Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

What's Your Nonprofit's Social Media Measurement Strategy?

 
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Many nonprofits have are actively exploring social media - from dipping in their toes into the water with a low-investment experiment to jumping off the cliff.   One problem is that many do not formulate a measurement strategy and are at a loss to justify their investment of time and resources or reap insights to improve what they're doing.  

A couple of recent reports and frameworks in both nonprofit and for-profit areas have been published recently and provide some useful ways to think about how to measure the ROI as well and measure effectiveness.

Altimeter Report:  Social Media Analytics

Jeremiah Owyang from The Altimeter Group along with  John Lovett  and Eric Peterson both of the Web Analytics Demystified firm have published an open research report that advocates for a standardized framework of the following business objectives and use of metrics to measure them.  They define this process as "social media analytics."

• Dialog: involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its own
• Advocacy: activation of evangelism, word of mouth, and the spread of information through social technologies
• Supporting: customers may self support each other, or companies may directly assist them using social technologies.
• Innovation: The business objective of innovation is an extraordinary byproduct of engaging in social marketing activity.

Social Media Analytics Frameworks and Tools

The report presents a framework for measuring social media effectiveness against those business results and presents standardized metrics.   The report also makes the point that there is currently no single tool that can capture and measure all aspects of social media.  They found that most companies (and this is true for nonprofits) are using multiple solutions, including commercial tools and free ones that require a lot of manual intervention (e.g. cut and paste).   The report warns that organizations should not define their measurement strategy by the features and capabilities of the tools.  It also warns against collecting lists and lists of meaningless data that is not benchmarked against business objectives. 

Measure Everything: Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It?

Perhaps more relevant for nonprofits is this report specifically for nonprofits.   Last week when I was Society for New Communications Research conference, I ran into KD Paine, who shared a copy of an ebook by Shabbir Imber Safdar, author of the TruthyPR blog and Shayna Englin of Englin Consulting LLC entitled "Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It? Analytics and Measurement Techniques" (free to download).   Jordan Viator had a guest post by the authors.  

The ebook includes a case study of the UNICEF-USA Facebook page based analyzing a year's worth of data.   Over the NTEN blog, they've summarized some of the interesting findings.   What I found most useful about the report are pages 13-15 that answer the question "What type of measurement program should your nonprofit have in place?"   Even with the recent changes, I think there is a wealth of information in the report and well worth reading.

The report offers a good step-by-step measurement process for Facebook:

1.) Define Objectives: The authors urge nonprofits not to skip to the tactics, but advocate a program of measured experiments that reap learning!  They suggest that nonprofits begin with a fill-in-the-blanks sentence as follows:

"We know our Facebook efforst are worth further investment if ....."

And suggests some answers:  If Facebook fans become - donors, volunteers, take advocacy actions, or share content. 

2.) Define and Track the Funnel:  They suggest clearly defining and tracking the marketing funnel.   On the recent panel I did at NTC called Social Media Housewives, I talked about the importance of the funnel.  I asked the audience how many of them were tracking the funnel for their social media efforts (out of the 100 plus people in the room, only a handful raised their hands.)

3.) Describe the Tactical Variations for Testing:   This is the list of tactics that you will test using particular metrics and reap insights about how to improve it.   This approach helps get away from the data collection for sake of collecting data problem or social media data trivia.  The e-book provides a great list of these tactics for Facebook Pages:

• Post Frequency
• Post Timing
• Post Content
• Voice
• Ask

I've been doing this for the past year with my Facebook Page and after a few months discovered the formula that seems to work for me.  The challenge, of course, is understanding what tactical suggestions will work for your audience and situation and what is a standard best practice.  This is the importance of doing these benchmark studies, such as the 2010 Social Network Benchmark study published by NTEN as well as the recently launched survey of nonprofit social media effectiveness from BridgeSpan.

4.) Determine Your Measurement Variables:    Some good advice about time segments for measuring which depends whether or not you're going back after the fact (archival) or creating an ongoing measurement program.   The latter is about determining how often you'll collect and compile data to review - weekly, every other week, monthly, or quarterly.    While weekly is ideal, it can be difficult for nonprofits with limited time resources.

5.) Set up Measurement Tool:   They are fans of the spreadsheet.  They suggest creating separate sheets for each of the metrics you'll be tracking, along with base data from Facebook insights.  (The latter can be exported into a spreadsheet)

6.) Actionable Decisions:   Remember, if you don't take the time to look and think about the data you've collected, it will be a big waste!    Decide how you will adjust what it is you will do based on looking at the data.

This framework is a good one that can be applied to other social media channels and will be still relevant for Facebook despite the recent changes.

What is your nonprofit's measurement strategy for social media?   What does your spreadsheet look like? What insights have you discovered from measuring your social media strategy and reflecting on the results? 

NTEN #ONTC: Slides, Resources, and Reflections from ROI Session

ONTC Slides

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I just finished my session on ROI as part of the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference - a two-day virtual conference. 

I presented on  ROI and Nonprofit Technology.  My presentation is based on Chapter 3 of NTEN's book.   The chapter includes detailed checklists, case studies, and how-to steps for analyzing ROI  for nonprofit technology projects.  

I'm started with a very brief primer on ROI which provided a basic overview of the concepts.  But the real learning came from a couple of ROI cliff hangers that I've created.  Participants applied what they've learned the presentation and their own experience by the interactive features of the Webinar software to suggest ways to resolve a common ROI problem that nonprofits typically face.

The inspiration was Perils of Pauline where each installment ended with Pauline placed in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death but was able to escape at the beginning of the next installment.   I've created a couple of scenarios where IT staffers Paul or Pauline are faced with a typical ROI challenge.

The three scenarios included:

Episode #1;   Fondle the Hammer Syndrome.

His executive director wants to purchase Iphones for all staff.   Paul has to use ROI techniques to help the organization make the best decision.  

I was really surprised that this situation resonated - one would think that with the economy - shiny object syndrome would die a hard death.   But several participants mentioned they had just dealt with that problem.

Episode #2:   Lost in Translation

Peter and everyone staff has 12 monitors and have to do a lot of work that requires scrolling.  Everyone is frustrated.  Peter, the techie, writes a twenty page report to his executive director extolling the features of large screen monitors.  His boss says, "Why should we buy new monitors, our current monitors work just fine."  How can we help Peter use ROI to get new monitors?

Episode #3:   No Buy-In 

Pauline works for an organization that is using all manual systems - with an overtaxed copy machine - work grounds to a halt because important procedures/documents are hopelessly out of date.   Pauline specs out an intranet by herself and her boss says, "for that money we could hire a staff person."   How can we help Pauline and her organization reduce their frustration and get work done using ROI to find the right technology solution?"

If you want a good laugh, watch this one-minute clip of Perils of Pauline movie.

A Few Thoughts on ROI and Nonprofit Technology Cliff Hangers for the #ONTC

NTEN is hosting the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference - a two-day virtual conference taking place on September 16 and 17th.  If you are on the fence about signing up,  NTEN is offering up 25% discount.  Remember the whole conference will be archived, so you if you can't spend the entire two days online listening in real time, you can always download the audio files and listen later.  (I'm planning to download to my Ipod and listen while walking.)

The conference speakers are a veritable list of who is who in the nonprofit tech world and you get a free copy of "Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission."  You can register here.

I'm presenting on ROI and Nonprofit Technology on September 17th at 11:30 am.  My presentation is based on Chapter 3 of NTEN's book.   The chapter includes detailed checklists, case studies, and how-to steps for analyzing ROI  for nonprofit technology projects.  

I'm going to start with a very brief primer on ROI which will provide a basic overview of the concepts.  But the real learning (I hope) will come from a couple of ROI cliff hangers that I've created.  Participants will apply what they've learned using the interactive features of the Webinar software to vote or suggest ways to resolve a common ROI problem that nonprofits typically face.

So, think of the Perils of Pauline where each installment ended with Pauline placed in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death but was able to escape at the beginning of the next installment.   I've created a couple of scenarios where IT staffers Paul or Pauline are faced with a typical ROI challenge. 

What's your biggest ROI cliffhanger? How have you resolved it?

What do Maori and Gourma Creation Stories Have In Common With Social Media?

Michael Quinn Patton, an evaluation guru, visited the Packard Foundation yesterday.  I participated in a lively exploratory conversation about "How do you evaluate network effectiveness?" along with others on the Packard Foundation organizational effectiveness team.  I also had an opportunity to hear his thoughts on the state of the evaluation field, how it has changed and get a deeper understanding of developmental evaluation.

Michael Quinn Patton uses metaphors and stories to talk about evaluation in everyday language. He is a genius at connecting evaluation to other people's contexts.  As a result,  I had several "ah ha" moments and found a couple of connections for thinking about social media strategy - especially how we address culture change, social media measurement, ROI and the whole larger question of social media for social good.  

By way of this post and video, I'm sharing some of Michael Quinn Patton's thinking about evaluation. I invite you to share your thoughts and reactions in the comments.

But first, some context.   

Patton has written several books on the art and science of program evaluation, including Utilization-Focused Evaluation (4th ed., 2008), in which he emphasizes the importance of designing evaluations to insure their usefulness, rather than simply creating long reports that may never get read or never result in any practical changes. 

He is also the author of a book called "Getting to Maybe" about social change.  The big idea in the book is described below:

Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world’s hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. We tend to think that great social change is the province of heroes – an intimidating view of reality that keeps ordinary people on the couch. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion. The trick in any great social project – from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single Canadian city – is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, leaders, organizations and circumstance – between individuals and what Shakespeare called “the tide in the affairs of men.”

This is one to definitely add to the plane reading list and a theme of my talk at Mashable Conference on Friday.  

I'm not an evaluation practitioner, so I wasn't sure exactly whether there would be any connection to my work in social media.   What I discovered, is that through his engaging storytelling, I got inspired by evaluation. 

As Patton shared with us, the field of evaluation is dynamic.  When he approached updating the fourth edition of his book, he thought it would be just about updating the stories.   In the course of writing the book,  he realized the field had changed.  Most noticeably in the rise of cross-cultural, international evaluation program work. The question of how to adapt evaluation methods to other political and cultural systems in developing countries was big challenge because evaluation, over the past three decades, has been deeply rooted in the Western ways of thinking.

He then launched into a series of "creation stories" or "beginning" stories to explain the difference between traditional evaluation approaches and "developmental evaluation" (an evaluation of a program that helps you improve it.) 

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.  God saw everything.  Everything is good.  So the 7th day he rested.   How do you know what you created is very good?  What are you criteria?  What are the outcomes?  Aren't you a little close to the situation to make an objective assessment? His rest was greatly disturbed by these questions. So, on the 8th day he got up and created evaluation (hell.)

The above story is a metaphor for the traditional summative approach to evaluation - create something, then evaluate it's impact, but don't change the program.  He pointed out that this was very difficult to apply to programs in developing countries.  He realized it when started to look at creation stories in different cultures.

Maori in New Zealand Creation Story

In the beginning, father sky and mother earth - embraced.  Such a fierce embrace - only darkness was in between them.  Children were born into this space but they became unhappy and plotted to push the parents apart.  It became clear that they would have to join together and need the strength of the oldest.  A lot of bickering followed and failed attempts by the younger siblings.   Having observed failed attempts, the oldest said said they would have to put their backs into it - back against father sky and feet against mother earth.  The push the parents apart.  Father sky was crying - and that became rain.   Pushing apart parents, had exposed the nakedness of his mother.  He began to plant trees to hide her body.  They had never planted a tree before.  First they tried roots in the air, leaves in ground.  It failed.  They tried laying them on the ground.  Finally they succeeded by planting the roots in the ground.   They then grew forests and the eldest child became the god of the Forrest. 

Patton points out that they were not sure what they were trying to get too.  They didn't know what a forest looked like.  They had a general sense, but had to go through a listen, learn, and adapt process before getting it right.   This is the essence of developmental evaluation. 

Gourma Creation Story

Gourma is in Africa.  Here's their creation story:

A group of people like Adam and Eve were there in the beginning.   In the mist, a grass hut appears with no doors or windows.   They surround the grass hut.  There are noises and they are frightened by it.  They spend the day debating - and end up not doing anything because they can't decide.  Frozen by fear, they go to sleep.  The next morning, the hut is there.  The noises continue.   The uncertainty is making them crazy.  They love the place where they are and they don't want to leave.  They decide they have to open up the hut.   They cut a door.  Out comes the clan, the medicine people who have knowledge.  They thank them and share their wisdom.

Developmental evaluation involves asking a lot questions.  This story is about the scariness of asking questions, looking at a program, campaign, activity and ask are we prepared to learn about it?  Do we stay in that place believing it is okay?  The story is a metaphor about the fear of asking questions and the knowledge that comes with it.

I also see this as a metaphor for the fear of engaging from social media.  What if we get a negative comment?  What if we loose control?  That fear keeps nonprofits from engaging. 

Some other takeaways from his talk about evaluation:

• Evaluation needs to be relevant and meaningful.  It isn't a horrible alien thing that punishes people and makes judgments.
• Evaluation should not be separate from what we do.  We need to integrate evaluation thinking into our everyday work so we can improve what we're doing.  Evaluation is not an add-on task. 
• Need a culture of inquiry, sharing what works, what doesn't.  A willingness to engage about what to do to make your program better.
• Evaluation is not about getting to a best practice that can be spread around the world in a standardized way and to answer the question, "Is everyone following the recipe?"
• Program development has to be ongoing, emergent.   It isn't a pharmacy metaphor of finding a pill to solve the problem.
• Real-Time Feedback/Evaluation is different from development evaluation which is directed towards a purpose to do something.  Police use real-time evaluation to allocate their resources.  For example, if crime increases in a neighborhood, they know how to allocate patrols.
• Developmental evaluation speeds up the feedback loop. 

The other conversation I participated in was focused on network effectiveness and how to evaluate it.   Stephanie McAuliffe captures is must better than I did, so go read her post. Patton observed that thinking about networks has changed. He shared one framework that describes what the network does:

• Networking/information sharing/learning
• Coordination
• Collaboration
• Partnerships

The framework assumes that networks can move up or down through these phases.  The question is when do the networks move to these other levels?  He talked a lot about ebb and flow - that a network could be doing "information sharing/networking" and that you can measure it by looking at how people are connecting and their trust.  

The connection here for me about social media is the notion that it isn't just a "campaign" - where you flip on or off switch.  It's about this ongoing building of relationships with the people in your network.  What you measure is engagement and trust.

Also, there is a catalytic moment when the network needs to scale into coordination or collaboration to take action.  He describe how some networks work while in the "networking" phase - they imagine different scenarios or "fire drills."  Another metaphor was disease - going from chronic to acute.

He also mentioned the importance of someone playing the role of being a network weaver who captures the lessons/stories in real-time.  Someone who doesn't own the purpose.

Evaluating network effectiveness looks at two different criteria.  Outcomes as related to purpose.  Is the network focused on problem-solving, networking, connecting fragmenting programs, a campaign, sensing network, etc.   The other criteria is process - what are the tasks and processes. 

What connections are you making between social media and the thinking of Michael Quinn Patton?

Guest Post by Deanna Zandt Measure THIS! An intro to social media ROI

Measure THIS! Social Media ROI

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The following is a talk I gave about ROI for Social Media at the 2009 Social Tech Training in Toronto, ON. The audience was a group of 90 or so people from Canadian non-profits.

When I first started thinking about metrics for social media, I wanted to start out reminding our group about some fundamentals of the sphere. Oh, and with a flying lemur, because Sam Dorman had a flying lemur in his presentation earlier that day.

