Web Search Engine “google”

The very first action nowadays almost every researcher has at the commencement of a paper is to search online for a definition or, simply, to “google” it, either the topic or the concept or the theme that has to be researched. In this regard, the theme to be treated in this paper, according to the web search engine “Google”, typed in literally as: “what is fundraising?” produces an approximate amount of 104.000.000 results.

Now, if we narrow the research filter by adding to the sentence “what is fundraising?” the word “online”, having therefore the following question: “What is online fundraising?” the number of results decreases in an 80%, providing an estimation of 21.000.000 of results.

Still, targeting a more concrete aspect of the topic here presented, a) fundraising, b) online fundraising and finally c) software for online fundraising (for nonprofits), the result sinks to only 1.380.000, a merely 1.3% of the initial research.

These numbers should not obviously be utilized as a statistical demonstration. The fact is, the reality of the online software for fundraising nowadays is only a small tool, a tiny way of carrying on the activity of fundraising itself. The fact is that web engine search and online services rule most of nowadays personal, social, cultural, intellectual and economic activities. Therefore questions of this type arise: Is fundraising online software used and operated, mirroring the Google results, only in the 1.3% of all of the nonprofit organizations? Is it a good tool for the fundraising activity? Appropriate? Effective? Necessary?