Business and Marketing

The operator of .org launches a new top-level domain that serves as a validator for nonprofit status.

Nonprofit organizations that tenaciously compete for funding and donations can now register for the new top-level domain .ngo as an imprimatur of their status. The domains are being offered through a program called OnGood administrated by the Public Interest Registry, operator of the .org domain.

Why get an .ngo domain if you already have a .org address? It's a seal of approval, says Dave Stewart, VP of sales and marketing for OnGood. “Dot-ngo is a validated space. Nonprofits apply for it and we validate that they are bona fide nonprofits and NGOs before we give them access to that domain,” he says. “They then also become part of the OnGood community, where they can build pages to showcase their missions and talk about their projects to allow them to raise money. We provide them with a ‘Donate' button.”

Registrants get the .ngo and .ong domains as a bundle—the latter handle being the Romance language equivalent of NGO. Public Interest Registry estimates that there are some 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. that qualify for the new domain.

“The Internet has given NGOs a much-needed platform to promote their missions, but the landscape has become increasingly cluttered, making it difficult for people to determine which organizations are truly trustworthy,” says Public Interest Registry CEO Brian Cute. “Credibility is one of their biggest challenges.”

According to the Blackbaud Charitable Giving Report, online giving was up 8.9% in 2014 compared to an overall increase of only 2.1%.

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