Introduction

I've got a little exercise to get you warmed up. Are you ready? Take a minute and jot down all of the breakthroughs in communications history you can think of.

No, no, seriously. Write 'em down. Or type 'em out, if you're like me. I'll wait.

Did you think of smoke signals? That's one of my favorites. Yep. Papyrus, printing press. Though, if we were playing Boggle, you'd have to scratch that one off, because everyone says that one. Radio, television. Morse code. The Internet.

Now tell me: In whose hands have those tools ended up over the last few millennia? Who has been in charge of, and in control of, telling our collective stories?

This is why history needs you. We need you to create and share your stories.

Social capital

Let's talk for a minute about social capital. What is it? Just like monetary capital, social capital can be built up, spent, saved up, invested. It's like a giant combination of influence and karma. The tricky part is, of course, measuring it.

According to Tara Hunt, author of a fabulous social media marketing book called The Whuffie Factor, there are a few things that comprise your, or your organization's, social capital:

• Connections: Who do you know? Not just important or famous people, either. Are you connected to lots of different kinds of people who can complete different tasks?
• Reputation: What are you known for? What do people say about your expertise?
• Influence: Can you move groups of people, small or large, to take some action?
• Access to ideas, talent: Beyond your own skill set, do you have ways of reaching out to others with talent and knowledge?
• Access to resources: You may not be able to fund a particular project, but do you know people who can? Do you have ways of generating physical support?
• Potential access: Will your access to resources and talent stay static in the future, or will it continue to grow?
• Saved up favors: Were not writing down every good deed, but do people remember you for the ways that you help others? This is incredibly important. Is your own generosity with your social capital part of your reputation?
• Accomplishments: What awards have you won? What concrete recognition papers or articles published, etc have you received for your work?

Authenticity

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to dealing with your social capital. First of all, your organization, based on its mission and staff, has a unique voice in the world. Even if there are tons of people doing similar work to yours, you are still the only group with your unique perspective. This works to your advantage in social media, because your authentic voice is your most respected and valued voice. Forget brochure-speak — this is a world of conversations.

The other thing to remember is that a lot of social media culture is built on the "gift economy:" the notion that it's a good idea to do things that are just good ideas. There's no expected return when you do someone a favor, or when you take time to share research for free. You realize that it's making the whole environment richer with your unique participation — you don't expect anything else from it.

Which leads me to the next point: one-way streets go nowhere in this world. If you're constantly posting self-referential items and nothing else, you're not going to win a lot of support for the work you're doing. This isn't a broadcast medium; this is a place to engage with your community. (A good rule of thumb, for those getting started, is to post 30% of your own material, and 70% relevant-but-nothing-to-do-with-you material.)

What people are up to now

On Facebook:

• According to Non Profit Social Network Survey, 80% of respondents have a staff person dedicating 25% of their time to social media
• 40% have raised money, BUT: a good chunk have raised less than $500 in last year

Why? Don't forget this incredibly important quote, ever:

It's still all about building relationships, telling your story, and taking potential donors through the process of cultivation, stewardship and solicitation

– Betsy Harman, on Beth's Blog

So, how are people using Facebook?

• Groups are good for personal communications, or smaller issue/action needs
• Pages are good for larger organizations, brand identities

(More on this: http://mashable.com/2009/05/27/facebook-page-vs-group/ )

Causes:

• Help spread the word
• Measure success through awareness, not dollars
• Majority of Facebookers are younger still
• Build an identity

Credit: Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

What about Twitter?

Twitter's pretty useful for a lot of aspects. You can get the word out, sure, but you can also:

• Get buy-in or advice on new projects
• Share others' info relevant to your work
• Find like-minded folk
• Connect with media

It's up to you to go looking for the conversations you want to have. You can easily set up searches for relevant names (of your staff people, spokespersons, etc.), titles of publications you've produced or articles that you're mentioned in, and topics that are relevant to your work. You can then save those searches as RSS feeds, or in the application you use for Twitter. Another tip: put in URLs that you want to follow to BackTweets.com, and keep an eye out for who's tweeting.

But! That's not all! Then you'll take time to respond to those people: you'll thank them for talking about you, or you'll direct them to a relevant article (that most likely doesn't reference you directly), or whatever the case is. It's gardening, in a way: you're cultivating community by spending time with the people in it.

Here's a great interview that I did with Elana Wolowitz from Wellstone Action on their use of Twitter.

So how do I measure this?

Good question! Just kidding.

My friend Beka referred me to this fabulous 28-page Social Media ROI report from Peashoot (scroll down, it's on the left — you have to give them your email address to get it). All the info covered in the report applies to commercial, for-profit enterprises, but there's a lot to be applied to the non-profit world as well.

One of the biggest takeaways from the report is that it's important in social media to not just consider traditional ways of measuring success. This is not about dollars raised, for example, as a direct measurement of the time you invest in having these conversations. There are other, more interesting ways — more qualitative than quantitative ways — to keep track of how you're doing.

Here are some examples:

• Satisfaction. Look at not just the number of people talking about your work, but start documenting what they're saying. Is it positive? Neutral? Negative?
• Authority. Are they coming to your organization as a resource, looking to you for expertise?
• Loyalty and trust. How about repeat performance — is this their first time dealing with you? How often are they dealing with you?

When working with these measurements, goal-setting becomes crucial. It's important to keep your goals very tight, direct and focused, especially when you're getting going. Choose timeframes that are small — having x positive conversations about your work per week. Also, keep your metrics, to start, within just a couple of services. Say that you're going to work on your Twitter presence for the next two months and then stick with it, rather than trying to spread yourself too thin across multiple services.

What about blogger outreach?

Charlene Li has a great graphic on measuring blogging impact from her 2007 report, and I can't say it any better than the Q&A that concludes this blog post that announced the report:

Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.

Q: What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a blog? A: Again, it starts with the goal of the blog. I strongly suggest that companies start with the goal, develop metrics that measure the attainment of that goal, and find ways to assign value to those metrics.

Q: But aren't blogs risky? How do you take that into account? A: We definitely take risk into account by generating scenarios that show the impact of low-likelihood but high impact events — such as a lawsuit.

Q: Our CMO/CEO/CFO won't let us have a blog until we can show him/her the definitive ROI of a blog. Help!! A: It's not an unreasonable request — they don't really understand the value of a blog and see just the potential cost and risk. By going through the exercise of defining and quantifying the benefits, costs, and risks of a blog, you'll be educating your C-level executives while also demonstrating the discipline that they expect.

Q: But this is heresy – you can't put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You've just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.

To explain. No, there is too much. Too sum up.

A few final thoughts to take away with you as you venture out into the wild world of social media ROI:

• ROI isn’t always about dollars. It's about social capital, and the goodwill and influence you're able to work with.
• The more specific you can get, the better. Make your goals and corresponding metrics direct and clear.
• Audience, audience, audience. Remember, this isn't a broadcast medium, this is a conversational medium. Find people that want to have the conversation with you.
• Ditch things that don’t work. The low cost of these tools allows you to easily abandon tactics that don't work. Don't think that this means you've failed– it just means that it's time to try the next thing.

Deanna Zandt is a media technologist and consultant to key progressive media organizations including AlterNet and Jim Hightower's Hightower Lowdown, and hosts TechGrrl Tips on GRITtv with Laura Flanders.

Bridge Conference: Social Media ROI: Mapping Metrics to Strategy

Bridge Conference Slides

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This week's theme is social media ROI.    That's what I've been thinking, speaking, and writing about and have also recruited guest posts on this topic.

I had an opportunity to lead a session on this topic at this years Bridge Conference. Over the past three years, I've been presenting on this topic, the thinking and practice has evolved from 'we can't measure social media or it doesn't yet provide a tangible return," to being able to have guidelines, metrics, and techniques for demonstrating the ROI. 

As KD Paine, the queen of social media measurement says, yes we can measure social media and here's how.

My presentation use s*x metaphors to explain some of the points.  For example, I used the quote above overheard and tweeted by Google Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.  It pretty much explains why so many people perceive that social media doesn't give a return on investment in the early stages.   There is a learning piece that has to happen first.  What David Armano has dubbed Listen, Learn, and Adapt.  That's the secret sauce.

I also pointed to Charlene Li's new report on engaged brands and the connection to financial performance.   She points out that deep engagement is what leads to these results, but also offers 3 different engagement strategies that can be scaled to capacity.  So, for example, making it possible for smaller organizations with fewer resources to use social media and still results. 

I still got heckled by skeptics (and on Twitter no less!).  

Some in the audience are impatient.  They shout:  "Show me the money!"    Given the pressures of the economy, the risk adversity to social media is not surprising.   Some simply won't investment unless they know for sure it can show immediate results.   It's hard for some to wait after 6-12 months of engagement to see dollars.  Insight and engagement are not as valued by some. 

I keep thinking of the advice offered by Charlene Li on whether investing in social media at some level is a yes or not question.   It's an either/or.

Doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something.
The optimal social media marketing strategy will depend on a variety of factors, including your industry. If your most valuable customers do not depend on or trust social media as a communication medium, or if your organization is resistant to engagement in some channels, you will have to start smaller and slower. But start you must, or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience.

There were a number of folks in the audience who have been implementing listening programs and spoke about the valuable insights and the early returns - like main stream press mentions, improved reputation, loyalty, etc.  

The most interesting part of the session for me was the fact that it was being "simulcast."  Perhaps not the right word.  My laptop was logged onto a webinar session and there a phone line in the room - so remote participants to see and hear the presentation.    What was cool was that one of the remote twitter users live tweeted the session, including my response to one of the skeptics.

juliepower #bridge09 @kanter saying it is harder to get past skeptics than adapt program. So start by listening, dip toe in, try, revise ..

In reading the Twitter hashtag stream for the conference, it was interesting to see that someone else who wasn't in the room or on the webinar, was also able to follow on.

askdebra @juliepower enjoying your insights/tweeting from the @kanter #bridge09 session. thanks from someone who couldn't be there!

This makes me think about the creative opportunities for learning and facilitating learning at conference with people in the room and remotely.

Meanwhile across town in DC, there was another nonprofit social media gathering taking place at Google Headquarters, there were also presentations and discussion on social media ROI.  Seems like a key theme there was: "we get importance of social media but how do we convince our boss/board?"

Crowdsourcing Your Professional Learning With Social Media: An Example

Kevin Gilnack workes for the Providers Council

Yesterday I did one of the Chronicle's Live Chat Discussions that was billed as "How Can Charities Figure out How Much Time and Money To Invest in Social Media."   The transcript is here.  I got flooded with questions and wasn't able to answer them all in an hour.  So, I wrote a post organizing all the questions and providing some short answers in a follow up post. 

There were a number of questions related to tools and tactics that I couldn't answer off the top of my head - so I decided to crowdsource them on Twitter asking for answers in the comments.   Kevin Gilnack came by and wrote terrific responses to those questions.  I'm elevating them from the comments because they make a great post.   This is an example of how you can use social media to crowdsource your professional development and learning.  Thank you Kevin!

How often should an organization post to Twitter or send out updates on Facebook? Is there a fine line between sending too much that's irrelevant vs. useful information?

Quality is more important than quantity. Make sure you're sending useful, relevant information, and do your best to spread it out. Also, try not to tweet about your own org on an average of more than once every seven or so tweets. You will also find your followers engage you more if you engage them. Replies only appear in your intended recipients stream and in those of people who follow both you and the recipient, so don't be afraid to have conversations with your supporters.

Talking about time, is there an application which would post an update on all main Social Networking Sites at once? I know of some but they would pick my Facebook personal profile instead of the Organization's Page I am admin of.

While I would suggest using automated content thoughtfully and customizing your message where you can, I realize that's not always possible. Ping.fm allows you to publish to your Fan Pages as well as many many other social networks.

Is the stigma of having fans or cause supporters with 'questionable' Facebook profiles true? Does it make the organization look too lax or less professional? We are a workforce development organization, and my superiors think it could be misconstrued.

I tend to be of the feeling that if someone wants to support your cause via social media, they should be able to. I'd argue it makes your organization look open, inclusive, and accessible. Especially in workforce development, as it's very possible that those with questionable profiles could benefit from your work. However, one thing you could do is include a disclaimer that acknowledges you accept anyone who wants to support your cause but that by no means is intended to endorse them or their content.

I would like us to get our organization on twitter, but i'm afraid that if i only "tweet" about fundraising events, people will tire of it quickly--any thoughts on this? other content i might want to tweet about?

Yes, they will lose interest quickly. Look beyond what you need people to do (whether it's giving money, volunteering, taking action, etc.). Before you can effectively get people to respond to those requests, and to build an audience in an opt-in system like Twitter, you need to show you're there to add value to your followers as well as advancing your mission. Talk about how your spending their money (e.g. the goings-on and successes of your programs), news relevant to your organization, RT posts from other orgs and individuals, and respond to interesting/relevant tweets your followers are sending.

What are some best practices on Facebook to generate followers and turn them into donors? Also everyone says that Twitter wont' raise any money. Is that true?

I don't have the stats to back this up, but anecdotally, I believe that Twitter can generate more giving than Facebook Causes. The gifts will generally be smaller, but with the right cultivation, you can use Twitter to raise funds. Here are some examples from Beth from November, 2008 - I'd be interested in hearing about more data and experiences myself .

I haven't done a lot of work with Facebook, but integration (linking from your website and enewsletter, writing about it in your newsletter, and sharing it through your other marketing and fundraising presence will help. You might start by importing your email list and suggesting they become fans of your page / join your group. Once you have staff and stakeholders on, ask them to invite their networks and share your page in their minifeeds. You can also find potential supporters by looking at the followings of aligned groups, though I'm not sure the etiquette for cold-inviting people.

What is the best process through social media of finding new organizations/individuals interested or working in your arena of social issues and connecting with them? I usually do simple Twitter searches and @replies, comment on blogs, but are there better ways or a general hierarchy of effective strategies?

I know that Beth has some great recommendations on paid listening services that she mentioned in the forum, but Twitter search RSS feeds to a Google Reader can provide some great insights. I'm not sure what you mean by simple searches, but think of all of the names, things, words that would help you find conversations of interest. You can also consider using the localization feature of Twitter searches. Finally, don't forget that Google Alerts have web and blog search features in the comprehensive mode.

We have blogs and forums on our site, but have a hard time getting people to comment or post anything in them. Although our members will comment and post on our Facebook and Twitter... how do we get them to jump from those sites, onto our site and start discussing there?

If it is a struggle to get people posting in your forums but are finding Facebook and Twitter conducive to conversations, it may be worth evaluating what the value of those forums are and if it might be more worthwhile to drive traffic there for interaction. However, you might find that posting something like "That's a great point, we actually have a thread going on this topic here [link to forum]" and/or asking key volunteers to do the same. You may get more comments on your blog by using Twitter and Facebook to drive people there, as well as by promoting posts in your e-newsletter and other outlets. Is the blog to buried from your front page? Also, I'm not sure if this is true, but one stat I saw said to expect 1 comment / 100 views (though I assume they pick up significantly after the first comment is left).

What tips or suggestions can you offer for partnering with FaceBook or LinkedIn to leverage their brand as a communication platform for alums, and the private companies policies for not sharing alumni data with the higher ed institution?

I've seen a lot of colleges creating groups on Twitter (http://twitter.com/higheredu), Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I'm not sure the value in highlighting their privacy settings, but if someone is reluctant to share their new contact info, asking for an email to invite them to a group, or providing them with a link to join, might be a good second ask.

