The value of outreach for the Environmental Services Department

So what exactly is the Clark County Environmental Services Department’s return on investment for the five websites it plans to spend tens of thousands of dollars on in the next three years?

In case you missed it, the Clark County council approved on Tuesday a $150,000, three-year contract between the department and Formations Design Group, a local web development company. Keep in mind that Formations isn’t guaranteed that money. This is an on-call contract for services Clark County’s web folks can’t provide.

Chuck Green, local government watchdog and member of Clark County Citizens for Good Governance, pointed me to WorthOfWeb.com. The website does pretty much what it sounds like it does: attaches a dollar figure to analytics like your site’s number of visitors, page views, search engine optimization, etc.

Disclaimer: I don’t know how valuable these numbers are and wouldn’t use them as the only metric to determine the worth of a website. My web developer friends tell me it’s very difficult to determine the exact analytics of a website other than your own.

Courtesy of WorthOfWeb.com.

That being said, according to WorthOfWeb.com, Columbian.com is worth about $1.6 million. They even give us a cute little badge declaring us a captain of the Internet.

Compare that to the five websites Clark County claims it needs $150,000 in external services to maintain.

ClarkGreenNeighbors.org: $434
ClarkGreenBiz.com: $238
VolunteerClark.com: Value too low to be calculated
SaveOrganicScraps.com: Value too low to be calculated
RecycledArtsFestival.com: $115

For a grand total of $787, which means for every dollar of value, the Environmental Services Department will spend about $190.