Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Popularity Metrics!

This slide came from a presentation by Rashimi Sinha that I stumbled upon and is focused on a different topic, but I pulled out this slide for "Popularity Metrics."  It connected with some thinking about metrics for measuring blog success and some comments from Stephen Downes:

Measuring "your blog's outcome" is ridiculous. It's like measuring 'friendship'. measuring 'reflective moments'. As Beth Kanter says, "numbers and data alone are almost meaningless." I don't think they get a lot more meaningful even if you add them to qualitative data.

I'm sure Stephen would say you can't measure popularity either ...

Catherine Carey riffed a bit in the comments about measuring friendship:

In addition to "best friend" other words for 'friends' include:

Good friend
Fair weather friend
Old friend
Dear friend
Friend of the family
Instant connection
Love of my life
Confidant
Someone I know
Acquaintance

These 'friends' are not simply gradations of friendship. Though that may be one way to think of measuring. It seems to me that we make judgments about our relationships with people when we call them an acquaintance, a confidant or a dear friend. The relationship differs among the three.

Thus it is with blog outcomes and learning. If my blog is about making friends or putting information out in the world my outcomes differ from a blog that seeks to encourage commerce.

I wanted to circle back to where Stephen and I disagree.  I think there is some usefulness in combining numbers with qualitative reflection on how to improve your blog. Whether you want to make money or educate people or just deepened your own learning -- setting some realistic benchmarks or goals, figuring out a way to determine if you reached them, and reflecting on why or why not - can lead to continuous improvements in the quality of your blog writing. 

Liz Strauss, from Successful and Outstanding Bloggers dropped a comment in that post and I wanted to highlight it here because she said so much better than I ever could:

I think that paying attention to what's happening using both sides of our brain, using our heads and our hearts, is the way to go.

No, numbers to don't tell us about people or relationships, but they point out patterns and sometimes reveal information that we won't consider or even recognize if we don't use them.

Humans have a natural tendency to count what we care about and to disregard what we don't. Metrics help us -- if we let them -- to keep a balance on what else we might look at to be curious about.

Nothing is ever wrong with being curious. :)

Catherine Carey notes in a comment in this thread: "Outcomes measures should be designed to help you make decisions, choices and judgments."

Thank You Chris Blow for Cleaning Up My RSS Mess!

Chris Blow writes a blog called Unthinkingly

If you been following this thread, I was prompted to explore blog metrics in this post after reading what Avinash Kaushik had to day on the topic:  The blog metrics he identified were:

• Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)
• Unique Blog Readers (content consumption – Unique Visitors & Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)

I discovered that I had problem figuring out how many total feed subscribers and the trends over time because I had four feeds (three built into the typepad blogging platform) and another one in feedburner which offers the stats tracking feature. 

I asked the question on my blog:  Is there some way to consolidate the feeds into so they can be tracked in feedburner and not disrupt current subscribers (make the unsubscribe and resubscribe?)  Chris Blow, one of my readers, was kind enough to send me clear instructions that quickly solved my problem:

The trick is with something called "redirection".

Your blogging platform typepad runs on a server.  The server works like a butler: visitors come to the door, the butler answers, the visitor requests a file, and the butler gives it to them. (or gives them a polite apology and a 404 message).

So if you are doing analytics it means that the butler makes a little note of everything that goes out the door (including the address of who asked for it, and exactly what they asked for). Then you can gather up all those scribbled notes of the floor and make pretty graphs.    And if you are doing redirection it means that you whisper in your butler's ear: "whenever a visitor asks for file X give them file Y."

You can do redirection for any file that you can serve ... including your feeds. ... So we need to tell the server that when someone asks for any of your feeds on typepad, to give them the feed on feedburner.

Based on my research, it looks like there used to not be a way to do this, but now there is one built into Typepad.

 

Be A Citizen Reviewer for New Foundation Effort

Via Allison Fine

The Case Foundation is looking for some folks to serve as external reviewers for the first part of its new grantmaking effort focused on igniting citizen-centered community work across the country. And it's doing it in away that reflects a citizen-centered approach by involving people outside the foundation in every part of the process, starting with reviewing Letters of Intent (LOIs). 

The Foundation has received some great applications from a number of people across the country. They're particularly interested, however, in getting applications from people who've been directly and personally involved in community-based public work, deliberation, or collaborative problem-solving. They hope you can help get folks involved by sending this notice out to your networks, your friends, your colleagues, and everyone you know.