PS from Kevin: These are just my two cents (most of it read here at some point - just google around the site and I'd bet you'll find great answers to most of these).

We're thinking about how human service agencies can use social media to engage clients/consumers, their families, supporters/volunteers, interested community members, donors, electeds, and other groups, so if anyone has experiences or thoughts, I'd love to hear about them and other thoughts on the interesting questions raised above.

Guest Post by Gaurav Mishra: The 4Cs Social Media Framework

The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

The second reason is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community. Different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices. Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, web 2.0, and even crowdsourcing and wikinomics can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it. Journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, software vendors and academics approach the space from their own perspectives and have their own preferred terms. Used precisely, these terms can mean very different things. However, very few people use these terms precisely and almost nobody agrees on the exact definition of these terms.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework

My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.

Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

The Second C: Collaboration

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The Third C: Community

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

Although I designed the 4Cs framework to explain how I see social media, I have also found it to be a useful tools to evaluate specific social media initiatives. The best social media initiatives leverage all these four layers, but I have seen that most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between. It’s important to note, however, that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Collaboration layers.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

What About You?

If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of  Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

If you are a journalist, analyst or academic in the business of understanding social media initiatives, you’ll find the 4Cs Framework really useful. What are the boundary conditions needed to succeed at each layer? What are the boundary conditions needed to move from Content to Collaboration, from Collaboration to Community, and from Community to Collective Intelligence? Can you think of other digital activism or social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers?

Do share your thoughts.

Gaurav Mishra is the CEO of social media research & strategy company 20:20 WebTech (http://2020webtech.com) and co-founder of election monitoring platform Vote Report India (http://votereport.in).

Chronicle of Philanthropy Online Chat: Reflections, Questions, and Answers

This morning I participated in one of the Chronicle's Live Chat Discussions that was billed as "How Can Charities Figure out How Much Time and Money To Invest in Social Media."   The transcript is here.

I logged in 30 minutes before the discussion began and there were already a dozen questions that required some thought in answering.  I can type and think fast, but the discussion still ran over an hour.  At times I was sorely missing the ability to ping someone in my network to answer the question.   I love the Chronicle live discussions, but would love to see a design that integrates a networked approach versus Expert Q/A.

Despite consuming a lot of coffee, I wasn't able to answer all the questions.   So, here's an analysis of the questions by topic.  I've given a twitter like response and a few links in each section.  These questions could generate at least two months were of blog posts!  As you can see, there is a wide range - from those related to the topic of effective social media use as well as those more about tools and tactics.

Metrics, ROI

• Are there any benchmarks as a result of social network giving?

No social media benchmarks on giving (yet).  Last May, NTEN, Common Knowledge, and The Port implemented a nonprofits and social networking study.  Recently, Case Foundation released a reflection paper on the America's Giving Challenge (I co-wrote it with Allison Fine)   In addition there is a nonprofit blogging benchmark, the List of Change.  KD Paine has also just launched a benchmarking service.

• How can we measure ROI on social networking sites?

Yes you can!  In the early phases, you'll be looking to reap insights about to improve your strategy.   Remember, goals drive metrics and metrics drive results.  Results are the way you can determine if something provided value.

• We read a lot of social media success stories and metrics from the corporate world, as well as from large and/or grassroots-oriented political nonprofits. How can we apply these stories to smaller nonprofits, or those that do not involve grassroots advocacy or widespread volunteer opportunities? How can we adjust their metrics of success to compare to our own?

Find other similar organizations and set up your own benchmarks.  Make sure that you set realistic and tangible goals give your capacity to implement and audience.   Recently, Case Foundation released a reflection paper on the America's Giving Challenge (I co-wrote it with Allison Fine) and many of the winners were smaller organizations.

• What are the donation conversion rates for fans and followers acquired via social networking? Where can I find metrics to validate an increased investment in platforms like Facebook and Twitter?

I wish I had that information too.  I don't think we're there yet, but KD Paine has just launched a benchmarking service which should get us closer. 

• Do we measure successes on each social network separateley? Do we count by followers/friends or by reposts or interactions?

If your goal is relationships, there are special formulas to measure relationships and engagement.  See this post and be sure to read KD Paine's comment.

• One of our goals for using Facebook/Twitter is to inform our members and the general public. How do we track an ROI for this type of goal? Or can we?

Yes you can. Read KD Paine's 7 steps to measurement success.

• We dove head-first into the web 2.0 world and are now at the point of measuring results and progress. We are considering focus groups as a means of gathering constituent preferences and qualitative data to figure out if these new channels are where we need to be focusing our efforts. Especially as print publications are under more financial and budgetary scrutiny. Do you have any insight into focus groups and how best to utilize them for measuring alternative communication vehicles like the social media sphere?

A focus group for social media is no different than focus group about football.  Same for surveys.  You might also want to incorporate a social media channel to do some research as well.  There's a terrific example from Nina Simon about how the Smithsonia used Twitter as a focus group.  I'm using my Facebook Fan Page as a focus group right now.

Policy

• Should an organization require that its employees create individual facebook (or like social media) pages as a way of spreading information about the organization. It it blurring the lines between work and home. I have read about asking volunteers to talk up the organization on their sites, but we are conflicted about having paid staff do it.
• How do organizations encourage staff (all staff, not just communications or development staff) to use these social networking tools? And if these program staff are using social networking tools for outreach, what are the costs and benefits? For instance, one perceived cost is the increased amount of time staff spend on facebook doing non-work related things. How do you measure the overall benefit of social networking tools?
• Your blog this morning featured an article on the Red Cross and had a link to their social media handbook. Do you have any other examples that might be good for a company to reference in order to develop their own policy?
• Do you know of any examples of social media policies that work well around an organization's use of facebook, twitter, etc.?

All these questions are answered in my blog posts on policy

• What are the "good sense" rules about posting personal information on our organizations web or social networking site?

The answers can be found here.

• As a follow up to the staff policy question, do you feel that organizations are more willing to engage in social media if management feels the policies in place for staff will prevent them from public negative comments? Feel free to address that all in one question if you want. Thanks!

What's better no chatter or negative conversation?

• My question relates to liability issues and the posting of private content or inflammatory material on a social networking site. Is the institution that sponsors the page responsible for the content of the posts?

I'm not a lawyer.  Can't answer.  Anyone want to take a crack at this?

Adoption

• Are there any real life success stories where younger early adopters(geeks)connected with and taught older generation of non-techies?

Have a great story here.  Some tips here.  A book to read here.

• Do you find that having good online policies for staff helps curve negative feedback about your org, since employees should abide by company policies, or do you feel it's a similar issue as with the public?

YES!  But don't take it from me, ask Wendy Harman from the Red Cross.

Capacity:  Work Flow, Staffing

• What is the best place to incorporate social networking into staffing positions in schools and youth organizations?
• First, how do groups devote paid staff time to social networking tools, either through one paid staff person or spread out among different staff?
• When considering creating a position within your organization for a person to manage your social media info, where might a person be able to obtain a sample job description?
• We are increasing our social media presence by involving multiple members of our team. Each has their own voice/style. We want people to participate in a way that is authentic for them but also furthers our brand. And we definitely don't want to sound fake. Any thoughts on how to best do this?
• One of the toughest things about social networking media is the number of services out there. Facebook and Twitter are the big deal now, but given how quickly things change in technology, how many outlets should we, as a university, truly have? We have students, prospective students, donors, alumni, faculty, administrators and other groups to consider. What's the best solution? Is there a best solution?

A couple of points here.  If you have limited time and resources, don't have a presence everywhere.  Be very selective.  Engage deeply in a few places where your audience is and relates to your goals.    See Tweeting 9 to 5 to get a sense of the job tasks in a social media job description.  To find job descriptions, search for them on LinkedIn or other employement sites like Monster or the job listings that Jeremiah Owyang posts.   BTW, there are many social media mavens from nonprofits on Twitter - let's ask them to share their job descriptions.  Here's some advice about managing multiple twitter accounts.  Some food for thought from Shannon Paul about social media job descriptions.

Strategy: Engagement/Relationships

• Do we need to interact with followers/friends every day? Is that expected?

Yes, deep engagement requires daily feeding and tuning of your network.  It doesn't mean that you engage with single supporter every day in great depth - but you need to cultivating and building relationships.   It's open-ended work, so to make it less overwhelming - time box it.

• I feel like it is better to let our social networks grow organically, rather than do a big "get us to 2,000 Twitter followers today" kind of campaign. I tend to see this as a quality over quantity issue. Do you think that is accurate? Does social media only work when you have a significant mass?

I agree.  Quality over quantity.  And, I also agree that it isn't about campaign, a flip that switch on or off.  It's going relationship building.

• Are social media connections becoming something that donors and advocates expect from a non-profit or are they still a nice frill, but not necessary in the same way that having a website has become necessary to appear credible? Has there been any research on this yet? Is there a risk that too much social media presence can turn donors or advocates off?

This is a great question and an area for more research.

• We are a little different from a direct service nonprofit. We are made up of funds established by donors. Those funds distribute money to the nonprofit community. Our current campaign is to encourage donors to think about the future of their favorite charities and create a bequest through their will that will ensure those charities receive revenue in perpetuity. Do you think there is any room for this kind of message on Facebook?

Don't ask me.  Test it out on Facebook. Although, I sort of skeptical that such a delicate conversation is appropriate to conduct on a social network.  You may need to have this conversation face-to-face or in a private area. 

• I work in development for a university trying to specifically increase black alumni donors by engaging our black alumni mainly through facebook. The desire is to have major gifts (for programs) that would benefit black students versus just having donors give for scholarships?

Do some listening first and see what your stakeholders have to say.

• What type of relationship building is needed to create long lasting relationships with donors via social networks?

Read this report from Charelene Li

Strategy:  Effective Listening

• One of the challenges of being part of a membership organization like YMCA's, which share the same mission but operate independently, is that using searches and keywords to listen to our communities in external sites doesn't necessarily yield accurate results. We are often known as "The Y" or "my YMCA", for example, and not the "Lake View YMCA" or "Buehler YMCA". So as we evaluate engaging in social networking, I don't have any good ideas on how to measure our success on sites we do not control (ie Twitter vs. Facebook groups). What advice do you have to streamline our listening strategy and tying it to measured our success so we are wisely investing our staff time in effective social networking, based on data for our Association and not as a tiny percent of the 2,800+ YMCA's across the country?

I answered this question first and in greater depth in the transcript.  I hope it helped Judith!   Ask this question of Alistair Croll or Amber Nashlund on Twitter.  They're listening geeks.

Strategy: Audience Identification

• Our organization that deals with both young people and older, well connected investors; however, we are concerned that these investors aren't necessarily interested in social networking programs such as Facebook and Twitter and that it would not be a good way to dedicate our time. Our facebook pages are mostly targeted at youth for the moment. How would we transform that page to reach out to an older, more sophisticated audience with different needs. As always, we're looking for financial support here... we're a fresh start-up in Seattle.

Here's a link that will take you a lot of freely available information on the demographics of social networks.

Getting Started

• For an organization who is new to the idea of social networking where is the best place to start?
• The small organization I work with is just venturing into the social marketing world. I would be interested to hear suggestions on how we evaluate the success of our efforts and any tips learned already on what to do and not do when using the online systems. Also, what realistically should we expect from our use of these systems? Thank you.
• As part of an organization that is starting to venture into social media, what are some hurdles we need to watch out for?
• How would you recommend we get started on Facebook?
• Before we have any data how do we get started or if we are to guess where do we start? Facebook? Facebook and twitter? Others?
•  How can a small school,with little to no public relations budget, best utilize social networks? Also, how can we use Facebook to get in touch with Alumni with out seeming like a stalker?
• I'm finding that nonprofit clients are nervous about diving into social media tools because they don't have the manpower to manage them. What is your advice on starting small? Should they start with a blog to create a voice for themself, make sure staff is on LinkedIn and updates it regularly, or create and mantain a facebook group?

You'll find lots of answers in the WeAreMedia Wiki

1.) Listen before you talk
2.) Allocate enough time
3.) Set measurable objectives and how you'll track your success
4.) Be prepared to experiment and learn and adapt
5.) Quality over quantity - don't spread yourself too thin
6.) Read about what other nonprofits are doing in social media and what they are learning - there are terrific nonprofit social media bloggers out there - recently I hosted a guest bloggers program - over 40 - all really smart and savvy

Case Studies

• At my organization, we're discussing the benefits of expanding our website capability/content v. delving into offsite social media such as Facebook. How have you seen member organizations/affinity groups use social media technology most successfully?
• Our non-profit is just starting to use a few social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, East Villagers, etc.). What successes can you point to in stimulating the growth or awareness around an organization or cause?
• Can you provide some concrete examples or case studies of non-profits that have significantly improved their visibility as a result of online social networking?
• I understand fully that social media is about engagement and relationship building. However, are there case studies about NPO's who have converted or leveraged relationships into tangible support?

Tons of case studies at WeAreMedia Wiki.  Also, check out the case studies from various panels that I've moderated == many success stories.  You'll find them here.  I also pointed to a bunch of examples in the transcript.


Next Big Thing

• It seems like we are always looking for the next big thing when it comes to social networking tools. Twitter is hot now, but what do you foresee being the "next big thing".
• Is twitter just a passing fad? Is it worth investing time in expolring this avenue of communications?
• The wisdom now seems to be that Facebook Causes are out, Facebook Fan Pages are in for nonprofits, because of the flexibility of the latter. What are best practices to move people from Causes to Fan Page or have the two interact for future fundraising?
• With so many social networking sites like facebook, etc...many of whom are recently considered "past their prime", which social media sites are best for small non-profits looking to communicate with its participants?

Two things off the the top of my head:
Real Time Web  Mobile social 

Honestly, unless your organization's stakeholders are early adopters or your mission is about that - I'm not sure I'd worry about the next shiny object. You want to be looking and watching when the technology reaches the plateau of productivity  Here's some tips on how to find the next new thing http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/05/early-adopters-and-finding-next-shiny.html

Tools and Techniques

• My question is--beyond purchasing ads (which we've done)--do you you have any suggestions about how to interact in a way that will increase the likelihood we'll go viral? In other words, how can we use FB, Twitter, and YouTube to get outside of our bubble? What makes postings, pages, videos, etc...more likely to get spread virally, perhaps as part of the same campaign? 

 

Read Michael Hoffman's Post

• We are considering using Facebook to reach a wider audience. Two concern brought up during a recent meeting: 1-how to handle the potential for negative commentary by fans/friends; and 2- possibly embarrassing situation if we create a FB presence and show few fans/friends for a while. Do you have suggestions on ways to handle these two issues?

Here's some tips for FaceBook Fan Pages.  Lots more here.

• Several  employees are using a personal/business Twitter account to engage with supporters in a more authentic way. Do you have any recommendations for how we can aggregate employee "connections" with our stream to glean a more holistic view of our "results"?

That's why god created hashtags!

• Can you offer suggestions re: how to best use social media to enhance fundraising events?

 

Read this post.

