Effective ROI of Nonprofit Technology Story Telling Techniques

Photo by Sean Drellinger

I'm working on workshop curriculum and a presentation about ROI and Nonprofit Technology for Legal Services Conference.  I'm focusing on Part 4:  Effective Ways to Make Your Case.   Numbers alone won't do it.  You need stories.  That brought me to the question of "What are effective ROI storytelling techniques?"

Ed Mitchell posted a summary from the online community ROI report that looks at effective communication related to online community projects. (The full report is here) I wonder if all or some of these are relevant for nonprofit technology?

• Report Direct Revenue: Report on direct revenue from Community Members.
• Establish Comparative Costs: Compare cost of the same result or activity in other media, like blog post comments vs. the cost of hosting a focus group.
• Communicate Cost Savings: Cost savings by hosting community, including support call deflection. Word of mouth vs. traditional marketing vehicles.
• Compare value of Member vs. Non-Member: Track and compare activity of subset of community member vs. non-member activity, including activity outside of community.
• Highlight the Direct Connection: Communicate the disintermediation opportunity for businesses, especially if your business is not directly selling to customers. Their online community creates a connection with the customer during and after the sale being handled by channel.
• The 24/7 Focus Group: A subset of your community will be giving real-time feedback on initiatives, products and company activities. “Human voice compliments the numbers.”
• Evangelist Creation and Mentoring: Communities attract your biggest fans and give them a place to connect with others, in the process creating new evangelists.
• Communicate the Cost of Not Being Engaged: Including increased marketing spend, and the threat of competitors engaging prospects and taking existing customers.
• “Value for all Departments” Communicate the broad value back to the management
  

What are your techniques?  Do you have an example of a good ROI story telling?

Comments

[Jonathan Trenn]

Beth

You may want to take a look at ooVoo (http://www.oovoo.com). It's an online telecom service that's free, easy to use, and can have up to six people conversing at the same time. And it is both text and video based. I think it's great for collaboration for small groups. Disclosure: I'm doing some work for them.

Here's an example of it at work:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2008/01/21/online_collaboration_technologies_new.htm?disqus_reply=93243#dsq-message