for the work. Impact statements. If you you're applying for grants, it's actually quite useful to have a specific page or website with your impact statement on that means you can highlight what you need in terms of that grant application. And obviously have links to your main site, but you're highlighting the specific thing you want to want to do and then volunteer management. Because it's very complicated. You're getting your volunteers excited and moving, but also it's not always appropriate to have that next to your fundraising opportunities as well. So all these things can be used. John's got a question now. How should an organization select their domain name. I think it comes down to two things. Your mission and what you want to impact and your branding. Branding is normally thought of a nonprofit in nonprofit context, but it's just as true for all sort of organizations. If you can get a very simple domain like habitat.org, then you can relate it to your brand, but then also it's a lot easier to actually use to use both online and even offline. My example of fairway drive.org. There's lots of signs on our road with the website. So having a short domain related to your brand is key, I think. All right, so I want to do all these things. What are my choices? The obvious thing is to put a page on your existing site. And that's absolutely fine. It preserves your search engine ranking. When visitors go to that page, they can also look at the other things you're doing. And it preserves that brand. The look and feel of the website is consistent. That sort of thing. Unfortunately, a very long page name can actually be a bit of a confusion on social and in the offline world. It's very hard to put really long URLs on posters. But also, if you want a specific call to action for a visitor, you want to focus on that, and sometimes having a page on your website, the main website can be distracted, distracting as well. So Joe, you have a question and Megan's going to answer it. That's probably better than me doing that. So page on existing website, perfectly fine. Micro site. Micro site typically is one to three pages and focuses on a very specific thing, whether it be a campaign or initiative. I've used natural disaster as an example here, which is a bit unfortunate because we always use natural disasters, but it's a good example of when you want to move quickly. And you want to get something out very quickly. And there are very specific things you want people to do normally with fundraising. But it can be other things as well. Because you control it, you have two options. You can get a new domain, or you can do a sub domain off your current one. So the example here was disaster.example.org. You've got your branding in the domain there, although search engines do actually view it as a new site. So you're not going to get the advantage of search engine rankings. And that's true for a new domain as well. But it comes down to what your objectives are. If you need to move quickly, search engines aren't always the thing to do. Sometimes it's social, sometimes it's very specific things as well. And then the third option is to redirect. And this applies when you start up or when you're doing something specific for a campaign. If you get example disaster.org, you can redirect that to the page on your website. So you get all the advantages of a very short domain. But it does preserve some of the advantages of your website, or it can go to the microsite, or even it can go to your social pages. The branding research we do highlighted that 67% of nonprofits nowadays actually start on social media. So if you get your domain name, you can actually forward that to your social media accounts, setting up a website or a way of talking to supporters very quickly. Just checking the questions. PIR, the people behind.org. We have actually operated.org for 20 years. Started in 2003. So it was our 20th birthday. And.org is the cleanest domain space in the industry. And a lot of that is actually the users of.org, the organizations that use.org are all doing good in the world. And that has a knock on effect of the name space itself. But we actually do a lot of things to keep. So we focus on quality. We don't do big discounts and get lots of domains that are going to get used. There are specific things we do that are really quite important. When you operate a domain name globally. It has to work the same in every single country, which means you have to engage governments, tech companies, nonprofits, and other groups as well. And to, if we get a complaint about a website, it's actually really quite hard to navigate that in terms of doing action. However, PIR has zero tolerance, for instance, for CSAM, child sexual abuse material. And we have consciously taken the decision to take action when we get those sort of complaints and sort it out later. We also work with some trusted notifiers as well. So the Red Cross, for instance, whenever there's a natural disaster, there are a lot of domains that are not set up by the Red Cross, but include the words Red and Cross. So what we've done is set up an arrangement with them. They'll notify us when it's a domain they haven't set up, and then we'll suspend it as soon as practical. And then finally, we are actually a nonprofit. We're owned by the Internet Society. The Internet Society is a nonprofit that's dedicated to keeping the internet free, open and accessible to all. So what they do is, depending on the country, invest in infrastructure, for instance, or they do a lot of advocacy in terms of privacy laws, that sort of thing. And I would suggest if you go to internetsociety.org, they do some great work as well. How to register your domain. So the link in the slides, which you can click on when it comes, simply log into your TechSoup account, go to that link, and you can search for your domain name. Now, it's great getting a domain name, but you need to work out what your website's going to look like. We PIR have something called the .org Learning Center, but also TechSoup have a great little article on how to build a website in six key steps. And I would recommend going there because it focuses you on what you want to say, what you want to include. Joe, you've got your website through wix.com. If you acquire .org from someone else TechSoup, then you can transfer, you can do a couple of things. You can set up the domain name system to point your .org to where your website is hosted, or you can use TechSoup services for hosting and other things as well. And that's one of the great things I think about PIR and TechSoup, we're both invested in trust. So the services that TechSoup offered are high quality and trustworthy. And as I said .org, we use trust in every single sentence when we put out things as well. Okay, that's all I wanted to go through actually. Are there any other questions? Thank you Joe for your activity. And thank you Kendall for internetsociety.org. Let me ask Kendall or any of the other panelists, is there anything you wanted to mention that I missed? No, I think we're good. Okay, that's great. So thank you very much. We are active on social media. And if you ping us, Kendall and her team will respond. We do believe in amplifying the .org community. As I said, we have the .org impact awards and we do feature .orgs on our main website as well. And LaKeisha, yes, the slides will be sent tomorrow I think. Yes. Well, Tony, this was great. I mean, I learned a lot and we don't have to do the whole hour for us to get there. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here because you hit every nail on it. I was even writing notes and I love the examples that you gave throughout the presentation. So getting a lot of thank yous in the chat and from John, the information, and it was also education. You made a lot of educational points. So I want to thank you and your team members for being here. And then I'm Megan and Corey from TechSoup for being in the chat. Somebody will put that in the chat and then we'll close this out. Tony, if you have any final words, here's everybody. This is a whole team that was behind the scenes answering your questions. Wave everybody. So Tony, I want to give you final words and again, please come back soon. We're so glad that you guys became a pharmacist. Well, thank you for the opportunity. As I said, one of the things we don't do enough is talk to the .org community or the potential .org community. So I do appreciate it. Awesome. Have a great day everybody.