• Is the stigma of having fans or cause supporters with 'questionable' Facebook profiles true? Does it make the organization look too lax or less professional? We are a workforce development organization, and my superiors think it could be misconstrued.
• Talking about time, is there an application which would post an update on all main Social Networking Sites at once? I know of some but they would pick my Facebook personal profile instead of the Organization's Page I am admin of.
• How often should an organization post to Twitter or send out updates on Facebook? Is there a fine line between sending too much that's irrelevant vs. useful information?
• I would like us to get our organization on twitter, but i'm afraid that if i only "tweet" about fundraising events, people will tire of it quickly--any thoughts on this? other content i might want to tweet about?
• What are some best practices on Facebook to generate followers and turn them into donors? Also everyone says that Twitter wont' raise any money. Is that true?
• What is the best process through social media of finding new organizations/individuals interested or working in your arena of social issues and connecting with them? I usually do simple Twitter searches and @replies, comment on blogs, but are there better ways or a general hierarchy of effective strategies?
• I just begun a new job and part of my responsibilities are social networks. In the past, the Facebook site, (a group not a page) has been run by lay leaders. What is the most effective way to make the switch to a page and get people to join us there instead?
• We have blogs and forums on our site, but have a hard time getting people to comment or post anything in them. Although our members will comment and post on our Facebook and Twitter... how do we get them to jump from those sites, onto our site and start discussing there?
• What tips or suggestions can you offer for partnering with FaceBook or LinkedIn to leverage their brand as a communication platform for alums, and the private companies policies for not sharing alumni data with the higher ed institution?

I'm crowd sourcing this last group of questions -- answer in the comments - thanks!

Now That Engagement Is Fully Measured, It's Time To Count the Treasure

 
My Laptop Stickers

That was my favorite line from the panel I moderated at SXSW last March called the "Nonprofit Social Media Poetry Slam" (notes here). KD Paine, the Queen of Social Media Measurement, said it.  KD Paine was also kind enough to send me my newest sticker - "Yes We Can! Measure Social Media."   (She recently announced a new fee-based service called the Social Media Nonprofit Measurement and BenchmarkingReport)

Last night, I stumbled upon a #blogchat on Twitter about How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media hosted by Mack Collier with special guest Wendy Harman, Social Media Strategist at the Red Cross.   Here's the transcript.  KDPaine was there along with a bunch of other smart people.  Some of my favorite tweets:

• What are the biggest hurdles in effective social media use by nonprofits?

i think the key is to listen and learn - find your niche. Look for people who care about issues you care about #blogchat i think the key is to listen and learn - find your niche. Look for people who care about issues you care about

2nd biggest hurdle is not giving in to the tendency to make your presence all about marketing instead of offering mission online

• How do you address resistence?

Look for the unique value your org provides and share that value, help others.  Focus on benefits and dispelling fears.  First step was showing them the existing conversation, which both educates about benefits and dispels fears at same time.

• How does the American Red Cross judge the effectiveness of its social media efforts?

our goal is to help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies using socmed tools, so look for anecdotes, engagement, some more traditional number crunching (like evaluating FB insights). As  np we should concentrate on executing our mission. If offering unique value, others will support. 

@kdpaine adds:  give me enough data + I bet I could show "mission accomplished" fewer lives/homes/property lost :)

• Do you engage your supporters around specific fundraising goals?

I'm not personally huge on fundraising outright - I think an np shouldempower supporters to fundraise for it.  Build engagement first.  Use keywords to find people who care about issues ur org cares abt. Offer value, talk 2 them, you'll build community. Content and to invite people in rather than yapping at em and asking for $$. Offering value keeps people around more than begging

@kdpaine:  Isn't the role of comms to fulfill mission, $$ raised is development, no?

@sarahmarchetti:  @kdpaine slightly diff perspective since I was Development Comm, but I think that the whole org is responsible for FR in some way

@kdpaine: I agree, but many non-profits have pretty firm silos keeping the two apart.

• What has been your greatest challenge/success with the social media organizational use handbook? with your chapters and volunteers? http://bit.ly/HGkno 

greatest success? it's pretty field-generated. They helped write it, they asked for it, so it reflects their needs.

greatest challenge? Getting some important groups to hop on board 

• Can you imagine at time in the future when your board will govern the organization using social media?

Yes, but there is a lot of work on my part before that will happen

This morning Charlene Li released a report looking at social media engagement.  What they found in a nutshell:  Deep brand engagement with social media correlates with financial performance. 

But even more interesting is that we also looked at the financial performance of the brands, grouping the companies with the greatest depth and breadth into a group called “Social Media Mavens”. These Mavens on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.

Note that we are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on companies than the competition.

The report also looks at the Best Practices for engagement which include:

• Emphasize quality, not just quantity. Engagement is more than just setting up a blog and letting viewers post comments; it’s more than just having a Facebook profile and having others write on your wall. It’s also about keeping your blog content fresh and replying to comments; it’s building your friends network and updating your profile status. Don’t just check the box; engage with your customer audience.

• To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job.
  The best practice interviews have a common theme — social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense — a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

• Doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something.
  The optimal social media marketing strategy will depend on a variety of factors, including your industry. If your most valuable customers do not depend on or trust social media as a communication medium, or if your organization is resistant to engagement in some channels, you will have to start smaller and slower. But start you must, or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience.
  
• Find your sweet spot.
  Engagement can’t be skin-deep, nor is it a campaign that can be turned on and off. True engagement means full engagement in the channels where you choose to invest. Thus, choose carefully and advocate strongly to acquire the resources and support you will need to succeed. If you are resource-constrained, it is better to be consistent and participate in fewer channels than to spread yourself too thin.

I particularly like the point 3.  And to bring it back to poetry, here's a couplet:

Social media may not be for you, but start you must
or you may get left in the dust.

And, I forgot to mention that I'm doing a chat for the Chronicle of Philanthropy on Social Media ROI Tuesday, July 21st at Noon EST/9 AM PST.  Here's the information.

Guest Post by Peter Campbell: The ROI on Flexibility

Submitted by Peter Campbell, publisher of Techcafeteria

Non Profit social media maven Beth Kanter blogged recently about starting up a residency at a large foundation, and finding herself in a stark transition from a consultant’s home office to a corporate network. This sounds like a great opportunity for corporate culture shock. When your job is to download many of the latest tools and try new things on the web that might inform your strategy or make a good topic for your blog, encountering locked-down desktops and web filtering can be, well, annoying is probably way to soft a word. Beth reports that the IT Team was ready for her, guessing that they’d be installing at least 72 things for her during her nine month stay. My question to Beth was, “That’s great – but are they just as accommodating to their full-time staff, or is flexibility reserved for visiting nptech dignitaries?”

The typical corporate desktop computer is restricted by group policies and filtering software. Management, along with the techs, justify these restrictions in all sorts of ways:

• Standardized systems are easier, more cost-effective to manage.
• Restricted systems are more secure.
• Web filtering maximizes available bandwidth.

This is all correct. In fact, without standardization, automation, group policies that control what can and can’t be done on a PC, and some protection from malicious web sites, any company with 15 to 20 desktops or more is really unmanageable. The question is, why do so many companies take this ability to manage by controlling functionality to extremes?

Because, in many/most cases, the restrictions put in place are far broader than is necessary to keep things manageable. Web filtering not only blocks pornography and spyware, but continues on to sports, entertainment, politics, and social networking. Group policies restrict users from changing their desktop colors or setting the system time. And the end result of using the standardization tools to intensively control computer usage results, most often, in IT working just as hard or harder to manage the exceptions to the rules (like Beth’s 72, above) than they would dealing with the tasks that the automation simplifies in the first place.

Restricting computer/internet use is driven by a management and/or IT assumption that the diverse, dynamic nature of computing is either a distraction or a problem. The opportunity to try something new is an opportunity to waste time or resources. By locking down the web; eliminating a user’s ability to install applications or even access settings, PC’s can be engineered back down to the limited functionality of the office equipment that they replaced, such as typewriters, calculators and mimeograph machines.

• Technology is not fully appreciated, and computer literacy is limited in an environment where users can’t experiment.
• Strategic opportunities that arise on the web are not noticed and factored into planning.
• IT is placed in the role of organizational nanny, responsible for curtailing computer use, as opposed to enabling it./

Cash and resource-strapped, mission-focused organizations only need look around to see the strategic opportunities inherent in the web. There are an astounding number of free, innovative tools for activism and research. Opportunities to monitor discussion of your organization and issues, and meaningfully engage your constituents are huge. And all of this is fairly useless if your staff are locked out of the web and discouraged from exploring it. Pioneers like Beth Kanter understand this. They seek out the new things and ask, how can this tool, this web site, this online community serve our sector’s goals to ease suffering and promote justice? More specifically, can you end hunger in a community with a widget? Or bring water to a parched village via Twitter? If our computing environment is geared to stifle innovation at the cost of security, are we truly supporting technology?

As the lead technologist at my organization, I want to be an enabler. I want to see our attorneys use the power of the web to balance the scales when we go to court against far better resourced corporate and government counsel. In this era of internet Davids taking down Goliaths from the RIAA the the mainstream media, I don’t want my co-workers to miss out on any opportunities to be effective. So I need the flexibility and perspective to understand that security is not something that you maintain with a really big mallet, lest you stamp out innovation and strategy along with the latest malware. And, frankly, cleaning a case of the conflickr worm off of the desktop of an attorney that just took down a set of high-paid corporate attorneys with data grabbed from some innovative mapping application that our web-filtering software would have mistakenly identified as a gaming site is well worth the effort.

Flexibility has it’s own Return on Investment (ROI), particularly at nonprofits, where we generally have a lot more innovative thinking and opportunistic attitude than available budget. IT has to be an enabler, and every nonprofit CIO or IT Director has to understand that security comes at a cost, and that cost could be the mission-effectiveness of our organizations.

This article was originally posted on techcafeteria at http://techcafeteria.com/blog/2009/04/21/the-roi-on-flexibility/ by Peter Campbell:

Non-profit Technologist @ Techcafeteria; IT Director @ Earthjustice

A Couple Really Interesting Social Media, ROI, and Nonprofit Links Worth A Click

2020 Web Tech Approach To Social Media Analytics

View more presentations from Gaurav Mishra.

20:20 Social Media Analytics Blog; A colleague just shared a link to this blog by Guarav Mishra's company. I've been following him on Twitter and have been following his social media/social change blog but hadn't made it to his company's blog.

It's where I grabbed the above slide show that offers a conceptual framework for strategy and metrics.  It's making me think of Gary Haye's Transmedia Storytelling and Co-Creation framework. 

The framework begins with the four c-s:

• Content: refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.
• Collaboration: refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.
• Community: refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.
• Collective Intelligence: refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

He lays out what to measure for each of these areas.  Here's the slide.  He has analysis and some thoughts on how to use social network analysis to evaluate your social media program - I haven't seen any other writing on this.  Must go back for a deeper dive, but flagging it for now.

@TheForefront: Successfully Navigating Social Media

View more documents from Beth Harte.

There's another post on this blog pointing to a slide show by Beth Harte on social media measurement.  He points out the substantial influence that KD Paine (the goddess of social media measurement) has had on the field.

Data For Good

View more documents from juliawatson.

This slide show about data visualization is also worth a quick read. It's from the presentations at Social Tech earlier this month. Well, back to packing up the house for the big move.

A Social Media Cliff Hanger: Making Sure Your Parachute Opens

I'm preparing for a day of trainings in Chicago on Wednesday at Making Media Connections. Last year, I gave the keynote and a workshop, and this year they invited me back again. I'm going to be teaching two intermediate/advanced workshops, one on mapping metrics to social media strategy and the other on listening.  (The secret sauce by the way is David Armano's Listen, Learn and Adapt)

I read an interesting post called "Jumping Off the Social Media Cliff" which raises a great question, "Are you a lemming or a base jumper?"  In other words, are you embracing social media because "everyone else is ..."

What I mean by that is a question as to whether your organization is following others blindly into the chasm of social web participation or are planning and preperations being made first? Are the right people being educated and given the proper tools? Is there a plan with a specific objective?

Chasing after the competition into Facebook, Twitter and blogging without a plan is the Lemming approach. You can almost visualize swarms of companies jumping off into the abyss following competitors, self serving social media consultants and momentum created by mainstream media hype, each yelling “weeeee, social meeeeeedeeeeahhhh” and then realizing (maybe too late) with wide open eyes that they’re not prepared (no social media policy, no roadmap). There’s no chute, and the ground is coming up fast.

The reference is lemmings blindly committing suicide by jumping off cliffs in the Arctic is a bit of an urban myth.    Contrary to what you may think when view the above Disney clip from the movie White Wilderness, lemmings do not  hurl themselves off of cliffs and into the sea.  

The film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.  According to snopes.com, rodents actors were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence. Next the creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was choreographed using a handful of lemmings photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.

The reference to base jumpers is an activity that employs a parachute or the sequenced use of a wingsuit and parachute to jump from fixed objects, with the parachute unopened at the jump.  Based stands for the four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: Building - Antenna - Span - Earth

Community Media Workshop: Chicago

View more OpenOffice presentations from kanter.

So the point is that if you are going to jump off the social media cliff, make sure your parachute opens.  And to tease out that metaphor a bit more, that means having:

• Having a clear objective
• Knowing the audience
• Deploying the right strategy
• Have the expertise/time or capacity
• Understand cultural barriers to adoption
• Pick the right tools

Oh, yeah, there's also the secret sauce:

• Listening before, during, and after a project
• Learning - using qualitative insights and hard data points to understand what is and what isn't working
• Adapting your social media effort or organization based on your learning or experiments

I found a fantastic example of Twitter as a focus group in Nina Simon's blog post, "Everyone's Smithsonian.'  Not only does she illustrate the valuable qualitative insights you can glean from social media listening efforts, but shows how to apply them to a museum context. Nina's secret sauce is:

1. Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
2. Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
3. Develop relationships via any and all useful platforms that allow you to connect 1 to 2.

I like how she connects the dots between objectives, listening, relationships, and platforms.

Measuring Engagement and Return on Relationships

Photo by Smitty42

Lucy Bernholz has a great post called "Metrics Are Good, Unless They Are Bad" which talks about the problems we encounter when we're trying to measure hard to measure stuff - like social media, social return, and social enterprise.   And while Lucy firmly believes that it is possible to measure, sometimes people measure the wrong thing.

Her case in point is the recent Washington Post article suggesting that Facebook Causes had driven very little money to charity and was a failure.  Several of us disagreed with the thesis money was the only one metric for success.  As I blogged in response to the article, Causes is best for creating connections and awareness. If you didn't read the thread over at Allison Fine's blog, you can find it here.

Lucy also muses about what the right metrics are for social media efforts.    (I've been obsessing about this topic for a while, you can read my latest musings here and here).  Lucy brings up some points about metrics for Twitter.  Whatever the tool we're using, the right metrics are those that can help understand engagement and relationships.

KDPaine's SobCon Roi Of Relationships In Social Media

View more presentations from kdpaine.

This last week I was at NTC 09 in San Francisco leading a session on Mapping Metrics To Strategy.  However, while checking my Twitter stream I realized that the Queen of Measurement, KD Paine, was at a conference a few blocks away in the lobby bar.  So, headed over to say hello and to hear about her masterclass "ROI of Relationships." 

Over the weekend, SobCon was taking place in Chicago and I wish I could have been there - (next year, Lis, I promise)  KD Paine was there and follow her Tweets and KDPaine pointed me to her slide deck.  

There's a lot of great stuff in this deck.  A couple of things that I really like:

• She talks about conquering our measurement fears.  It's not just math phobia.  It's about confronting what doesn't work and improving it.  It gets at that failing formally point that Clay Shirky was talking about NTC Keynote.
• She puts the what to measure question in context from hits, to views, to engagement.  And, the whole point is about improving relationships.
• She offers a frameworks output, outake, outcome - looks sort of like a logic model to me.
• She gives a seven step framework for measuring the ROI of relationships.
• She gives us some suggestions for tools
• Most importantly is understanding what your engagement index is.

