Archive for the ‘Measurement’ Category

Dec

2010

03

Category:

Measurement

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6 Comments

Social Media Measurement for Nonprofits

Photo by Darren Hester

Note from Beth: One thing I am trying to do with my Facebook Page is to  model abundant behavior.  My goal is to make it an online space for peer knowledge sharing, but what I hope will distinguish it from spaces is the synthesis, sense-making, and sharing of the abundance of stories, knowledge, tips, resources.   This is wisdom that is happening in real time  and the curation of real-time learning.

While people are asking questions and sharing resources not related to the monthly theme (this month is measurement),   quite a few are.    This post harvests some of the insights shared about social media measurement and nonprofits from my Facebook Page. If you have questions or something to share, please join the conversation.

The Social Media Measurement Checklist

The best ever resource is 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.

The Challenges of Measurement:  Getting Agreement on What To Measure

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…. ”

Getting Started:  The Importance of 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.”

As Judith Sol-Dyess , from the Chicago YMCA, notes, “We struggled for a long time with how to launch ANY social media efforts.  In the end only one thing worked: small, “non-threatening” pilots.  We also just started reporting on the metrics we already had available (web analytics, FB insights, email campaign stats) and are now moving towards more of a “digital content services” model with metrics related to specific campaigns, etc.”

Ymca of Metro Chicago Facebook Case Study

How To Use Measurement To Improve Your Social Media Practice

One question that bubbled up was about specific techniques to measure or benchmark your nonprofits social media strategy and execution.   What data to collect and how to use to make decisions to improve the effectiveness of your implementation?    In other words, how do you measurement as a diagnostic tool?

There are specific metrics for specific platforms.  For example, on Facebook, using the Insights analytics programs to measure both fan growth and interaction is important.    John Haydon shared this excellent screencast providing an overview to what data you’ll find in the new Facebook Insights program.    On Twitter, it is important to measure “click throughs” which can be done with bit.ly or ow.ly.

Kami Huyse notes, “You should also have an analytics program, like the free Google Analytics, installed on your website to determine where people are coming from and what they do when on your website. Other than that, it is important to have engaged fans in these networks (Twitter/FB) and you should see steady growth, but the number of fans or likes should not be your primary measure.”

A Cool Free  Tool for Monitoring

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.

The Importance of Benchmarking

Another terrific question in the Salon, “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

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.

Come join the conversation.

Sep

2010

07

Category:

Engagement, Experimentation, Listening, Measurement, Networked Nonprofit

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8 Comments

How Networked Nonprofits Use Facebook

How Networked Nonprofits Use Facebook
View more presentations from Beth Kanter.
Introduction

One of the very first bloggers I started reading and having conversations with about social media was Alan Levine (aka CogDog Blog).     Over the years, we have supported each other’s professional work and personal fundraisers before ever meeting in person.   Last year, Alan invited me to keynote the New Media Consortium‘s virtual conference to talk about the future of social and nonprofits.  It was my most memorable virtual presentation as my avatar was June Jetson and I made a flying entrance into the auditorium to the tune of  the Jetson’s theme song.

This year, Alan invited me to present a webinar for participants in the Marcus Institute Digital Education for the Arts on how Networked Nonprofits use Facebook.  This was a fun opportunity to pull together some of my Facebook action learning curriculum and summarize much of the wisdom being shared over on at my Facebook Page.  And, of course, to revisit my Cute Dog Theory and see how it applies to Networked Nonprofits.

This post reflections on the training design as well as my content notes.

Social Learning In Webinars

I’ve been exploring how to integrate social media into instruction at face-to-face workshops and as well as webinars.  The concept of before, during, and after is an important way to plot out your instruction,  getting a good understanding of the audience, and modeling.

Before the session,   I spent some time reviewing Museum Facebook Pages – luckily the MIDEA project has them organized into this handy list.  My goal was to find examples of some if the concepts I was going to share from the group itself.    This helps spark peer conversations and indeed a quick check of the chat transcript shows it to be case.

I had hoped to find a good example of a museum or an arts organization with a custom landing tab.  I struck out.   So, I posted a request on my Facebook Page and participants offered up some great examples.    If you want to encourage social learning through social media, you have to model the model.  So, I shared with participants how I discovered relevant examples.