-----------

Dear Friends:

The Case Foundation is looking for external reviewers to assist with the first phase of a pilot grantmaking program that encourages citizen-centered civic participation. Given your experience and relationships, we thought you might want to apply; encourage your friends, colleagues or constituents to apply; or forward the announcement to others who might be interested.

First, a bit of background. Through this new grant program, the Foundation seeks to identify, support, and lift up some of the most exciting citizen-centered efforts that are bubbling up across the country. But, what also makes this program interesting is that the Foundation will not only be supporting citizen-centered efforts, but will be attempting to walk the talk of citizen-centered practice itself by involving the public in virtually every aspect of the process from creating guidelines to vetting proposals to making grant decisions.

The individuals the Foundation is now recruiting (and will commission) to serve as external reviewers will be participating in the first part of this process: Reviewing and assessing the initial "letters of interest" from hundreds of organizations and individuals across the country. More details about the position are attached.


This will not only be a fun and interesting opportunity, but it will give participants the chance to participate in one of the first efforts by a national foundation to "do philanthropy" in a way that is, hopefully, more transparent, interactive, and responsive.


Interested applicants should first read the attached job description and are strongly encouraged to review the Foundation's paper, Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement (www.casefoundation.org/citizens). An executive summary of the paper is also included in the job description.


The deadline for applications is Wednesday, May 23rd.

Interested individuals should send their resume or curriculum vitae and a brief statement (50-75 words or less, please) on why you want to be involved in this review process by Wednesday, May 23 to:

The Case Foundation
Attention: Kristen Cambell
kristenc@casefoundation.org

This looks like an interesting experiment to blend citizen journalism with philanthropy in the real world.  Speaking experiments and philanthropy, Lucy's post on Philanthropy 2173 the other day about Virtual Philanthropy Simulations is definitely worth a read.

NTC Day of Service: Reflections

Program Evaluation By Magic Eightball - Click to Play
Music by Stablom, "Something Dark" from ccmixter

I'm slowly blogging the posts, videos, and photos that I captured last week along with some reflections. 

For the past five years, I've coordinated the NTEN/NTC Day of Service and before that participated as a volunteer.   This year, conference attendees hooked up with local volunteers to help out 34 local nonprofits, including the Center for Community Change, the Genocide Intervention Network, National Student Partnerships, and Wilderness Technology Alliance.  Volunteers had the option to do a strategy consult and stay at the hotel or leave the building and go on-site. 

The Day Before the Day of Service is always a crazy blur for me because I'm generally in the office our local partner, along with Cheryl Hanback, generating the last version of the check-in list, name tags, and materials.  I'm even more of zoombie after the event because managing events takes a lot of adrelin.  I could barely utter two words let alone blog about it.  That's why I'm so happy to see the well-written article that Ali posted on the NTEN blog.

Although it was a little chaotic at the start of the event, it went off well.  We had a few no-shows, but we were able to match up folks on spot to fill in the missing gaps.   I heard good reviews from the volunteers and I'm hoping that we'll get some good feedback (both things that worked and didn't work) in the evaluation survey  I'm working on right now.  If you participated and are reading, you are also welcome to drop a comment to this post.

The strategy consult option was new this year, partly in response to people who wanted to participate, but didn't want to miss out on the afternoon affinity group sessions on Wednesday.   

Here's some thoughts of improvement for next year:

• Must do a better job with data management.  No more excel spreadsheets and cut and pasting from email.  I'm feeling a case study coming on ...
• I think it might help to do some more vetting for the strategy consults and match the pairs in advance.   Also, phone calls to local organizations prior to the event might help with no-show rate.  A few strategy experts told me they would have liked to prepare or look at the organization's site.
• I'd like to see the software skills coaching include a broader array of software applications, although limiting it to very common software in use in nonprofits helps with making the event more streamlined.  It might be nice to have some Penguin end-user skills coaching or blog coaching ...

Eric's magic eightball evaluation video was fun to make, but there was a point.   I've been thinking a lot about the use of video as an evaluation or documentation tool.    I was only able to  interview volunteers.  Ideally, I would have captured some video from the organizations as well.

Peter Deitz of First of Its Kind Network - Click to Play

Peter did a strategy consult with a local organization.