There is also a detailed taxonomy for types of social media conversations.  I happened to see a wonderful remix of this from Buzz Canuck called "The 27 Types of Twitter Conversations."

One of my favorite metrics geeks, Jim Sterne, who has very advice on "How To Measure Engagement On Twitter."  He suggests setting goals and identifying audience before selecting the metrics.  His approach is not to select a metric that shows impact, but to pick the right metrics to help you improve what you're doing.

He writes about an analytics tool developed by Eric Peterson that if you apply thoughtfully can help you improve the results of your Twitter strategy.  A slightly different approach than demonstrating impact, Twitalyzer calculates your influence based on your signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity and clout, and it also allows you to calculate a score for any other Twitter user you wish to track.  You're tracking relative increases and decreases to your influence over time and helps you refine Twitter strategies.

So, how might this work?

(1) Identify goal and audience

(2) Identify Twitter strategy

(3) Use Twitalyzer for a baseline

(4) Implement strategy

(5) Use Twitalyzer to measure again

(6) Reflect on the changes 

Putting the Public Back in PR - New Book from Brian Solis

My autographed copy of Brian Solis's (and Deirdre Breakenridge's) new book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relationships: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR just arrived in today's mail.  I immediately opened it and started reading.

It's look at what's wrong with public relations in an age of social media, a complete social media primer from the perspective of those who work in communications, and lots of incredibly useful information about the art of listening and metrics for the web 2.0 world. Even though it is written from a business perspective, there is a ton of useful insights and pointers for anyone who does PR or communications for a nonprofit. If you are a social media strategist, it's a great book to share with your senior manager.

I have a confession, I'm one of those people who does not read a book cover-to-cover in linear way.  I have a hypertext brain.  I scan the table of contents and the index and jump to the parts that I'm most interested in.   

For this book, I was like a moth to flame to Chapter 18: A New Guide for Metrics.  The chapter is a great overview for the C-Level suite.  I pick up some tips and tricks, but I had a strong urge for "Practitioner Worksheets" which made set up this spreadsheet.   Anyway, here's my takeaways:

• Need to know how to convince "C-Suite" (corporate level executives) that social media is required to compete in today's economy and that it is measurable.  In other words, that you can monetize the process of engagement.  For nonprofits, that tracking donations from social media engagement.  As KD Paine said on our SXSW ROI Poetry Slam, "You have engagement fully measured, now calculate the resulting treasure!"

• The old Web metrics don't work well for measuring social media.  We know that.  I love the quote from KD Paine, "HITS=How Idiots Track Success."  It's about engagement, referrals, activity, sales, and market and behavioral influences.

• The importance of monitoring in real time and demonstrating what's working through active listening and continually taking the temperature.

• Conversation:  Your placement, status, ranking, perception, and participation in the Social Media sphere.   It starts with tracking conversation threads or by keyword.  If you are starting, you need to begin by manually across multiple networks and then automate the search using a listening/analytics tool.

• Traffic:  Suggests partnering with the web team and using analytics software to track the referrals of unique visitors to site from a site.  Get granular - figure how how many unique visits a particular blogger sent, a Facebook Event, or Digg.  

• Activity:  This using specific landing pages (web pages designed to capture incoming traffic from a specific promotion or an area for sign up, special discounts, votes, or RSVP, etc)  that can track visitor's presence and sub-sequent actions.

• Engagement:  This is defined as the amount of time a person either participates within a dedicated or hosted Web community or service related to your brand, or interacts with someone from your organization online.  It also refers to the reach of your content/story - the process of spreading word-of-mouth referrals or sparking new and related conversation threads.

• Relationships:  Defined as the number of friends or followers or community members.  Cautions against it not being a popularity contest, but the number grows because people get some value from part of an active, informative, and value-driven community.

• Authority: A measure of your brand's credibility and thought leaders.  Rises because of relationship building.  Measured by inbound links for blogs.  Important benchmark in your field.   Suggests that authority can also be measured by tracking trends of RSS subscribers - not just for your blog, but all sources.  Mentions an alternative tool to Feedburner - Pheedo.

• The chapter identifies a new area for PR folks to measure - education, participation, and collaboration.  This is not new for nonprofit folks - looks like some of the items we track in our logic models - at least short-term outcomes for efficiency and effectiveness.  I wrote an entire chapter about this for the new NTEN book "Technology to Meet Your Mission."

• Perception:  This metric is about tracking seniment - what people are saying about you.  You monitor this by searching for your brand name and the word "sucks."

• Community Activity:  Nice checklist of activities you can engage (and measure) your online community to do linked to different social media/networking sites.   These might work well as a series of pilots/experiments to track and learn.

• Measurement Tools:  There's a high level overview of analytics tools - covering the topic of using free tools or not.   Also talks about off-site analytics -- services like Alexa, Compete, and Quanitcast.  If you're a metrics and analytics geek, you'll have to wait to for Sean Powers and Alistair Croll's forthcoming book, "Watching Web Sites"

• Simplified ROI Process: It sort reads like logic model to me.   1) identify success or benefits; 2) get a baseline, identify data; 3) define goals in terms of your metrics (increase x number of visitors)  4) develop strategies/tactics to reach goals  5) Estimate cost/benefit

Don't have the time to read the entire book cover-to-cover today, but I have a long flight to California on Sunday, this book is high priority plane reading.

Reflections from Nonprofit Social Media Poetry Slam

Photo by eschipul

Yesterday's SXSW Nonprofit Social Media Poetry Slam was so much fun and from the feedback we all learned a lot about measuring the return of social media for nonprofits.   The panels, judges, twitter moderators and audience rocked!  Who knew that using the discipline of poetic form could generate such a great discussion about measurement and metrics.

We used the hashtag #roi for audience participation and we trended 8th on Twitter, generating some entertaining tweets.  Some participants even rhymed in 140 characters or less.   The twitter feedback was very positive.

Some takeaways about measurement and ROI:

• Need to incorporate tracking of how many people that you involved in engaging conversations via social media become donors.  What is your conversion rate?  Need that to show the ROI. 
• Acquisition of email names - while that metric is important to "management" to justify social media effort - there is a need to track other metrics.  Also thinking about the "life time" value of the email address or contact information.
• Having benchmarks from other similar organizations in your space is important and valuable.  If it doesn't exist, reach out to colleagues and share that information.
• Need for way to track people's participation in social media and what it generated in other channels - how many signed up for the newsletter

Brian Fitzgerald wrote a blog post of the panel in verse!

Fantastic to watch, impossible to describe,
A poetry slam about non-profit ROI
The groups that take blogs and facebooks and twitters
And turn them to saving both people and critters
Spun iambics and rhymes around all their banter
In this panel assembled by (brilliant) Beth Kanter
They told of Twestivals, LoL Seals, and Apps
That raised money, awareness, and the eyebrows of chaps
In management who aren’t down with the groove
Of using these cool social marketing tools
They took tweets from the audience, how cool is that?
And one of them wore that cat hat cat’s hat!
I loved it, I learned stuff, I had a great time
And yeah, I was the guy who was tweeting in rhyme.

Here's a round up of blog posts and tweets:

KD Paine,Poetry for Measurement Geeks

She was one of our expert judges - the Queen of Measurement.   My favorite couplet

You have engagement fully measured, not its time to calculate the resulting

Renee Alexander, SXSW Smiles Journal

Amy Sample Ward,  SXSW Poetry Slam

Ed Schipul,  Tweet w/ links to the Photos

Shannon Aron, Top Ten Lessons from the ROI Poetry Slam

Will Coley, Did you miss SXSW Interactive? Check out this excellent workshop on ROI

Videos

From Holly Ross, NTEN

From Brian Fitzgerald

 

Celebrating with a drink afterwards, Wendy Harman got some good luck!

SXSW: Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam - Slides, Links, and Poems (long)

SXSW Poetry Slam Slides

View more presentations from kanter.

Today, I am moderating a panel at SXSW about Social Media Nonprofit ROI in the format of a poetry slam.   The panel will be in room 18BCD at 5: 00 PM.   The description:

What works and rhymes? A creative report on non-profits, social media, and effective ROIs delivered as poetry slam and expertly judged including interactive crowd participation. Come measure success.

This post includes all the links and additional ROI resources that will be mentioned or discussed during the session.   I'm writing this post for the benefit of our "Twitter Backchannel Moderators" who will be live tweeting the panel and posting these URLs to Twitter.  To follow the Twitter stream or ask questions or make comments, use the #ROI hashtag.

Who knew that there were poets on Twitter?  One of them @peoppenheimer  was kind enough to critic and help my own poem's meter and rhyme!  Thanks!

Session Content

1. Introduction by Beth Kanter

Poem

Welcome!  At the SXSW Nonprofit Poetry Slam
Four brave panelists will cram
Their ROI stories into five minutes time
And present their Powerpoint slides in rhyme

Expert judges will listen and let it rip
and share many a metrics and measurement tip
Our expert judges will impress
sharing their wisdom in five minutes or less

Dear audience you will also have a turn
Don't just sit back and passively learn
Ask questions, make comments, share your expertise
Use this twitter hashtag as your mouthpiece
Should you want to stand up in Q/A and recite
a Social Media Nonprofit ROI poem, we'll hand you the mic

So, listen geeks and you will hear
How these four nonprofits persevere
to apply David Armano's listen, learn, and adapt
KD Paine's measure, calculate, and map
to their twitter, blog, youtube, or facebook app
Best of all, their managers don't think social media's crap

They made their directors understand
How social media improves their brand
extends their programs and services too
They will share this in poetic form like haiku
or limericks, rap or spoken word
giving you insights you never heard

So now you know the format of the panel
and how to participate in the backchannel
It's time to introduce our judges, moderators, and presenters
For the next hour, they be our mentors

Our backchannel moderators will scan and flag
any questions or comments that use the hashtag
they'll toss urls into the twitter stream
so extra meaning the audience can glean
Moderators in the front row
please stand up and wave hello

Our judges are experts in what they do
Now, I'm going to introduce them to you

First we have the queen of measurement, KD Paine
Who knows more about the topic than anyone can claim
All hail to the measurement queen
Put her blog url in the twitter stream

Our next judge is Holly Ross
She's the nonprofit technology boss
Oh my god, take a look
She just published this new book

Geoff Livingston is judge number three
He is an expert in social media strategy

And now I'll introduce our presenters one by one

First up is Danielle Brigida, NWF's Social Media Maven
She will tell her story spoofing Poe's, The Raven

Carie Lewis from the Humane Society is next up
Her poem is about a photo contest featuring cute pups

Our third presenter is Wendy Harman, from the American Red Cross
Inspired by Dr. Seuss she gets her points across

David Neff who speaks to the beat of a drum
shares how social media leads to some income

And, now it's time to get started with our great fun
Let's hear poem number one

2.   The Return by Danielle Brigida, NWF

NWF Description of Case Study

While strategy plays an important role within the National Wildlife Federation, initially it was very hard to determine one for our social media presences. Social media brought instant returns but many of them fell within categories that aren't quantifiable. However, what we discovered was that social media (once internally accepted and acknowledged) could truly compliment and improve engagement with our programs. The example I talk about in the poem covers the initial use of NWF's twitter accounts and then continues to how we actually starting using it to improve and grow one of our programs- "wildlife watch". http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch

Not only that, but it shows how we took our return from this experiment and placed it within the programs website to show more dynamic content and interaction possibilities.

NWF's Twitter presence has grown because while I want NWF to still serve as the roll-up account for all of the programs, I wanted to give a chance to some of the program managers to create friendships with Twitter users from their specific audience. http://www.twitter.com/wildlife_watch is a great example of this. While we have a number or random staff also creating relationships with people that are interested in what they do, the programs allow for a very specific audience to collect information about what they are most interested in.

Poem: The Return by Danielle Brigida, NWF

Once upon a non-profit theory, measurement was weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious meetings with little to account for,
While I nodded, nearly napping, an idea for a strategy came a tapping,
What if measurement could include social interactions and what they stand for?
I shall investigate - I muttered - to know what ROI could account for
Instantly I knew, this was something I must explore

Ah, distinctly I remember, I wanted the opinion of a member,
Because it is each separate inspiring member, That I do wildlife justice for
So I tweeted, questions and links, to see what each member thinks
But from my stats surcease of sorrow, I realized - some things you can’t keep score
Aside from rare and radiant traffic spikes, there was nothing traditional to record
I thought this it is, and nothing more.

It was our executive VP who had unfounded belief in me,
Thrilled me filled me with fantastic insight I’d never known before;
So that now, to still the ADD of my moving mind, she stood repeating
"Remember at NWF it's revenue, reach and engagement that we push for
Keep this is mind for what you measure - for this is all I will implore
Only this and nothing more.

Suddenly, my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
You sure? said I, for Madam, truly it's a return hard to account for
But the fact was I kept tracking, never loafing, never slacking
And so slightly traffic came tapping, tapping on my website door,
I used listening to confirm I saw it - then I recorded to be sure
Not just linkbacks here but something more.

Deep into the analytics peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing
Listening, and dreaming dreams no marketer ever dared to dream before
Instead of traditional ROI abounding, I saw something even more astounding
And the only thing I could think was How can I measure engagement more?
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word "explore"
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into my cubicle turning, all the questions within me burning,
Soon again I started tweeting more strategically than before.
'Surely,' said I, 'surely there's a chance for program assistance;
Let me see then, a potential instance, and this mystery explore -
Let my mind be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis a test and nothing more!'

Wildlife watch - an idea release, it holds the key engagement piece,
For people who spot all from crickets to geese, can use twitter to tweet
With NWF as the hash tag; Wildlife sightings perhaps would not lag; (for all to brag?)
Updates made by phones to twitter, are searched more easily than before -
Searched using Twitter Search with no URL to look for -
Perhaps with this we will engage more.

With the wildlife we're compiling, We could keep the scientists smiling,
And lose the grave and stern decorum that was our storytelling before,
'Though tweets are short and fitted,' I said, we'll increase the total submitted
Ghastly grim and empty forums we'll be faced with nevermore!
Tell me what thy wildlife name is on the twitter feed-but be sure!
Share the findings, 'forever more.'

Then, methought, the air grew denser, social media had no censor
There were still those unbelieving, even worse were those misperceiving
That Twitter was the answer to all their programs' problems evermore. 
`At last,' they cried, `thy God hath lent thee -- social media -- the angel -- sent thee
Traffic, comments, tweets and other means of engagement to record.
Yet it is important to remember, that goals determine the ROI accounted for
Forget this, `Nevermore.'

So there I was, sitting lonely needing support, but thinking only,
For Social media change we needed to move past communication days of yore
A little birdy told the web team "We should use a twitter stream"
And the idea, instead of dying was kept alive and continued flying
Till I found myself crying `Wow this is much easier than before -
With Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Stumbleupon gone are the days forgotten lore.
Doubting social media, `Nevermore.'

Though I feel the time spent disputing could be better spent recruiting
On the social sites that are intuitively fantastic for good rapport
It is my job to continue thinking how to keep goals and return from sinking
But trying to pinpoint every intangible value is simply uncalled for
Though I love data, traditional numbers are so far from social media at it's core
It's the relationships I adore

As for complete measurement, we're still waiting, we're still waiting
And anxiously anticipating metrics that assign value even more;
And my hopes have all the seeming of a marketer still dreaming,
That my efforts not in vain, will yield intangibles and metrics all the same
And that all the hours invested carefully will open future media doors
This I hope and so much more.

