Beth’s Blog

A Couple of Good Resources

January is Tune Up month in the Zoetica Salon, an online space for free peer learning about nonprofits and social media.   Here’s a few good resources shared on the wall in the past week.

Book: My colleague, Micah Sifry, has written a book, “Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency.”   The theme of transparency was an important idea in the Networked Nonprofit and I can’t wait to read Micah’s thinking about the transparency movement.  You can pre-order the book and get 15% off.

Editorial Calendars: Use a social media editorial calendar. Identify all your platforms, themes, and schedule it. It is way less stress to know what you’re going to publish for the week versus having do it on the fly.   It also helps with celebrating organizational milestones via social media.  Holly Minch shared this excellent template.

Strategy Tune Ups:   Geoff Livingston shares his strategy tips on how nonprofits can break through the social media clutter and get stakeholders pay attention (Julie Pippert talks about the importance of passion) and a framework to think about your social media strategy.

Social Media Initiative Guide: This guide from Spreadfast, a social media management tool vendor, has some great tips and ways to think about Key Performance Indicators, tactics, and metrics.  A big shout out to their new Director of Social Media,  Jordan Viator.

Benchmarking: When assessing social media performance, many nonprofits want to benchmark their social media results against other similar nonprofits.    Here are a couple of nonprofit and social media benchmarking resources.  I like to see a digital IQ study focused solely on nonprofits – one that analyzes it by budget size.  In lieu of that report,  here’s a quick list of nonprofit facebook pages that rock (for example this shoutout landing page from GLIDE)identified by folks participating in the Zoetica Salon in response to a question posed by Holly Ross at NTEN and Kivi Leroux Miller’s Nonprofit Communications Trends e-book.

A Fresh Perspective: Steve Bridger shares this post that offers nonprofits five suggestions for giving their communications strategy a fresh look.

TechSoup Global Storytelling Challenge: Susan Tenby shared this post about the “TechSoup Global Storytelling Challenge” -  part competition, part instructional – an opportunity for your organization to win some great prizes and improve the way you share your story.   More here.

Personal Productivity at Social Media: Kami Huyse shares this informative video and deck about productivity in an age of distraction.

Zoetica Salon: This Month’s Theme: Social Media Tune Up

Flickr Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

Last month, we launched the  The Zoetica Salon on my Facebook Page with my Zoetica colleagues,  Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse, and Julie Pippert (the newest Zoetican) where over 7,000 nonprofit leaders have been engaging in informal learning about nonprofits and social media.   Our intent is to provide a space for  just-in-time answers, share best practices at no charge, and deepened our learning based on a monthly theme.  Last month, our theme was measurement and we shared a summary of the best measurement tips and resources here, here, and here.

Since January is a great month  to tune up your social media strategy, that’s our theme for the month.     We will answer your questions about how to make your organization’s social media efforts more efficient.     We’ll share tips, resources, and tools for saving time on engaging in conversations, listening, content strategy, measurement, tools and more.

We encourage you to ask your questions about how to more effective with social media – either for your organization or as a practitioner.   Whether you are  looking for ways to make your email campaigns more social or trying to avoid the pitfalls of common social media measurement mistakes, post your questions.   Maybe you want to find a few examples so you can benchmark your organization or for a presentation,  just post your query.   Maybe you are looking good shortcuts to make your organization’s social media use less time consuming and have specific questions about techniques or tools.      Maybe you don’t have time to test every app on Facebook and want some recommendations on what’s best to stream your content.

And if you’ve  implemented a few focused social media activities in 2011 and have gleaned some insights.   Good for you!  Tell us about your success stories!

We invite everyone to join us this month as we explore how to make our organization’s social media use effective or improve our own practice.    See you there!