Having the traces of the discussion unfold via social media channels is important both during the event as well as after the event for learning capture.   I set up a wiki page that includes my slides, a link to a rowfeeder spreadsheet for the hashtag (#midea), and the archived recording of the session.

The MIDEA Institute has a nice model of networked learning that allows for a larger network of people with “looser ties”  to join while the smaller group of Institute members can continue the peer learning conversations.     The content presented in Webinars by “experts” will help leverage these conversations through “Round Ups.”   The conversations between institute participants are happening across social media channels – I imagine the role of a network weaver here will be vital to the learning.   I’ll look forward to read any reflections from Alan on how this worked.

Content

I gave a quick overview of the  Networked Nonprofit and how the concepts in the book relate to museums.     I covered the following points with lots of examples from museums as well as pointers to some of the best thinking on Facebook best practices.

  • Networked Nonprofits that use Facebook effectively have a social culture that allows them to scale to have everyone using Facebook.

Networked Nonprofits or museum have leaders that aren’t afraid to deconstruct their fear of letting go or being transparent.  That make having everyone on Facebook a culture norm through professional development and learning for everyone on staff.    They have codified a social culture and make it easy for other departments to have a presence and to empower all  stakeholders to spread the organization’s mission on social networks.   They also understand how to leverage and work with free agents or groups that may create “unofficial pages.”

  • Networked Nonprofits know how to listen, engage, and build relationships on Facebook that allow them to reach their goals.

Aliza Sherman's "Birth of A Superfan" as it applies to Facebook and Museums

They  scan for conversations about their museums on Facebook, but more importantly use tools like NutshellMail to monitor and join in conversations happening on their wall.  Their status updates are not all about them or always asking their stakeholders to do something.    And, they take the time to get to know their fans and transform them into brand ambassadors.

Based on Aliza Sherman's "How To Know A Good Fan"

  • Networked Nonprofits know how to use simplicity to do more with less.

They have made the mindshift from scarcity to the abundance that networks offer and know how leverage their networks.    They make use of Facebook tagging feature in wall posts and have encouraged other users and fan pages with similar audiences to do the same – they don’t see it as a competition.

  • Networked Nonprofits have articulated SMART objectives and a target audience for their Facebook page.

Networked Nonprofits know exactly what they want to accomplish on Facebook and who they want to target.   This helps them easily understand whether they need one Facebook page or several or how to rebrand a single page for different campaigns.  They also know how to make use of a customized landing tab – articulating value at a glance and a call to action that ladders up to the objective.  Take for example the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland or Yerba Buena Center.

Right now it is fairly easy to create a custom landing tab using FBML and tools like Pagemodo,  Facebook recently announced that it will no longer support new installations for FBML for custom landing tabs (although existing installations will be supported).

  • Networked Nonprofits have a solid and aligned content strategy for Facebook and other channels where they link, distribute and co-create.

Networked Nonprofits know how to creatively give themselves some link love on Facebook.  They have a carefully crafted content plan to cross distribute content via Facebook, email channels, and on the web that takes into account frequency, style, and format.    The Metropolitan Museum of Art “Art of the Day” on Facebook and Web site is an excellent example.   Their content creation strategy also includes opportunities for their fans to co-create content with them.

  • Networked Nonprofits practice deep engagement techniques on Facebook.

They ask their fans their opinions, test their knowledge, pair promotions w/content, and say thank you. Here’s some examples and tips.  They use fun conversation starters.  Engagement conversations revolve around getting people to look and discuss the art or may encourage them to participate in a gallery activity inside the museum.  They run contests, but they are sure to follow Facebook Guidelines. ( See these two posts for more explanation.)

  • Networked Nonprofits promote their Facebook presence through all channels.

Whether it is texting or promoting offline,  they experiment with many ways to increase their fan base.

  • Network Nonprofits use measurement to learn and improve their Facebook strategy and presence.

They use an approach called Spreadsheet Aerobics.

How else do Networked Nonprofits use Facebook?

Additional resources

Sep

2010

01

Category:

Measurement

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Avoid Drive By Analysis: Get Your Social Media Strategy in Shape With Spreadsheet Aerobics

Flickr Photo by Metro Transportation Library and Archive

Successful social media is like going to the gym because the discipline of a good routine gets results much like  working out on a daily basis.