Links

Wildlife Watch: http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch/
Wildlife Watch Twitter:http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch/Twitter.aspx
My twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/starfocus
NWF's Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/nwf
NWF's Staff on Twitter: http://blogs.nwf.org/arctic_promise/2009/01/nwfs-staff-on-twitter.html
Hashtags: http://www.hashtags.org "search #nwf"

3.   Carie Lewis, Humane Society of the US

Carie's poem is about the Humane Society's experiments with photo contests and how to use metrics to improve your social media strategy.

How Do You Measure Success: Dollars or Doggie Treats?
Spay Day Photo Contest Page
LOL Seals

4.   Wendy Harman, Red Cross

Wendy will share a story about how they used metrics to refine their social media strategy for their Online Disaster News Room

Presentation Key Points

• set goals:
  • decrease number of incoming media calls
  • increase transparency about disaster response
  • disclose “process” of responding to disasters
  • offer real-time valuable information for people affected and their families
  • offer reliable situational awareness 

• set audience
  • media: local and national
  • affected people
  • affected people’s families and friends in other areas
  • general disaster-interested public 

• picked tools
  • wordpress bc of ease of publishing. Can teach field to use. Has rss capability. Has tagging and category capability so media can subscribe to only what they’re interested in receiving.
  • Flickr bc have established presence there and can cross post for bigger influence. Everyone likes photos.
  • Utterli bc often our volunteers only have a phone and no computer or internet access. Utterli lets them use phone to tell us stories about their process. 

• launched pilot program in 2007 to see if it worked
  • looked at site views and hits. Yes we did
  • looked at incoming links and rate of growth. Analyzed which types of content generated most activity
  • asked media partners if it was useful and what we should add or take away. We made adjustments
  • asked our chapters if it was valuable to them in telling their story and getting info out, made adjustments based on their feedback 

• analyzed overall progress against original goals
  • saw increased press for each disaster based on newsroom
  • saw exponentially increased hits and links for each disaster
  • saw increased field engagement
  • saw that we were recreating the wheel each time and needed to adjust to one URL
  • saw decrease in time spent handling media calls (and those that did keep coming could be easily solved with a “have you checked our disaster online newsroom?”
  • saw increase in understanding the process of responding to a massive disaster, which means fewer negative stories about how we’re not there quick enough or not handing out enough money.
  • Collected hundreds of “thanks” from people affected via Twitter and regular channels saying the info we provided on newsroom helped them navigate their situation better.
  • Gained lots of social media fans. Can invite them to engage with us on our other platforms and by subscribing to our email program. 

• Looking forward
  • Trained 100 disaster response volunteers in submitting their info, improving content
  • Brought in experts like Andy Carvin to advise us
  • Brought in experts from mainstream media to advise us
  • Moved to single URL 

• Goals 2.0
  • Move disaster online newsroom to prominent redcross.org position
  • Change design to mimic look and feel of official site
  • Move from huge disasters only to documenting daily disasters such as home fires
  • Teach chapters to document their own disasters on their own newsrooms so we can aggregate a national picture of data of how much the org does in a day when you won’t hear a word about it. Goal to lead to increased sustained donations rather than episodic giving, increased understanding.
    

Wendy's Poem is a spoof on Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish.

INTRO

One ROI, two ROI, red ROI, blue ROI
Black ROI green ROI, old ROI, new ROI

This project might take its toll, but then again it might have soul…
Say …. It’s hard to prove social media’s role.

Yes!

Some goals are talking and some are listening.
Some are energizing and some are embracing.

Sometimes you have numbers and sometimes you fudge.

Why?

I do not know, go ask the judges!

SET GOALS

We hoped to show the underbelly
Of what it’s like to respond to disasters smelly
So everyone can understand
The stuff that comes as a surprise and the stuff that’s planned.

We wanted less calls and to show our vols
Because the vols are juggling lots of disaster balls.

We wanted to share what we’re doing much quicker
And as a kicker to have a spot for aggregated info. It’s slicker. 

 

WHY USE SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

From there to here and here to there,
The Red Cross wanted one place to update response info from everywhere.

 

Social media tools made it easy
To do just this when the wind gets breezy.

 

DEFINE THE AUDIENCE

We thought media would like to see. And people affected and their families.
Oh me oh my. What a lot of audiences came by.
Some have influence, some need sustenance, some are curious and some need assurance.
Where do they come from? I can’t say but I bet they’ve come a long long way.
We see them come and see them go. Some are fast and some are slow.
Some are high and some are low. Not one of them is like another.
Don’t ask me why. Go ask your brother.

DEFINE the METRICS

Say, let’s define our metrics. 1, 2, 3. Where do we want our newsroom to be?

1, 2, 3, 4 …..  5, 6, 7,  …….  8, 9, 10,

Our benchmarks are 11.

11? Social media is something new. Hits and page views just won’t do.

Try, try, try. Did you ever try before you buy?

We tried a guide with just one disaster at a time.

We looked at growing views and hits, from one to the next.

We looked at incoming links and popular subjects.

We asked media partners about their use and what we should add or take away.

We changed to suit them along the way.

We asked social media experts what we could do better

And we altered how we arranged our letters.

We asked our chapters if it helped them get info out

They say the newsroom increased their clout and helped them understand what social media is all about.

CHOOSE the TOOLS

What are my tools? We chose the following jewels

Wordpress is the main platform and fuel.

Flickr helps us to show the story. We cross post from our presence there and illustrate our response in all its glory.

Utterli is for the ears. Makes it easy for you to hear real time updates from our volunteers.

We’d be nowhere without the volunteers. They’re full of info, blood, sweat, and tears.

ANALYZE PROGRESS

Where to go from here? We look at what we’ve accomplished and cheer.

We analyze what went right and whether we fulfilled our original goals almost or quite.

We like our newsroom and this is why. It does all the work when the piles get high.

Hello there success, how do you do?

Tell me, tell, me, what is new?

Well, we got thousands of mentions by press

And many hundreds linked to us I must confess.

Our own chapters learned the newsroom address

We asked everyone is this valuable and useful?

Their answer was yes! Yes! Yes!

It isn’t perfect. We have room to grow.

By watching the pilot program flow.

We moved from multiple to a single URL

So we can begin to document not just big disasters but also small.

We had enough positive feedback from our tryout

That we’ve decided to go all out.

We’ve trained volunteers by the hundreds

So we’re increasing the quality of the content from our embeds.

CONCLUSION

So we tried a little experiment

To see if we had an accident or accomplishment

We collected qualitative and quantitative evidences

Evaluated them against our expected consequences.

We found our challenges and successes

We continue to change and grow and press

All the while measuring and analyzing and treasuring.

1 ROI, 2 ROI Red ROI Blue ROI

Full of actual numbers and intangibles

Now I look forward to your reply.

Disaster Online Newsroom
http://newsroom.redcross.org

Blog
http://blog.redcross.org

Twitter
http://twitter.com/redcross 

Facebook Page
http://www.facebook.com/redcross

Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/americanredcross/ 

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross

5.   David Neff, American Cancer Society

David will be perform a spoken word and video poem about using Twitter to recruit blood donors and the Austin Twestival.

Poem

When I am in a cinematography state of mind,
my words can open the eyes of the blind

Im going to use verbs that ya'll might never have heard but don't be scared
let my words flow over you like a wave. Social Media is not old Media
foot in the grave.

It's just another channel, another avenue, another street.
Social Media helps your campaign bounce to a different beat
Makes your campaign quite l33t

You see Communities Listen, Communities respond, To them
your word is bond.

Austin is no different. Motivated volunteers have an event. Doesn't
cost your non profit a mint. Twitter crowd rolls through. Donating
and bringing there whole crew.

Social Media for Social Good

Communities Listen, Communities Respond. To them your volunteer
word is bond.

DJ BETH DO YOUR THING <VIDEO ROLLS>

Now Communities Listen, Communities Respond. To them your non profit
word is bond

DJ BETH DO YOUR THING <VIDEO ROLLS>

Social Media for Social Good

This is the last big mistake your non profit could make
if you don't try you won't succeed. Between the Social
Media lines you must read.

I'm about to bail. I don't have time for the fail whale.
My time is already a mess. I hope I have explained this
all in 140 characters or less.

Links

http://austin.socialmediaclub.com/2008/07/02/tweetup-blood-drive/

http://www.wearemedia.org/tactical+track+module+4

http://austin.socialmediaclub.com/2008/07/05/blood-drive-tweetup-a-success/

http://austin.twestival.com/

http://austintwestival.com/

http://www.fispace.org/2009/01/twestival-2009-even-the-fail-whale-needs-clean-water/

If you were in the room or not, and have some great examples or resources about nonprofit social media and roi - drop them in the comments!

What's Your Social Media Baseline?

Photo by Caveman92223

I'm enjoying how Robin Broitman aggregate links about social media. Take her ROI and Measurement list. (I've definitely added that link to my social media metrics personal learning space)

She recently pointed to a blog post called "Ten Ways To Measure Social Media Success" by Chris Lake.  What I found most valuable was the tip about getting a baseline measurement before you begin.  A baseline is a measurement that you can use as a comparison to measure progress against a goal or do before/after comparisons.  Chris suggests:

Before you start the clock it is a good idea to benchmark where you’re at...

1. Make a note of the obvious numbers (number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Digg links, Delicious bookmarks, and referrals from social media sites, plus existing website traffic).
2. Make a note of the less obvious benchmarks (such as SEO rankings and referrals, customer satisfaction scores and other business data). 
3. Make a note of ROI benchmarks. How much are you paying to acquire customers via other marketing channels? How vast is that advertising budget, and how is it being split up? And what proportion is being directed into channels that you cannot accurately measure? 
   

There is a comment in the post from Dan McQuillan who has been mulling over measurement of social media from the nonprofit perspective.  His post "The Apollo and Dionysus of digital evaluation" talks about finding the right mashup between numbers and stories using mythology metaphors.  

What's the technique that converts the Apollonian distancing of neatly printed tables to the DionysianSavvy Chavvy - then, maybe, it'll be pretty clear what's working and what the impact really is. celebration of shared sensations of change? I think one of the consultants at the CES session cracked it when she said that the lab coats of traditional expert evaluation were starting to give way to self-evaluation and user-led evaluation. Maybe what makes the difference is not just the social media but the people who's hands it's in - when the cameras are held by the young people (as they have been at some Make Your Mark events), where users are making the podcasts and the online communities are as self-managed as as Savvy Chavvy - then, maybe, it'll be pretty clear what's working and what the impact really is.

Dan points over to the Measurment Camp Wiki that I need to explore further.

Reflections and Follow Up Questions from Techsoup/NTEN Share Your Story: Social Media ROI Webinar

Wordle of Words Participants Use To Define ROI

Yesterday I taught the fifth and final webinar as part of NTEN/TechSoup Global Webinar Series: Social Media and Storytelling. The presentations and recordings are available online for free and if you work for a nonprofit and want to learn more about social media, definitely worth reviewing.  Here's the list:

• Amy Sample Ward, Building Blocks of Social Media
• Corey Pudhorodsky, Podcasting and Storytelling
• Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman, Video and Storytelling
• Danielle Brigida, Spreading Buzz

I posted my slides and notes on my blog.  You can find the archived recording and there is a follow up discussion item on TechSoup's forums.

I started the Webinar asking folks to type into the chat the first few words that popped into their heads when they heard the phrase "ROI."   As you can see the words paint a picture of a traditional ROI analysis, with the emphasis on quantitative, measurable results. 

For this session, I presented two ROI approaches, one for the early stage projects or pilots based on David Armano's Listen, Learn, and Adapt and the traditional ROI analysis that IT staff in nonprofits might use for a major hardware or system investment.

Click to See Larger Image

I have been noodling around with this chart to show that insight comes before dollars, but if you measure and improve your initial pilot efforts over time, eventually the dollars do come.   Some interesting questions that popped up looking at this chart:

• Does this mean that in the beginning we get insight but not $, and in the end we get $$ but not insight?
• Does return always have to be represented in $, or if you're an advocacy group, couldn't we look at e-petition signatures, volunteers?

I'll need to tweak the "Y" access because gathering insight is a continuous process and there are elements of listen, learn, and adapt in a traditional ROI process.  What's common to both is the use of metrics to measure results. In the early stages, you're using this information to make improvements and in the mature stages to answer the "Was it worth it?" question.

Some interesting questions and reactions in the chat during the Webinar that I wanted to answer and reflect on further.

Does this mean the project itself is redone, or are you assuming a series of similar projects in the early stages?

Put another way, this is a question about how to design effective pilots in the early stages that are measurable.  Geoff Livingston has a terrific post called "Getting Social Media Approved By Your Boss."  He's talking about organizational culture change and resistance, but he emphasizes the importance of a proof of concept project.

First off, we recommend using a pilot project to get through the door.  Reticence is often conquered by a win, and the best way to provide a win is via a pilot project.  Tips to ensuring you choose the right pilot project:

• Begin with some form of listening or monitoring. You must be in tune with your social web community if you want this to work. Hopefully you are doing this before you begin, but just in case…
• Simple and relatively low cost is good.  When there is fear involved, an easy, relatively affordable project is an easy thing to sign off on.
• Short timeframes help, too. You want to make this a quick test.
• Make sure you have a measurable goal. Look at your strategy, it will tell you exactly what to measure. You must be able to attain ROI.  That is why attaining something worthwhile is essential, whether it’s  micro-donations, market intelligence, feedback on a new product, click-throughs to a store, registrants for a value added webinar, or some other measurable result. You must be able to declare victory.
• You have to feel confident that you can attain said goals. Make sure it’s doable. It may be worth bouncing off someone else who has more experience.

How do we make sense of intangible measures?

Intangibles are important, but they won't stand on their own.  Collect anecdotes that illustrate your numbers or final results.   I wrote a lot of about ways that you can think about intangibles in a post called "Can You Quantify Love?"  (part 1, part 2)

Is there a general time ratio or average percentage of time spent on ROI measures vs the actual work?

This is such a good question. I said, somewhat jokingly, that you shouldn't be spending more time doing the ROI analysis than the actual project.  The data collection should be not be a burden and that's why it is useful to carefully pick and choose what metrics you'll track.   The final report or analysis can be a memo or simple report, doesn't need to be elaborate.

Where do you look for standard metrics?

There was much talk early on about the need for standard metrics for measuring social media and struggle to measure social media effectiveness.

I think it is wrong to think about metrics first.  I've done this.  Here's what happens.  There are many many different metrics you could track.  If you don't how they relate to your objectives or audience - then you end up tracking them all.  That creates a lot of data collection and a lot of information to make sense of.  It's best to really focus in on what is most important by relating the metrics to your objective or audience.   With that said, here's Rachel Happe's awesome list of social media metrics.

Do you have a sense of the rate of increase in ROI we should see over time? i.e we should get better each time, but how much?

This is another excellent question, but I don't have an answer. Does anyone?

My blog is worth WHAT!

I hear from a lot of folks that they want a magic calculator that would do all the financial calculations and answer the question, "What's the dollar value?"   

Well, here it is, Stimator. Unfortunately, it doesn't really explain very well how the algorithms and scales are computed. And looks like my blog isn't quite a lucrative as Dave Winer's blog.

My point?   If you are attempting to translate benefits into dollar amounts, particularly intangible benefits - make sure you have a credible formula that you can explain to your executive director in under 5 minutes and that is credible.

NTEN and TechSoup Webinar: Share Your Story - ROI and Social Media - Slides and Notes

Share Your Story: ROI, Social Media, Nonprofits

View more presentations from kanter. (tags: nonprofits roi)

The hardest part of putting this presentation together was using the template because it reminds me why I think powerpoint is evil! But it is always a good exercise to make your brain think in a different way.

