Charities can now register websites under a new digital domain: dot-giving. The Public Interest Registry — the nonprofit that operates the popular dot-org domain — created the new domain with the goal of making dot-giving a home for online fundraising.
The group launched the new top-level domain Friday as a resource for mission-driven entities and individuals, including nonprofits, donors, social enterprises, and the social-responsibility arms of corporations. As with dot-org, nonprofit status or other qualifications are not required to register a website with a dot-giving domain.
One aim is to allow fundraising entities to clearly signal their intent through their web address. Individuals or organizations could, for example, use a dot-giving address to directly route visitors to a charity’s donation page.
“Dot-giving gives nonprofits another tool in their toolbox, essentially, to help streamline their fundraising efforts,” says Jon Nevett, president and chief executive of the Public Interest Registry. “This is an opportunity, as a complement to their main site, for them to make their fundraising more efficient.”
Individuals could also create websites with the dot-giving domain to run their own fundraising campaigns. Nevett says he imagines people using personal dot-giving websites to solicit gifts for charities in honor of their birthdays, for example. Corporations may also want to register a dot-giving website to showcase the impact of their social-responsibility programs.
In December 2021, the Public Interest Registry announced its plans to offer nonprofits and other mission-driven entities more options in its “dot-org family of domains.” In July 2022, the group opened registration for three new domains: dot-charity, dot-foundation, and dot-gives.
More than 10 million websites are already parked at dot-org, and new top-level domains make room for more organizations online. It’s not unlike creating a new area code when a region runs out of new telephone numbers.
“Dot-org is the centerpiece and always will be because that’s what people think of when they think of the mission-driven use of the internet,” Nevett says. “But there are opportunities for others who want to have a simpler name.”
Nevett says it’s becoming more common for nonprofits to own more than one domain name and use them for different purposes. Domain names vary in price across the hundreds of registrars that sell them but generally cost $10 to $30 annually. Affordability for these domains is a key issue, which led to massive protests that stopped the sale of the Public Interest Registry in 2020 to a for-profit company that critics feared would unreasonably raise prices. In an email to the Chronicle, Nevett wrote that his group “works with registrar partners to ensure prices for the dot-org family of domains remain reasonable for end-users.”
