Policy-focused organizations ultimately want to see their work change how society addresses important issues. Towards that end, they need to see that their work influences how key audiences like the media, researchers, and policy/legislative communities think about and work on the issues the organizations care about. I think it’s clear that to succeed with those audience today organizations need to be very prominent online– they need their ideas, their people, their prescriptions to be widely circulated, referenced and discussed.

To explore ways to gauge online prominence, I look at the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation from several angles. They’re a little different from each other in their political outlooks(!), but roughly comparable in size - with annual budgets around $35 million, and between 150-200 research staff. (Note: I think these and other prominence metrics are most relevant as comparative tools – either to judge performance against a comparator, or against oneself over time.)

Some of the metrics I looked at, and links to show examples of the various queries, include:

Online pervasiveness
Links-in
I used Alexa “links-in” to measure the numbers of other web sites that link into a domain. (I think this is a better measure than Google hits, which counts own-domain links.) Heritage is substantially more linked-to than Brookings:
Brookings (BI): 380, Heritage (HF): 1200

Alexa site ranking
I used this ranking from Alexa to indicate overall level of traffic to a web site - with #1 Yahoo.com, being the most popular site on the web. This Alexa data is based on web usage by people with the Alexa toolbar installed. Heritage is a good bit higher than Brookings.
BI: #53,000, HF: #22,000

Alexa traffic
From Alexa you can also compare web traffic across two sites, and I found Heritage to be about two times the traffic level of Brookings. This is less than the three-fold difference in 2003/4, but recently fairly constant (see the Alexa graph below).














The “According to…” Index
I searched on Google using the phrase “According to the (organization name here)”. (Kudos to Dave Witzel!) The data shows Heritage to be more cited in this manner.
BI: 680, HF: 930

Key people
I Googled the organizations’ Presidents’ names for hits on web pages updated in the past year, and Strobe Talbott from Brookings is substantially more prominent online that Heritage's Feulner.
BI: Strobe Talbott 71,000, HF: Edwin J. Feulner 16,000

Overall, Heritage is substantially more pervasive across the whole web by these measures - with the links-in and Alexa site ranking being particularly compelling.

Scope of their content
I Googled for key terms within each organizations’ sites to gauge the amount of content they have on various key words (this is a neat Google tool!). This says nothing about the quality of their content, but can provide a comparison of relative content effort.

Both organizations are close on these topics:
Iraq: BI: 6800, HF: 8100
Israel: BI: 560, HF: 620
Hillary Clinton(!) BI: 52, HF: 63

Brookings focuses relatively more on:
Education: BI: 32000, HF: 9900
HIV/AIDS: BI:230, HF: 61
Environment: BI: 31000, HF: 6300

While Heritage has put more effort into:
Health: BI: 7000, HF: 19000
Social security: BI: 970, HF: 5500
Taxes: BI: 3600, HF: 9500

So, picking the timely issues of social security and Iraq, Heritage has been relatively more active in creating content. Disappointingly, on the critical issue of HIV/AIDS, both organizations have substantially less content than they do on other key issues, with Heritage well behind Brookings.

Mainstream media
I searched the online services of these mainstream media (MSM) outlets, for cites over the past three years:
Nytimes.com: BI: 500, HF: 190
WSJ.com: BI: 380, HF: 170

Brookings has about double the MSM “mentions” as Heritage in both these two publications.

The Blogosphere
In the growing network of blogs that is the blogosphere, Heritage is actively using blogs to promote their ideas. Brookings is, so far, only talking about blogs

I searched on Technorati for the URLs for both organizations, and found:
BI: 180 links from 130 sources
HF: 920 links from 720 sources

Heritage has been running its “Policy Weblog” (time to just call it a blog?) for about a year, with daily posting of opinions and analysis, and has recently launched a second blog on Tax policy. (You might call these half-blogs as they do not allow readers to post comments or support trackback).

Quick conclusions?
Overall, I think Heritage is succeeding better than Brookings in building the prominence of its ideas and its work online, including on the blogosphere. This is evident in the wider linking in from other web sites, heavier overall web traffic, and wider blogosphere prominence. While Brookings has about double the prominence of Heritage in two major (online) “mainstream” media outlets, that’s only a (small and shrinking?) piece of the web.

These groups no doubt have different objectives and priorities for the impact of their work. Still, I think this wide different in online prominence noted here would encourage Heritage to try to do more of whatever has been working well for them, and to inspire Brookings to use the web more aggressively. I’ve not gotten into prescriptive ideas here, but it’s a rich topic.

There are pros/cons to each of the metrics I used here, which is why we generally seek to use several of them and reach conclusions based on the cumulative picture.

Further work
If I were either Brookings or Heritage, I might be interested in assessing the online prominence of several of my top people and/or most current research topics. I'd enjoy hearing other ideas/critiques.

Notes:
I collected all the data used here on various dates in April and May 2005, and rounded all numbers to two significant digits.

Find more information about:
Brookings: Wikipedia, Guidestar
Heritage: Wikipedia, Guidestar