The List of Change

I'm pleased to be part of the "List of Change."  Geoff Livingston has the details here and Chronicle of Philanthropy here.

If you have been reading this bog, you know that I have often asked "What are the best hard data points and qualitative insights that help you improve your blog?"  In the comments of that post, Kynam Doan
pointed out that I was missing one important metric:

There's one more benchmark that you may be interested in - your performance in relation to others in your market space.

My initial reaction was - yuke, that's competition.  Then I thought about it for a couple of months.  At SXSW,  KD Paine  shared some insights when asked a typical metrics questions - How many comments is a good a number?

She couldn’t answer that because you’d need to have some industry or nonprofit benchmark. And, if one does not exist - trade that information with your colleagues.

So, when Geoff Livingston mentioned the possibility of adapting some code that could index bloggers performance within a sector, I said - wow, this could help stimulate some reflective questions that could lead to improving the quality of our blogs.

So, that's why I opted in.   I don't think in terms of competition.  I think of sharing information so we can collectively make a difference.  It's working in a networked way ...

If you want to think about ways to improve what we you're doing and our sector as a whole, then come join the List of Change.  Let's have the collective conversation.

While this is currently being hosted on the livingstonbbuzz.com URL, Geoff Livingston's professional blog’s domain, the ultimate intent is to move the list to the Chronic of Philanthropy’s site when it launches its redesigned philanthropy.com. Thank you to Peter Panepento and the Chronicle team for serving as our partners in this endeavor.

If you think that this is not a good idea, please share your views in the comments.  The dialogue is valuable.  If you want to participate, you can opt in to List of Change.

Thank you!

Update:

In the comments over at Geoff Livingston's blog, Brian Reich left an interesting comment:

I think the idea of a list of the most important change blogs is great, and this will be a terrific resource. Thank you for leading the charge to put it together. But, I think this list only has limited value. Not every post on these blogs is useful or focused or even change related. Not every blogger talks about only change in the context of nonprofits or philanthropy or social change.

It would be even more valuable, I think, to develop a ranking/rating method/system and using it to aggregating the most important POSTS about change. I work with and speak to nonprofit leadership, social change advocates, corporate leaders and media all the time about these issues. They are overwhelmed. A list of blogs for them to follow or experts for them to chase alone is not all that helpful. People who are looking for guidance, and information, and support on these complex issues should be able to find the 100 articles that they should read, the posts that address specific issues or coordinate. It will come from this list of blogs, no doubt, but there are also other bloggers or thinkers who might have a single post that is a ‘must read’ or a conversation that people should be a part of. You won’t be able to find that easily from just a list of the important blogs.

Just a thought.

I think what Brian is describing is very valuable, but not the purpose of the change list with benchmarks.  I think Brian is describing some sort of newsmastering of the content with some automated filtering tools.   Of course, it would require some tweaking and the ability to customize to individual's preferences, levels, and interests.   Also, would it require that each of these bloggers has an RSS by category? And, I think it would require some human curating.

Another colleague pinged me privately and asked where the conversation would be taking place?  I think that's up to us to have the conversation.

 

Comments

[Wendy Kloiber @learningashland]

So how are you indexing performance? (You being you, this has gotta be about testing recipes for the secret sauce and then sharing the good versions so we can make them at home, right?) That's going to be pretty fascinating to follow along with.

I just got back from the Chronicle/Philanthropy site, where I threw your work (lobbed it, really; it deserved a much more elegant trajectory) at Mal Warwick, who I read faithfully for years but the literal "My, my" over there ruffled my feathers a bit.

Off to bed. Wonder what cool thing you will do tomorrow?

[Fundraising Detective]

Hi Beth,

I think it's a great idea. One of the real stengths of the non-profit sector is it's willingness to share best practice and co-operate with each other. Hopefully this site will help those blogging on the sector to do the same.

I set up my site as I was frustrated at the lack of good UK based blogs on fundraising and wanted to collect the best of the web (mainly from you guys over the pond!) and give it a UK context.

Hope the project takes off and is a big success,

Craig