Social Media Measurement Roundup

Photo by M. Schenekenberg

The  Zoetica Salon is a free online space for informal peer learning about nonprofits and social media.    It is a place to share resources and ask and answer questions.   We also identify a monthly theme to discuss in more in depth.    We want to distinguish the salon from the informal knowledge sharing that happens daily on the web or behind pay walls by offering a regular synthesis of the stories, knowledge, tips, resources, and wisdom shared in real time in the salon.

This month’s theme was measurement – here’s a summary of the month’s learnings:

Measurement Approaches

We launched with a post that shared a copy of KDPaine’s Measurement Checklist that takes you through the A to Z of setting up a thoughtful and robust measurement approach.    Many nonprofits often address measurement at the end of a project or program or fiscal year, but by putting it first it enables organizations to build a thoughtful strategy.

Measurement Challenges

Folks from larger organizations identified one challenge with the first step, which is get sign off and buy in on what to measure.    As one participant points out,  “It is very hard to get departments to agree because Web wants one thing, Membership wants another, Communications has it’s own tracking.”

Deb Levine from ISIS shared, “Many organizations in public health area are still relying on process measures (how many visitors, how many links in, how many friends, etc.).  I believe this is because it is so difficult to measure behavior change. ALSO, incredibly important measurements are the demographics of who your non-profit is reaching.  Meaning, if you are a senior-serving organization and you have 1000+ friends, 80% of whom are under 30, well, enough said…. ”

Small Proof of Pilots With Measurement Component

Participants pointed to the importance of small pilots.  Notes one participant, “It definitely gave us the ability to work around chicken & egg conversations. “I can’t prove value unless you let me try.” “We won’t let you try unless you can prove value.”

Data Analysis

What useful nugget did you learn from analyzing your social media metrics data or your measurement process that lead to a success or improvement in your social media practice? There’s a goldmine of insights shared on this thread that will be useful to everyone!   Enjoy!

How do you analyze your social media data? This conversation explored common pitfalls to analysis approaches and how to avoid them.   Many nonprofit social media managers shared tips and advice.

Metrics

When a nonprofit partners with a company on project that uses social media, what metrics do you use to measure success? This conversation was sparked by this post from Richard Becker that shares the numbers from the Pepsi Refresh Contest.   Numbers are the first tangible indicators, but documenting and seeing the actual change depends on how well equipped and capable those who won the popular vote and the money are to achieve those social change outcomes.  While difficult to link cause/effect, it will be interesting to see what the long term impact is.

How important are outside social reviews of your cause and its efforts to measure and improve? This conversation starter was about measuring the impact third party reviewers.  In the commercial sector, Yelp serves as a third party review mechanism for restaurants, hotels, etc.   In the nonprofit sector, there is no universal review mechanism to benchmark against, but Great Nonprofits is beginning to fill those shoes. Many feel the same as Craig Newmark.  Do you?  Respond here.

How do you measure the your organization’s influence in social channels? This conversation was started by
blog posts from Geoff Livingston and Valeria Maltoni about one popular influence measuring tool.

What’s your “sexy” social media metric? Google Analytics Evangelist and Blogger, Avanish Kaushik coined that phrase to describe a metric that helps you learn and improve what you’re doing and leads to greater impact.     That’s why the sexy metric for social media is engagement which can lead to more impact.    Frank Barry wonders why many nonprofits measure the wrong things and suggests these three metrics to track.

Other than benchmarking against yourself over time, are there sub-sector averages that we can look at? Here’s a quick list of benchmark studies of nonprofits and social media:  NTEN/Common Knowledge Social Network Benchmark Report , NTEN – E-Nonprofit Benchmark Study ,  PostRank Nonprofit Blogs Benchmarking and Digital IQ Public Sector Benchmark. And, in addition to these nonprofit and public sector benchmark reports, another approach is get a small group of your colleagues from similar organizations and benchmark each other by sharing data.

