Australian Charities Slow on Dot NGO Take-Up
19 May 2015 at 11:58 am
Australian charities are lagging behind the rest of the world in the take-up of the much anticipated new internet domain tag, dotNGO.
The US based Not for Profit operator of the .org domain world-wide, Public Interest Registry, said a number of Australian Not for Profits have already joined, including both high profile organisations such as Cancer Council, Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Greystanes as well as a range of smaller organisations.
However, it appears that only 16 Australian Not for Profits have signed on to the dotNGO domain so far.
After three years of development, PIR released the new .ngo and .ong domain bundle for NGOs and Not for Profits to increase their online presence in April.
“Since its inception, the Internet has been a forum to share information and connect with others, giving NGOs a much needed platform to promote their missions. But the landscape has become increasingly cluttered, making it difficult for Internet users to determine which organisations are truly trustworthy,” Brian Cute, CEO of Public Interest Registry said.
“After speaking with more than 16,000 fellow NGOs and NFPs in more than 40 countries, we learned that credibility was one of their biggest challenges.
“Over the past three years, we connected with thousands NGOs all over the world – including hundreds of thriving Not for Profits in Australia – to learn about their online pain points.
“There are hundreds of thousands of NGOs in Australia serving the public interest, but undoubtedly, many are struggling to reach key audiences or generate necessary funding simply because of their online presence.
“Australia has a vibrant Not for Profit community and we hope that OnGood will help them extend their online reach.
“The overall consensus was that NGOs need to be found, be credible and raise funds, so we created OnGood (.ngo and .ong domain bundle) to be part of the solution."
PIR said that unlike .ORG the new .NGO is a closed domain, meaning that organisations will need to show that they are registered as a Not for Profit to get a domain.
Public Interest Registry operates the .org top-level domain — the world’s third largest “generic” top-level domain with more than 10.5 million domain names registered worldwide.
In 2012 the campaign for global control of a new dotNGO Internet domain for charities intensified with two Not for Profits joining forces in an application to control the new domain.
The UK charity Article 25, which had intended to compete for the .NGO domain against the US-based Not for Profit, Public Interest Registry instead supported the PIR bid.
The two previously competing organisations had been calling on Australian NFPs for their expressions of interest to join the campaign for the rights to operate a new dotNGO domain.