Last year at this time, I was writing the chapter on ROI in the soon to be published book from NTEN called "Managing Your Mission." My chapter lays out a traditional ROI process that Nonprofit technology staff use to make major IT investment purchases such as hardware, video conference system, database system, etc. The chapter is based on interviews with folks in the field and includes step-by-step checklists, examples, and tips.

My goal for this presentation was to synthesize the traditional ROI process with the best thinking about social media and ROI from the gurus like David Armano and KD Paine.    That's how I got the sub-title, "Insight Yields Return on Investment."    I feel that David Armano's "Return on Insight: Listen, Learn, Adapt"  process is something that you don't stop doing.   And, it also includes measurement - not just qualitative information. 

After you've been able to use metrics to learn what works and adapt your approach,  you can use a traditional approach which begins with defining value and culminates with a financial calculation that could go something like this.  Or it might compare the cost of one approach to another or the cost of not investing.   It answers the "Was it worth doing?" question.

Return on Investment

Definition: An analysis that looks at the benefits, costs, and value of a technology project over time.  It uses metrics to measure your results and help you improve your strategy over time.  Helps us move away from tool driven decisions to results.

The Return on Investment financial process was created by DuPont and used by Alfred Sloan to help make General Motors manageable in the 1920s.  ROI had it origins as an accounting term and was originally a measure of return on the total investment in the entire business.  It is a flow chart that calculates business performance taking into account not only whether the company had a profit, but whether that profit was good enough relative to the assets it took to generate it.  Over those 80 years, the chart has been polished, refined and so deeply embedded in business thinking..   Wall Street  views it as the only  legitimate means of measuring business performance.  But ROI was not really intended to measure a technology project, program, or tool or any other isolated aspect of an organization.

Return on Investment is what many executive directors may be thinking when social media strategy comes up.   They want to know:

• How much will it cost?
• How much time will it take?
• What are the results?
• Is it worth it?

And we wonder how do we calculate that?  Can we calculate it if we haven't done anything yet?

Return on Investment is a much broader concept that doing math.   If you lay it step-by-step, it includes these:

• Smart Objective
• Defined Audience
• Clearly articulated benefits statement that looks at tangible and intangible
• Use of metrics to measure your results
• Results translated into dollar value (donations or time saved)
• Financial calculations: net gain, opportunity cost, or comparison to other method
• Communicating the results

Return on Insight: Listen, Learn, Adapt

David Armano's "The Collective Focus Group:Listen, Learn, and Adapt" was written for the business audience in mind, but the concept and techniques can be used by nonprofits and more importantly lead to success.  In an earlier post and presentation, I riffed on Armano's article and translated for a nonprofit context.

This process consists of three activities.   Listening is knowing what is being said online about your organization and your field.  Listening is the first step, but you do it before, during, and after the project. Learning is using experiments with metrics and the right questions at the right point to understand what works, what doesn’t.  The definition of adapt is using insights to make corrections to improve results the next time around.

How do you apply these two methods?

You must begin with getting insight and once you've had learned enough and adapted, you can begin to subject your social media efforts to a traditional ROI process.

Insight

• Secret sauce of social media success
• It may require internal culture change – proactive listening and experiments
• May initially feel like “extra work” but should be embedded in your implementation process
• Requires longer-term thinking which is difficult given current financial pressures

Investment

• Should do once you’ve had several thoughtful experiments using Listen, Learn, and Adapt not on the front-end
• ROI analysis requires documenting, collecting data, and internal discussion and cooperation
• Must be more than math.

Listen, Learn, Adapt: Step-by-Step

The following are the key points.  For links and more detailed, see my earlier post on Listen, Learn, and Adapt.

Listen

• Using monitoring tools
• Know your keywords
• Use your RSS reader like a rock star
• Engaging and monitoring responses from clients
• Engaging internally

The example to illustrate these points is from a panel I designed for the NTC08 on ROI and Social Media and including Wendy Harman from the Red Cross.

Learn

Learning is picking the right metrics to measure what is and isn't working. The most important point is that you need to think like a scientist - they measure and document everything and do experiments.   You also need to think like Jane Goodall or a primatologist - who does field observations, sifts through qualitative data for patterns, etc.    Above all you must pick the right metrics to measure what your doing and look for trends that can tell you what works and what doesn't.

Here's how I've documented all the social media fundraising campaigns:

• Objective and Audience
• Document on the fly
• Test and tweak
• Pick the right hard data points
• Harvest insights
• Look at what other nonprofits are doing in the space
• Pause for reflection time before next reiteration: How to improve results?

I used the example from the Facebook Birthday campaign.

Adapt

This is hard part because it means making changes either with your social media strategy and potential your organization.  Adapting is taking the insights that you've learned and using them to tweak or revise your strategy.

I used the example from the Humane Society's excellent social media work.

ROI Process

In the next section of the presentation, I use my blog as an example of going through a traditional ROI process.  I've been doing the ROI analysis openly on my blog for the past two years and the presentation uses a slightly more refined version of this benchmarking process.   I learned everything about metrics ane measurement from reading the blogs of gurus - KD Paine and Avinash Kaushik

After defining objective and audience,  the metrics that I use to measure my blog include:

• Raw Author Contribution
• Unique Blog Readers
• Engagement
• Authority

For each one, I show an example of charts, graphs, or data that I've used to lead to an understanding of what works.

The tools I use are below.  These are all free tools that do not require technical knowledge to install or use, although you have to spend some time learning how they work.  

• Feedburner
• Google Analytics
• Postrank

What's Up With Feedburner by Beth Kanter
Google Analytics Primer sponsored by NTEN with screencast and wiki created by Beth Kanter
Using Postrank To Evaluate the Top Content on my blog by Beth Kanter

Benefits: Tangible and Intangible

The next step is list all the benefits that your blog or other social media offers.  Don't worry if you can't quantify them at this point, just list them.  There are two types of benefits.  Tangible benefits are those that can be easily converted into a standard measurement unit like dollars or time.  Intangible benefits are those that are more subjective, usually behaviorally oriented and more difficult to convert into a standard measure.   While both are important to track and identify,  your executive director is probably most interested in the tangible benefits.

Tangible Benefits

• Market Research
• Mainstream media mentions
• Inquiries for consulting
• Helps me prepare for trainings/consulting Program Ideas
• Increased Relevant Visitor Traffic
• Increased Page Rankings
• Fundraising – reach new donors – both small and large

Go through each of your tangible benefits and assign a value or specific dollar amount.  You may need to think of terms of time or dollars saved.

Intangible Benefits

• Intangibles
• Makes me happy
• Makes me smarter
• Reduces my information overload
• People say they are learning as a result

A good exercise is to try to convert your intangibles.  Sometimes with additional data collection or secondary research you can.  Here's a conversion test:

• Does an acceptable, standard metric exist for the measure?
• Can the conversion be accomplished with minimum resources?
• Can the conversion process be described to an executive director and secure their buy-in in five minutes?

I wrote a lot of about this a year ago in a series of post called "Can You Quantify Love?"  (part 1, part 2)

Track Your Time

Social media takes time to do well, a minimum investment of 5 hours a week.  With financial pressures, you need to know how much time it takes you and figure out how to be efficient.   Two years ago, I started to use my kids timeout timer to keep on track with my social media work.  This had a double value - I was more efficient because I was tracking my time (sort of like keeping a diet journal) and I was to find ways to save time and use a more systemmatic approach.

What I discovered is that once I had my blogging work flow into a routine, I was to accomplish it more efficiently.  If subjected myself to an tracking my time exercise in the beginning, I wouldn't be blogging today.   There's a learning curve before you reap the benefits of efficiency.

Other Data

One thing about a traditional ROI process is that you might need to collect other data to analyze the ROI.  But careful, you don't want to spend more time collecting and processing data than actually doing the social media implementation!

• Staff Surveys
• Staff Interviews
• Client surveys
• Clients Interviews
• Data from system
• Task Analysis
• Times Sheet Analysis
• Articles
• Field research (Listening)
• Observation
• Secondary research reports
• Benchmark studies
• Budget and Financial Analysis

Now Do the Math

Now you are ready to do some number crunching.   Here are some ways to think about the math part of your ROI analysis:

• Compare the total cost/benefit of different options

• Compare the total costs with the benefits/value

• Compare the costs of not doing the project

• Identify pilot(s) to identify cost/benefit (Listen, Learn, Adapt)

In researching the ROI Chapter of the NTEN book, I intervewed some staff members from Legal Services community.  They wanted to implement a laptop program for the 40 attornies on staff - they knew it would be more efficient for those who working outside of the office.   However, with such a large expenditure and not data, the project was not approved.  So, they designed a small pilot where they tracked how much time was saved and what that translated into - including the ability for the attornies to spend more time taking on more clients.   This lead to full implementation of the project.   So, look for small, low risk pilots so you can understand the cost/benefit. 

ROI Story Telling

It is important to communicate your results and be an internal evangelist for your project.  Here's some points on that:

• Blend the numbers and non-financial factors into a concise and informative presentation
• Focus on the value
• Be honest about the issues and facts, but spotlight value to mission
• Creating effective stories is not hard, provided  you clearly understand who these decision influencers are, know well what they most care about and understand where to place stories for the most impact.

Summary

• Insights translates into dollars over time
• Use Listen, Learn, Adapt especially in the early stages
• Pick the right metrics and track to improve what you’re doing
• Focus on value of social media first – tangible benefits
• Intangibles are important
• Numbers are important, but stories can enhance your case

There are a couple of bonus slides in the deck about how to use metrics for podcasts and video.  Corey Pudhorodsky of the 501-Casts was kind of enough to create some slides for me.  Go listen to his podcast session as part of this series.

My session was the last of 5-part series that started with a fanastic session by Amy Sample Ward on the building blocks,  a webinar on Video by Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, and Spreading Buzz by Danielle Brigida.

Additional Links

WeAreMedia: Considering the ROI of Social Media
ROI Blog Posts by Beth Kanter
Social Media Metrics Blog Posts by Beth Kanter
Listen, Learn, Adapt by David Armano
KD Paine Reputation Management and Measurement Session at E-Metrics by KD Paine
KD Paine Measurement Blog (must read)

•

At what point in the life of your social media project can you use a traditional ROI Process?

I've been doing a lot of  thinking about "ROI, Social Media, and Nonprofits" in preparation for a book chapter and several upcoming presentations, workshops, and webinars over the next couple of months.   Yesterday I took a deep dive into David Armano's "Listen, Learn Adapt" and translated it for nonprofits.

I've walked away with a feeling that the Return on Insight process is something that you don't stop doing.  And, it also includes measurement - not just qualitative information.

I've also been thinking about traditional ROI processes in the nonprofit technology context.  I contributed a chapter on traditional ROI processes to the forthcoming book from NTEN, "Managing Your Technology To Meet Your Mission."  This chapter focused on how nonprofits can use an ROI analysis for IT investments, like a client management system or hardware upgrades.

In the past year, I've been looking at the question of how, when, or if you can use a traditional ROI process for your social media effort.  A traditional approach begins with defining value.  A traditional approach culminates in a financial calculation that could go something like this.  Or it might compare the cost of one approach to another or the cost of not investing.   It answers the "Was it worth doing?"

I've come to the conclusion "Return on Insight" can co-exist with traditional "Return on Investment" approaches for social media, not replace it.  

My question is: 
At what point do you shift or incorporate a traditional ROI process for your social media effort?    

Riffing on David Armano's Listen, Learn, and Adapt: Need Your Organization's Adaption Stories!

Listen Learn Adapt

View more presentations from kanter. (tags: listening roi)

These is a rough cut where I've riffed on some of the ideas in David Armano's "The Collective Focus Group:Listen, Learn, and Adapt" and extended them to nonprofits and social media.  I was inspired  wondered how and if it might translate to nonprofits and social media.  I think that listen, learn, and adapt is the secret sauce to social media strategy success!  Now say that five times fast!  

What I need is your input -I'd love to hear about your social media "adaption stories" - please leave me a comment.

I think "Return on Insight" can co-exist with traditional "Return on Investment" approaches for social media, not replace it.   More on that later.

I'm also using this for the upcoming WeAreMedia Workshop in San Francisco which has a section on experiments and measurement.  I'm also doing a session at the NTC in April called "Mapping Metrics To Strategy: Using Measurement To Improve Your Social Media Efforts" with panelists Wendy Harman, Red Cross, Qui Diaz, Livingston Communications, Danielle Brigida, NWF, and Susan Granger, PDF.  

Listening

Listening is knowing what is being said online about your organization and your field.  Listening is the first step, but you do it before, during, and after the project.  In other words, you never take your listening ears off.  It becomes part of your organization's culture. 

It can be hard to retool an organization's culture to do listening as a daily part of the work flow, particularly if it isn't valued or there are concerns about negatives.

The Red Cross has overcome these hurdles.   They use social media to achieve goals of increased transparency and increased donations of blood, time, and money.  In that order.   Listening is an important piece of the strategy.  This was over two years ago.

As Wendy Harman, Red Cross Social Media Manager, observes, "When Katrina hit, we knew people are talking but we’re not listening to conversation. First, it felt like we were going to do battle.  But now, the process of listening has changed concerns into strong interest about what people have to say."
 
The first project was to listen to what was being said on blogs about the Red Cross.  As the chief listener for the organization, Wendy honed her listening literacy skills using free tools like google alerts, technorati, RSS reader, and delicious.  She would listen, aggregate, analyze, and distribute to key subject matter experts within the organization on a consistent basis.

Listening leads to engagement.  Wendy documented many different stories and shared these internally. The examples would show how engaging with people changed them from complainers to fans.  Here's but one example from a blogger:

“I took an American Red Cross class I thought was less than satisfactory. […] Someone found my blog post and told the local chapter director. He called me to talk about it honestly. […] They care about me and they’re willing to go the extra mile. […] This gives the American Red Cross HUGE points. I am now significantly more likely to take another class than I was before.”

They've had months and months to hone their work flow and the Red Cross Social Media Team has it down to a science.  They determine what comments need action, whether to say thank you and build a relationship, repair a customer service issue, or ignore.   They spend time reading other posts by the blogger to help make this decision.  They now use this approach with other channels, like Twitter, for example.

Because of the volume and using free tools, Wendy had to do a lot of heavy cut and paste to analyze, summarize, and distribute the information. With a better understanding on the value that continuous listening provides the organization, they are now investing in professional tools, like Radian 6.

Key points:

• Relationship building lays groundwork for future campaigns to raise time, money, and blood
• Identifies influencers
• Documentation creates internal value
• Listening skills and tools upgraded
• What works used for future campaigns

Learning

“If you don’t launch, you don’t learn.”   David Armano

Learning is using experiments with metrics and the right questions at the right point to understand what works, what doesn’t.  This is where the pavement hits the road.  You won't be able to reap the full potential of social media unless you begin and get past any social media stalemate.

What does learning actually mean?  You have to think like a scientist, documenting your experiments at the beginning, middle, and end.  You also need to observe like a primatologist, like Jane Goodall. Perhaps that a bad analogy - certainly your donors aren't primates.  Armano describes this as digital anthropologists sifting through qualitative data and metrics to reap insights.