Tools

KD Paine’s checklist, step 2, is to select a listening/monitoring tool, an important step in the measuremet process.   As Kami Huyse points out,  paid tools can be expensive, particularly for small nonprofits.   She discovered a new free Beta tool called G’lerts (at http://glerts.com/) from Shonali Burke.   This tool allows you to shared today, that allows you to put all of your Google Alert feeds (which many of use get by email) into a dashboard. The dashboard shows rough sentiment analysis, # of mentions and links.

Interview

Dan Michel from Feeding America shared how his team measures and tracks their social media and links to key performance indicators.   Here’s the summary and it is filled with useful tips and practice.

Q/A
Wayside House for some beginner tools for automating a micro content strategy.   The answer is here.

Hildy Gottlieb asks for advice about what to do about those pesky community pages on Facebook.  Many answers here.

Some Great Links Shared

Lots of discussion and questions about Facebook Places inspired this guest post by Ivan Boothe and this short and sweet and very useful tip sheet on what nonprofits need to know about Facebook Places

A terrific resource on ROI and Social Media shared by Kami Huyse – Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media and ROI for Associations.

JD Lasica shares an awesome list of social media measurement tools, many of them free or low cost.

Holly Ross, NTEN,  Four Lessons Learned About Social Media in 2010

Come join us in the Zoetica Salon. We’ll have a new theme for January and lots of tips, resources, and discussion about nonprofits and social media!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday! We’re off to visit the snow for a few days! I have a series of wonderful guest posts planned for new week, but may be popping in with a few of my own!

The Zoetica Salon: A Peer Learning Community for Nonprofits and Social Media

Photo by Teddy Llovet

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be co-hosting The Zoetica Salon on my Facebook Page with my Zoetica colleagues,  Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse, and Julie Pippert (the newest Zoetican) where almost 7,000 nonprofit leaders have been engaging in informal peer learning about nonprofits and social media.   Our intent is to provide a space for  just-in-time answers and share best practices at no charge.

We will have  a monthly theme, which will include resources, discussion questions, and more.   December’s theme is “31 Days to Better Measurement.”    At the end of the month, we’ll share a summary of what we’ve learned as e-book with some blog posts along the way.  We’ll also be referring folks to resources for more formal learning and peer connections, like  NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network and host of the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference and Netsquared and TechSoup Global – and of course sharing resources from our colleagues in the nonprofit/social media field.  It’s our way of embracing and spreading the abundance that working a networked way offers.

Why am I excited about this project?   Freely sharing and facilitating community knowledge is part of my DNA as it for many colleagues in the nonprofit technology field.   Over the years,  I’ve participated in and started many nptech online sandboxes, small online learning cohorts and wiki projects to explore best practices in nonprofit technology  hosted on many different platforms and in collaboration with many different organizations.    I’m passionate about the power of peer learning communities – and how we can all lift up each by sharing our knowledge with one another.

Photo by Dkurpaptwa

There is an added benefit to learning communities.  The Learning Pyramid or the Cone of Learning are well-known frameworks to trainers and while not based on research,  anyone who has had to design and lead training or answer students questions – knows that the best form of learning retention is teaching others.     If you combine that with a discussion group and practice by doing – learning soars.     This is why  I’m passionate about creating, facilitating, and participating in peer learning communities in the nonprofit technology field.      They help deepen a field of practice.

Back in 1993,  I first started working with nonprofits and the Internet as the Network Builder for ArtsWire, an online peer community of artists.    I didn’t know a modem from a microwave, but I was responsible for providing technical support to over 1000 artists who were first getting online or building web pages.   The way I learned was through working with peer group of people who were supporting nonprofits  in their quest to build capacity and skills using the Internet to realize their missions.  In those days, we used listservs and online discussion software, but platform matter.  It was the free and open sharing of knowledge, insights, quick tips, and how-tos.  I then modeled this support on the online community  — and we quickly had a village of practitioners supporting one of another.

So,  I invite you to join us at the Zoetica Salon on my Facebook page.  Pull up chair, fill up that coffee cup, and join the discussion.