HAAS center

What:

The HAAS center for public service’s web page (haas.stanford.edu) offers a variety of information about the community service comings and goings of the Stanford campus. 

Useful Aspects:

One useful aspect of the HAAS center webpage is that the Homepage immediately siphons off different readers into useful categories like “students”, “faculty” and “alumni” by placing links for these groups on the homepage. This allows the HAAS center to write for different groups, and to present more pointed information to those groups. This also allows the center to provide a ton of different information while still maintaining an easy to use site.

Another useful aspect of the site is that once you click through to one of the constituencies pages, the navigation bars change. For example, when you click through to the “students” page, a new navigation bar appears on the left of the page with links to pages students specifically might be interested in. These links include things like “calendar 08-09” and “programs at a glance” etc. However, the site maintains its overall navigation by placing the other group pages links right at the top of the page.

A third useful aspect of the HAAS center site is that it provides A TON of information about service on the Stanford campus. It’s a great place to go if you want to learn about public service classes at Stanford, to find out base level information about public service fellowships, or to read a recent news article about some of the work a particular group is doing on campus.    

Problems:

The HAAS center website offers so much information that even with the easy to use navigation buttons it can be hard to find what you are looking for on the site. This could be remedied through some sort of search tool on the site.

Cardinal Nonprofits Advantages:

While the HAAS center webpage is a great page with few “problems”, it has a critical lack of information about the nonprofits on campus. It has pages for some of the larger organizations, like Stanford College Prep, but it doesn’t even list the campus nonprofits anywhere on it site. Furthermore, while this page has a ton of information about service on campus, there is no central “volunteer opportunities” page. They suggest that if you are looking for an organization with which to volunteer you should contact the center and meet with the HAAS center staff. Due to the lack of a “student groups” section and a “volunteer opportunities” section, the HAAS center will be more of a helpful supplement to Cardinal Nonprofits than a direct competitor. The “students” page on the HAAS center website could actually be a great place for a link to Cardinal Nonprofits.

 

Stanford MyGroups

What

While the HAAS center site doesn’t offer a list of the nonprofits on campus, it does give a link to Stanford MyGroups. Stanford MyGroups is a site that offers information about all of the student groups on campus, and has information for those groups about banking, funding and event planning. The part of the webpage that is pertinent to Cardinal Nonprofits is hidden under a couple of other pages. It contains a list of the registered community service groups on campus. Each group name has a link next to it to a subpage that contains a short description of the group, basic information and officer contact information.  

Useful Aspects

One useful aspect of this site is that it offers basic information about each organization in a kind of quick and dirty way. It can be a great place to go just to see on a kind of base level what each nonprofit organization on campus is about.

Another useful aspect of the site is that the organizations are listed in alphabetical order, which makes finding the organization you are looking for easy.

A third useful aspect of the site is that the names of the officers in charge of the groups are clearly labeled on each group’s site. After talking to people at the HAAS center about MyGroups, they said that this information is the most important and useful function of the page. The nonprofits can’t get funding from the school unless they keep the officer information up to date, so all of the people listed are actually the people currently working on each project.

Problems

While there are a couple of redeeming aspects of the MyGroups page, it has many more problems than useful aspects.

The largest problem with this site is that it is really hard to find. Once you find the MyGroups main page the only way to find the service organization list is to click on “advanced search” below the search box, click on a drag down menu and search through the listings to “community service”. This process isn’t that difficult if you know what to do prior to going to the site, but there is almost no chance that a first time visitor would find the list of service organizations.

Another problem with the site is that the descriptions given about each of the organizations were written by the organizations themselves. This means that some of the descriptions are two or three paragraphs long, and some of the descriptions are as short as a sentence. This makes it difficult to compare between the various organizations.

A third problem with the site is that it doesn’t offer the actual contact information for the officers. It only gives the names of the officers, and the link to Stanford Who, an online contact book for Stanford.

Cardinal Nonprofits Advantage

The MyGroups site offers some of the same information as Cardinal Nonprofits, but the two sites are very different in a variety of ways.

 One key difference between the two sites is that Cardinal Nonprofits offers information about the volunteer opportunities each organization provides, while MyGroups does not. This information can be a critical for Students as the decide whether or not to actually contact the organizations.

Another difference between the two sites is that the group descriptions in Cardinal Nonprofits will all be written by the same person, and won’t vary in length and content as much as they do on the MyGroups site.

A third difference between the two sites is that Cardinal Nonprofits will actually offer the officer contact information on each groups page, so readers won’t have to go to another site and search for it.

A last major difference between the two sites is that Cardinal Nonprofits entire site will be focused on Stanford nonprofits, while the “community service” section of the MyGroups site is just a small portion of the information they offer. This will make it much easier to find each organization on Cardinal Nonprofits’ page than on MyGroups.

Individual Organization Webpages

What

A lot of the organizations discussed on Cardinal Nonprofits have their own individual sites.

Useful Aspects

These sites are useful because they offer more information about each organization than Cardinal Nonprofits will. Some of the pages have huge databases of pictures, others offer calendars of events that update every couple of days, and still others have features like a running fundraising calculator and directions to the site where they do their work.

Problems

One of the problems with only having individual organization sites is that there is no central place where Stanford students can go to browse through the nonprofits and see if they find one they are interested in.

Another problem is that if people don’t already know about a cool nonprofit on campus there is virtually no way that they are going to find out about it simply by searching through the Stanford website.

Cardinal Nonprofits Advantage

Cardinal Nonprofits can serve as a jumping off point for Students to go and visit the organizations pages. Cardinal Nonprofits and the individual group’s pages will have more of a symbiotic relationship than a competitive one. Cardinal Nonprofits will never be able to offer as much information about every group on campus as is offered on the group’s pages, and the groups might never be able to net volunteers if they don’t know about the organizations.