In my experience, the approach seems to vary considerably — according to the specific legal interpretations by the particular organization’s legal council. I’ve had some clients who were perfectly happy to build a single site, but — behind the scenes, categorize each page so that page counts could be reported. The page counts would then drive a calculation of how much money had been spent on each.

Other orgs have two sites, but they are tightly coupled and share a back-end database and share content. For example, the Democratic Leadership Council does this with its main c4 site and affiliated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute: http://www.dlc.org.

And others are more comfortable creating completely separate sites for each legal entity. Compare www.americanprogress.org and www.americanprogressactionfund.org

There are many considerations, and I’d recommend getting qualified legal guidance for your planning activities.

Andrew Cohen
Project Director
Forum One Communications