I'll share my process and I understand that I'm probably a crazy person.  I also know there is some resistance to document while you're doing, but I think it is essential to learning - especially at the practitioner level.    Here's what I do:

1.  Document on the fly

I don't wait until the end of the project.  I grab a little something everyday.   It could be as simple as opening up a google document and dropping in a few bullet points or cutting and pasting a comment.  The point is - you need to steal five or ten minutes from the doing to reflect in action.  Since I'm a visual person, I also use flickr as a documentation tool - I do a lot of screen shots with snagit and annotate. I also bookmark posts that reference the project using a unique project tag.  If I'm working with a team versus solo, I'll also share some summaries of the most important learnings.  I also tweaking as I go - mostly messaging and mostly clarifying.

2. Pick the right hard data points
 
I know from experience what the most important metrics are to track for different types of projects.  They are different depending on the audience and goals.   Here is where more is less is really important.

3.  Harvest your insights
 
At the end of the project, I do a wrap up with all the bites and pieces I've collected.  I do a "by the numbers" summary,  I look patterns and trends in the comments or visuals, and look at what other nonprofits are doing in the space.  The important piece is to ask questions, not just look at numbers.

4.  Hit the Pause Button

I usually write something up that anwers the question - "If I were to do this again next step, what would I do differently?"   I don't wait until the day before I'm going to do something similar again.   You best insights come right after you've completed the project and had a day or two of distance.   Then you have captured those thoughts and when you begin planning for the next iteration - you have not lost those valuable insights.

A few points about social media metrics. While some of the measurement concepts for social media remain the same as traditional Web analytics, there are some new ideas to embrace.  Steve Rubel wrote about this in a post called "Page Views Are Officially Dead" two years ago.  Page views may not be dead, but you need to use engagement metrics. I've written about this as it relates to blogging quite a bit.  Again, it isn't the numbers in isolation.  It is the time that you spend looking at metrics in the context of your strategy and asking questions.

Yesterday, I interviewed Jake Brewer who is the Internet Manager at the Energy Action Coalition about how they use metrics to generate insights about their YouTube Channel.

“We don’t really care about views as much as we care about comments.  If we get 1,000 video views that is good.   The comments are a focus group with our influencers.  If they like it, they’ll spread it and that helps get to our objectives.”

Rachel Happe has a great list of social media metrics and it is a good starting point.   If you're a metrics geek and want to go deeper, visit my personal learning space for Social Media Metrics.  But do me a favor, please.  Please don't get so obsessed with metrics that you loose site of how you're going to use them!  And remember,

• Objective, audience, strategy and link to your metric
• Pick the right ones! 
• Numbers alone are meaningless
• Combine with other measures and qualitative data
• Harvest insights

Adapt

The definition of adapt is using insights to make corrections to improve results the next time around.  You have to be nimble and that can be hard.

I've watched the Carrie Lewis at the Humane Society do a fantastic job of adapting the organization's social media projects.   In 2007, the Human Society implemented its first photo petition campaign to protest Wendy's treatment of animals . They tracked the number of photo submissions they got, but they also listened carefully to the responses they got from participants.

As Carrie Lewis mentions in the comments in the blog post , "Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time." This particular photo campaign had many technical glitches and ultimately the number of submissions was less than impressive. Did HSUS proclaim that photo competitions were a waste of time?

No.

The next iteration of a photo contest, LOL Seals , made it as easy as possible for people to participate. That's what they had learned from the first campaign. The first contest, they asked people to upload their photos and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a Flickr account and know what “tagging” was. The second contest, they used the Flickr API which made everything automatic -- from tagging and uploading without the user having to even touch Flickr. They had about 3,000 submissions and captured about 2,000 new email addresses.

They've recently implemented an online photo contest that combines wisdom of the crowds with person to person fundraising.  There is a web and Facebook version.   It looks, from the outside, like a great success so far and this would not have happened with out these earlier versions.

It's much easier to adapt your social media project than to change other things in your organization that social media might shine a light on - customer service, programs, and services.   And to make changes on those areas, it may require thinking staffing, work flow, and of course, involving leadership and others in your organization. 

Armano has a some excellent organizational culture questions:

• Are you launching initiatives that can be easily updated? Are you enabling a "culture of rapid response?"
• Are you building a culture in which "failure" is acceptable?
• Are you allowing your teams to create "pilots" prior to scrutinizing them through traditional ROI exercises?
• Are you planning initiatives that will help your organization learn prior to backing major marketing campaigns?

Conclusion

• Don’t take off your listening ears
• Think like a scientist, observe like primatologist
• Evolution is a good thing

Listening Literacy Skills by Beth Kanter
How Listening Returns Value for Nonprofits by Beth Kanter
Nonprofits Need Different I and R Words by Beth Kanter
How o harvest insights by Beth Kanter

Now, it's your turn.  What are some of your organization's social media adaption stories?

ROI (Results on Insights) of Online Communities

Flickr Photo by Cursed Thing

Last year at this time, I was in Austin, TX doing a keynote workshop for Legal Services Corporation on the ROI of Nonprofit Technology.   I interviewed technology practitioners from the poverty law community about how they approach ROI and significant technology systems investments like client databases, document assembly systems, or video conference systems.  I also contributed a chapter on the topic to NTEN's Managing Your Technology To Meet Your Mission due out by Wiley

I covered the building blocks of a classic ROI process, but translated to a nonprofit context.   The basics include: benefits, value, metrics, and financial calculations.   I shared case studies and tips for nonprofits on measuring efficiency and effectiveness and looking at tangible/intangible benefits.  I still think these are components are essential and should be applied to looking at the ROI (Results on Insight) for nonprofits and social media. 

However, even with harsh economic times, there is the temptation to look at numbers only and immediately dismiss social media.  I think that is dangerous.  Numbers need context - and that context - insight - can help with improvements.  Also, I think a lot of nonprofits are in the early implementation stage and to be able to get to traditional ROI - they need experience guided by tracking insights and metrics.   You have to set up a framework at the beginning - hence the vital importance of a strategy map.

Jeremiah Owyang has an excellent post for Online Community Managers about demonstrating ROI so their departments, jobs, or communities won't be cut from the budget.    He begins points out three outcomes that should be tracked.  Nonprofit technology folks will find these all too familiar if they've had to make a case for a new client management system or other expensive upfront investment for mission-critical technology system.

Improvement in marketing efficiency
Community Managers should measure increased speed from word of mouth or marketing awareness, the best way to measure this is time from awareness to close –or spread of WOM. This could also include increase understanding of customers (listening) for marketing research, or warning stakeholders about potential detractors before they become real issues.

Reduction in support costs
The bottom line is always important to business, so if you can measure a decrease  in customers going to physical stores, emailing account reps, or calling the support center as they instead rely on community to help self-support themselves, you can start to put dollar costs on this actual community savings.

Actual improvement to sales
This matters most. Community Managers should start to measure how clicks from community directly impact e-commerce, go to product pages (perhaps if you’re B2B) or to affiliate marketing to demonstrate how community interaction increases revenue. If you can demonstrate this (like Dell’s million dollar sales in Twitter) tout this loudly to management.

Jeremiah points out that the first value/outcome - which is essentially about listening and participating, isn't as much appreciated (in a for-profit environment) as the other two which are about money. He recommends  to prioritize according.  So, for the purposes of an ROI analysis and reporting to decision-makers, maybe you don't emphasize those values in the report or be the only value.   However, if you want to get to the other two outcomes.  And, just because the second two outcomes are valued more in terms of ROI report, I don't think it means eliminating the strategies and tracking.  

Do you agree?

Bill Johnston has some additional thoughts for building a case for ROI for an online community.  He talks about the reporting requirements and where to start - that is focusing on value:

Focus on Defining / and Reporting Value
In order for your community strategy to be sustainable, you need to be able to articulate value back to the organization. This value has to be articulated, at least in part, in the cultural language of your organization. In some organizations, it’s all about impact to customer loyalty, it some organizations, this value is growing an audience (member registrations). You will likely wind up with a report that is a mosaic of quantitative and qualitative sources.

Note that qualitative data is important - you need both to do an ROI analysis and to communicate the results.  Numbers speak yes - but the qualitative data tells the story and gives context.

In the comments, Mike Pascucci, emphasizes how important the internal evangelism skills are:

It is very important that a Community Manager highlights the “wins” that have resulted because of the Community offerings that a company provides. Community managers need to be the “Internal Evangelist” for these companies. Let everyone know what is happening, and develop an internal communication process to distribute any and all information about your Community.

The highlights to me the importance of making sure that social media is everywhere in the organization and not just an intern in an silo doing it.   I don't think you can become an effective evangelist at the end of the project, you need buy-in upfront and continue regular updates.   You can only gather "wins" - and both qualitative and quantitative ones if you've set up your hard data tracking system and also gathering qualitative information. 

Wendy Harman at the Red Cross has been a master at that.

My question is what happens when the numbers don't look good?  Bill Johnson has some advice, what nonprofits may call the "Opportunity Cost"

Show the Cost of Not Participating
One way to show value back to management is to paint a picture of not having a community or community engagement strategy, and the associated costs and losses. These hypothetical costs can range from increased awareness of competitors to decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A consulting company that sells ROI services for online communities says it isn't hard to measure the ROI of online communities (or social media) (using their framework):

It is not hard to develop the ROI framework, but it does take time and relationships within the organization to get the appropriate data. If you are a community manager, you need to build a network outside of the community area in your organization in order to align the community’s analytics with your organization’s focus and goals. Only then will you be able to tap into CRM or e-commerce databases to validate your framework.

Nonprofits have the Social Network Calculator from Care2.  

So the challenge is how do you translate these outcomes for a social media effort and a nonprofit context?    Here's some examples from last year's NTC Nonprofit Case Study Slam.   I'd love to see some more. 

ROI (Results on Insights): Nonprofit Examples of How Listening Returns Value

Click to see larger image

I'm very tempted to start using Results On Insights for ROI thanks to Barb Chamberlain's comment in yesterday's post "What Are The Best I-Words For Nonprofits To Think About Social Media and ROI?" 

But what does that really mean? 

A few days ago, I asked for some stories "What is the value of listening through social media channels for your organization?"   I wanted to see examples from nonprofit organizations engaged in listening and conversation and the value it has to their missions, programs, or marketing efforts.   And you shared them!  Thanks.

Here's what I learned.

Observations

• Listening may happen at the personal, staff level as a best practice for doing their job whether or not it is embedded in the organization's culture.
• For listening to become an organization wide activity and more impact, it needs to be part of the organization's culture.  That happens when leaders model and encourage it.
• Listening is typically used by nonprofits to provide better customer service, correct misconceptions, and other ways to support external audiences.  Nonprofits are also using listening to support improved program implementation.
• Organizations use both hard data points and qualitative data to listen and learn.
• Having a structured way to collect and analyze qualitative insights can not only help with designing a social media engagement policy, but also harvest insights.
• Effective listening through social media channels means that individuals and organizations need to identify why they are listening and how they will apply what they hear.
• The value of listening is not in the act of listening in and of itself, but when an organization or individual uses the information to improve programs or marketing. This requires engaging in a conversation.

Correcting Misconceptions and Improving Customer/Stakeholder Relations

The AirForce Blog:   The image above is of the US Air Force Blog Assessment and Engagement process.  It is an excellent example of working through how an organization might respond to comments on a blog, but even better it is map for insight harvesting.    As David Meerman Scott notes in his analysis of their social media strategy, the goal is "to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public." 

If you were still thinking about ROI as Return on Investment you'd never be able to make a case!  With such a clear policy for response, it is obvious that the blog generates valuable information to shape and improve a marketing strategy.

As Pudding Relations suggests "Take a look and see if you can use it to enhance your own thinking around social media with, ahem, military precision."

Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center is listens by searching for discussions about blood donations in their local area says Courtney Martin.   Although there is low volume, the listening has provided a lot of value. "We've been able to answer questions for people who want to donate blood but don't know the rules, or who have misconceptions. When we found someone who'd had a negative experience at one of our facilities, we were able to respond to her concern and leave her with a good feeling about our organization.  It was our first true social media success story, and helped validate our social media use to the powers that be at our organization."  

No doubt, the listening also provides great content ideas for their blog.

Network for Good has some terrific stories about noisy, angry people becoming champions for their services because of active listening and then open engagement with them on social networks or in the comments of blogs.  One example is from the GiveWell Blog which posted a complaint about the Network For Good's fees. Network for Good's Vice President,  Katya Andresen, left a comment in response which lead to a conversation and this follow up post from GiveWell.   After some back and forth conversation, including asking for his input when they changed their fee structure, GiveWell became a supporter and user for Network for Good's services.

Getting Ideas for Campaigns or Programs

GreenPeace Whale Trail  asked their online visitors for campaign ideas and they got some great ones, like the Great Whale Trail, where they tagged whales and then tracked them using GPS/Google maps. This drove traffic. (Hat tip Miriam Kagan)

Improving Program and Service Delivery

Green Media Toolshed;   Founder Marty Kearns says that listening is something that is done on an individual staff level, but for it to become an organizational process leaders need to build a culture of listening.   He encourages staff to listen on many different channels and to blog what they learn in order to share with members.  He notes that they have a 80% retention rate with members and "you can't do that without listening."  Listening by using rss feeds helps refine their services and help stay sharp and connected to experts in the field.  A lot of their listening is through filtering information from friends on social networks which saves them a lot of time and helps the organization "work smarter."

World Institute. The social media maven and metrics expert is Laura Lee Dooley where the organization uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data points to improve their social media strategy.  Laura's challenge is to get the right metrics to the right people on staff at the right time to reap insights.  She's recently retooled the organization's metrics dash board to include social media measures.  Using the hard data points and sifting through qualitative data, she drives reflective conversations with staff that reap substantial insights. Here's a few:

• People who are leaders in online conversations about our issues are not always the same as those who are leaders in the offline world. You should reach out to both audiences.
• People who choose to follow me or my organization do so because of the conversations we participate in and the issues we care about. Keeping the trust of those who follow and support us is an important responsibility.
• It is important to leverage the active social media networks that are already out there - jump in, listen, contribute and you will develop a core group of dedicated followers who will become advocates for you and your work.

LawHelp:  Kate Bladow who blogs at Technola says that listening has become a best practice for staff persons responsible for program management, even if it isn't being done as an organizational wide activity.  Notes, Kate, "I found out this week that a colleague and I both listen to social media channels on "legal aid" and "pro bono"  because we want to know if anyone is reaching out and looking for legal aid."  Kate directs those people to their web site where they can find legal information as well as referrals.  They also listen to identify people who are talking about wanting to take on pro bono legal work and recruit them as pro bono lawyers.

Kate also uses listening techniques for her personal blog as a way to build her community of readers interested in legal aid, pro bono work, and other access-to-justice issues.  Listening helps her aggregate stories for her blog and has helped her grow the readership.

People Helping People volunteer Cynthia has just started to use listening techniques as a way to convince others in the organization of its value.  Using a combination of Twitter, RSS feeds, and commenting on blogs, they ahve seen their search engine results improve.   Far more valuable is that they have identified and recruited some new board members and volunteers.

Danielle Brigida shared some wonderful insights about the how-to of listening and why it is essential as part of your organization's social media strategy.

Listening is a vital part of NWF's social media strategy. I spend a majority of my time listening and responding to questions, commenting on blogs, and tracking NWF's mentions and various programs. But also-- it's important to connect with people based on their interests (I will sometimes search twitter for "kids outside" and then compliment them on giving their kids a green hour!)

Paying attention to trends on the various networks is also incredibly beneficial because it makes it easier to be relevant. Listening helps you be less of a spammer and more of a do-gooder

Update:

Reflecting on these stories, I wrote a post called "Listening Literacy" which outlines the skills you need to do effective listening.