Susan Tenby and Karen Thomas of TechSoup - Click to Play

Susan and Karen were on a twenty-person team, led by John Nuno of Cisco, that worked with homeless clients in a community technology lab at the Wilderness Alliance.   

Deborah Finn's thoughts here.

Tools for gathering data for blog and web page metrics

Photo by Andy Welsh from flickr -  cc "by" license

Last week, there was a useful exchange on the NTEN Affinity group for Nonprofit Bloggers around the question "What metrics do you use to measure success for your blog?" 

The question awoke my inner research geek (a long time ago I worked as a research analyst and focus group moderator).  That geek has been sleeping for at least 15 years and when it opened it eyes it found a whole new world.   It goes into the topic of social networking analysis ...huh?  Yet another paradigm shift, emerging field, and something else to research. 

So, let's start with the familiar before we depart into the twilght zone ...  the listserv question was focused on blog metrics and primarily as traffic and driving traffic!  There were some good points made about the need for context (outcomes and audience), some assumptions made about bloger RSS reader behaviors, and a very short list of tools. 

Are blog metrics all about traffic?

" ... traffic is an important metric to evaluate a blog.  After all, if no one is reading the blog, there isn't much point to writing it. I've found traffic largely comes from search and RSS subscriptions."

What about out-bound and in-bound links?  What rankings and influence? I'm remembering something that I heard Robert Scobel say at last year's Global s Summit in London.  "A blogger's influence should not be measured by in-bound links (like technorati), but out-bound links.

Well, we're gonna have to think about other types of metrics, particularly for awareness raising and blog fundraising.  How do we think about those?  How to we identify and analyze them?  How to we interpret them and put them to use to plan and improve our campaigns?  How do we collect and crunch them?

In the category of learning and forgetting - always remember metrics alone are not very meaningful -- they need to be put into some context.  Context to me means outcomes, intent, and audience. No matter what type of metrics you trying to figure out ... that's a universal metric standard.

Going on with the traffic metaphor, there was a comment that building traffic takes time, "particularly from RSS subscribers who must be convinced that the blog is worth investing the time to read and therefore subscribe."  This comment got me thinking RSS subscription behavior and will do a seperate post on this.

There was a brief list of metrics generated:

• Avoid  "raw numbers" per month of readers
• Review repeat versus unique visitors to get a sense of how loyal your readers are
• A question about whether or not to use the "donate" link in every blog post

The next issue  raised, "How do you know how many people are reading/subscribing to your blog?"  generated a short list of blog and weblog stat programs and some other measures:

• StatCounter
• Sitemeter
• Google Analytics
• MyBlogLog
• Subscribers in Bloglines or via feedburner (Does anyone know how I can get a total number of subscribers that is accurate with several different feeds?) 

In addition, I also look at the Technorati ratings, but with a huge a grain of salt (thanks to my smart blogher friend, Amy Gahran.  Most recently, I found a research geek's guilty pleasure list:  "Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking" which should prove to be a whole new sandbox to play around in.

Now, let's enter into the land of paradigm shifts.  My aussie blogger friend Dave Wallace pointed me to this article from Micro Persuasion:  The Imminent Death of the Page View.  Here's the gist:

Underneath the Internet advertising economy is a key metric that dictates how properties are valued and how online media is bought and sold - the page view. While it's not the only way to measure the health of a site (time spent and unique users are among the others), it's still very popular. Unfortunately, the trusty page view is on life support and I give it four years to live.

And while he is talking primiarily about commercial sites and metrics to determine ad dollars, he goes on to tell us more about why the pageview is dead:

The page view does not offer a suitable way to measure the next generation of web sites. These sites will be built with Ajax, Flash and other interactive technologies that allow the user to conduct affairs all within a single web page - like Gmail or the Google Reader. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The widgetization of the web will only accelerate this.

The tombstone generator can be found here (I have a huge collection of these tagged npflickr in my bookmarks .. he he ... want to waste some time ... don't click here.

UPDATE:

Okay, so that's the bleeding edge .... blog metrics and beyond.   What about web site metrics?  I just noticed on the NTEN site a great post about a pointer to survey that is collecting information about web site benchmarks (slightly broader than metrics) ... benchmarks are about web site use, staffing dedicated to web sites, the tools used, budgets, growth projections, and how these areas are affected by the type/size of the nonprofit.