Site Meter is yet another free web-based tool that I recommend to nonprofit organizations.  This is in keeping with the rule of thumb that free advice, products, and services make it possible for nonprofits to lower the risk of trying new technology - but that in the long run you'll have to pay real money to have precisely the right tools for supporting your mission.

The platform that I am using for this site, Blogware, provides a traffic monitoring tool as part of the package, but the reports are issued (when things are working correctly, which is not always) only once a day, rather than in real time.  In addition to filling the need (or whim) for data on demand, Site Meter provides breakdowns on the length of visits, number of pages visited, entry pages, and exit pages.

Blogware and Site Meter measure traffic differently, which is currently confusing but may also turn out to be an advantage, once I figure out the exact nature of the difference.

The number shown below is the sum of
Blogware's report of "distinct hosts served" between the day I launched this blog (3 January 2005) and the day I started experimenting with Site Meter (23 June 2005)

plus
Site Meter's real time report of the "total number of visits" since I started using it (23 June 2005).

I wouldn't encourage anyone to live or die by these numbers, but for nonprofits that are interested in outcomes measurement, a tool such as Site Meter can provide some insight about what sort of impact their web sites are having.