by Daniel Akst

Some nonprofits use the Internet as an adjunct to their work; some use it as their office, fundraising agency and mission central, combined.

Ask moveon.org, the not-for-profit web site that mobilizes on behalf of liberal causes, just where the operation is based and you’ll get an ambiguous answer.

“It’s an interesting question,” MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser says by cell phone. Pariser himself, for example, works out of Portland, Maine. But MoveOn (www.moveon.org) has employees in about 10 different cities, he says, most of them working from home and of course, making use of the Internet. There simply is no central office, yet according to Pariser, MoveOn boasts more than three million members.

MoveOn, which isn’t the usual type of 501(c)3 (generally defined as a tax-exempt organization created to carry out charitable, educational or religious efforts) is nonetheless a good example of a new breed of nonprofit organization—one for which the Internet is central to their identity. Of course, the more traditional nonprofits are all over the Web nowadays; the Internet is useful for fundraising, promotion and donor communications, among other things. But organizations like MoveOn are different because they exist primarily on the Internet, using this new medium as an essential venue for their activities.

Roger Craver, a well-known philanthropic fundraising consultant, says the Internet has opened the door to all kinds of innovative nonprofit newcomers who may someday challenge the biggest established organizations in philanthropy—many of which, in his view, are still too complacent about the new medium. One reason may be that, for established organizations, building up a Web presence requires extra staff and expense, but Web-only newcomers can get up and running on the cheap. Just consider the story of Monica and Gilles Frydman.

When Monica was diagnosed with a form of breast cancer known as ductile carcinoma in situ, she and her husband Gilles were devastated. Monica had already been through two heart operations and a difficult pregnancy. Now their doctor scheduled surgery for a radical mastectomy and told them chemotherapy would be required afterwards, as well as bone, brain and liver scans to search for distant metastases.

This was back in 1995, and the despairing Frydmans turned to a new source of information—the Internet. After checking some electronic mailing lists dealing with cancer, they began to doubt the treatment advice they had been given, and shortly before the surgery, demanded a second opinion. A specialist confirmed what they had suspected: the earlier treatment plan was misguided, and the implied prognosis much too dire. The couple’s experience not only spared Monica Frydman the needless surgery; it also led Gilles to rescue the mailing lists that had helped her. He decided the postings in these lists should be archived for the benefit of others desperately in search of information about a life-threatening disease. “At the time,” he recalls, “there were four lists.”

Today, through a nonprofit organization called Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR), Gilles Frydman maintains and archives more than 200 such lists serving as a conduit for questions and answers, information and, most of all, hope for 75,000 subscribers, most of them people with cancer and their families. Virtually the entire effort is sustained by volunteers. “That’s what the Internet allows you to do,” Gilles says.

ACOR (www.acor.org), shows how much the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry in founding new nonprofits—and how much more expensive it is to maintain an Internet nonprofit than it looks. Entering its second decade, ACOR clings to life thanks to the energy and commitment of the 51-year-old Frydman. With an annual budget of just $150,000, ACOR manages to serve its subscribers for a remarkable $2 per person per year. But Frydman works mostly without pay, and ACOR doesn’t have a single employee.

Unfortunately, a site like ACOR cannot be run merely by plunking a cheap computer down on somebody’s kitchen table. ACOR maintains a bank of servers in New York’s borough of Queens, and they account for one of its biggest headaches: high electric bills. Electricity costs more in New York City than in most of America, but Frydman and his ACOR associates need quick access to their equipment, and New York is where they happen to live. The other big expense is computer code. ACOR pays programmers on an hourly basis to create lots of custom software, which is necessary if its web site is to serve its users well. In the long run, Frydman says, ACOR needs about $1 million a year to fund its operations. Unfortunately, he says, “we are terrible at doing fundraising.”

Next page: Politically oriented nonprofits now often facilitate organizing, fundraising and reporting online. For some, the Internet is central to their identity.

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