Your Favorite Philanthropic Insights
by Michael Hamill Remaley, SVP, Public Policy & Communications
This piece was originally published as the feature article of the January 2016 issue of the New York PhilanthroPost Policy Edition.
A trip to Google Analytics may be the most fascinating rabbit hole you will ever encounter. In preparing our year-end reports, I spent a lot more time than I expected getting a better understanding of philanthropynewyork.org’s click-throughs, behavior flows and bounce rates. It really is amazing to see, over the course of a year, what our audience was into.
One of the data points that gives me the most satisfaction is the click-rate for pieces appearing in the Insights column of the New York PhilanthroPost. Aside from job postings, they are consistently the most popular items on our site and the most frequently clicked by the well-over 5,000 subscribers to the New York PhilanthroPost.
Looking at the analytics, I was very interested to see which of the 64 Insights pieces we published last year had the most clicks. These were the top five:
- Six Subway Stops, Worlds Apart by James R. Knickman, President and CEO, New York State Health Foundation.
- Young Professionals, Get On Board by Erin J. Law, Vice President and Counsel, Morgan Stanley
- Frontier Thinking: Staten Island as Innovation Lab by Betsy Dubovsky, Executive Director, The Staten Island Foundation
- More than Test Scores: What Young People Need to Succeed by Hilary Rhodes, Senior Research and Evaluation Officer, The Wallace Foundation
- How We’re Addressing the Overhead Fiction by Darren Walker, President, Ford Foundation
I tried to draw some sort of conclusion about the pieces that had the most clicks, but they don’t really seem to have much in common. They are written by philanthropic leaders at a wide variety of different kinds of funding organizations. The subject matter ranges from community health to education, from young professionals getting more involved to organizational approaches to improving nonprofit sustainability. I actually find it heartening that our readers are interested in such diverse topics.
I was also immensely flattered to see that one of my own pieces, Is Overhead Having a Moment?, came in at number three of all the opinion pieces we published last year. So as PNY looks toward more public policy work on indirect costs and the OMB Guidance on Overhead, I am happy to know that our readers remain interested in that work.
Looking back over the 2015 Insights posts, I was struck by the generosity and thoughtfulness of all the authors who contributed their thinking to the New York PhilanthroPost. There were so many big ideas, practical solutions and inspired editorials.
I love that our members see the New York PhilanthroPost as an important resource to generate conversation with a wider audience. I hear so often from our writers that they get many emails from colleagues and strangers continuing the conversation. That’s is everything we want the Insights column to be.
If you have an idea that you would like to share with New York PhilanthroPost readers or feel that there are important topics that we should be focusing on in the column but that we haven’t given enough attention, please email us at editor@philanthropynewyork.org.