If you have put on running shoes for the first time, do you think you can really expect to win the Boston Marathon? If you are just starting out or if you haven’t identified a strategy and a good regular routine, can you really expect success? You need to make social media a daily habit; understand the rules, the landscape, and above all give it time to work.

Actionable Measurement

The gym metaphor resonated because lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of  “SpreadSheet Aerobics, an actionable social media measurement strategy that is fit and trim and light on its feet!   When I coach nonprofits on tactics and talk about measurement, their facial expressions change happy to annoyed.    Collecting data is often viewed as an onerous task.   It doesn’t have to be that way.

We know that good practice is to establish SMART objectives for your social media strategy and identify the audience before you executive.  You also need to think through your content and engagement strategy.  You should also be thinking about what to measure and set up an efficient method for collecting that data.   And, of course, making the time to actually look and think about what the data means.

We get so overloaded by meaningless data collection, that we’re exhausted before we get to do the fun part:  making sense out of it.  I don’t try to measure everything.   I find it overwhelming and a lot of  it won’t help me refine my strategy.  Spreadsheet aerobics is actionable data.   What does that mean?

  • Measurement should inform specific decisions and/or actions.
  • Do not measure everything, but do measure what is most important to your objectives.
  • The data you gather should help you learn.

Avoid Measurement As Therapy and Drive By Analysis

Another pitfall is doing “drive by” analysis.    Let’s take Facebook pages as an example.   Rather than download a spreadsheet of the most important data points for a month from Facebook Insights (the Facebook page analytics tool which was recently upgraded) and comparing it against content, engagement, and outreach strategies,  administrators glance at the summary insights on their page and draw subjective conclusions.

Avoid this measurement as therapy trap.   When we see the green arrows pointing up and the numbers look good, we might think — “they like me, they really like me.”   But you can’t really put that data into context and learn from it.

Here’s my spreadsheet aerobics daily and monthly routine.    I grab the monthly daily data from the insights tool (old version)  and download into a spreadsheet.    Out of the 25 or metrics I could look at, I only collect the following metrics:

  • Total Interactions
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • New Fans (Likes)
  • Unsubscribes
  • Page Views
  • Photo/video Views (optional if I’m testing as content strategy)

I also have columns in daily spreadsheet for labeled “content format”, “content topic” and “promotion”.  In the content line, I put a link to the actual post noting the type, voice, or if it was a fan posting.  I also make notes about what promotional tactics I used.   Then at the end of the month, allocate a half hour to look at the numbers for the month in comparison to other months – and look for insights and trends.

In reviewing my spreadsheet, I discover what works. For example, open-ended questions work, particularly those that allow people to share their knowledge or ones accompanying a good resource link.

I’ve looked at frequency of posting and day/time of the week, but have learned what my sweet spot is for my audience on Facebook and no longer track it on a regular basis.

It is also important to track exactly how you promote your Facebook page and what helps you recruit more fans.  I keep notes on when I’ve tweeted a link, speaking dates, posting updates in my status about my fan page and all the multi-channel ways you need to promote your page.

I’ve also discovered that it is important to identify as many opportunities to set up experiments that you measure and learn as you go. This is where I’ve gleaned most of my insights – a combination of quantitative metrics culled from Insights and what people are saying on the page.

What are you learning from your social media measurement strategy?   How have you kept your data collection trim, fit, and actionable?  What is the most compelling thing you learned about your social media strategy through measurement that lead to better results?

Aug

2010

31

Category:

Engagement, Listening, Measurement

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14 Comments

What Tools Are You Using for Listening, Engaging, and Social Media Management?

Based on the discussion threads in my Facebook page,  I’ve updated my mega list of tools in my social media listening and engaging instructional wiki.   In reflecting over the past three years,  the definition of listening tools has broadened beyond “monitoring” or “research” to include several categories:   social media engagement management,  analytics, influencer identification, and social network analysis.

Here’s a couple of new tools I’ve been exploring:

RowFeeder should be in your spreadsheet aerobics routine.   It searches Twitter and Facebook for phrases or hashtags and dumps them into a google doc spreadsheet.  Saves a lot of cut and paste time and great for analysis.   The basic version is free, but you can add on data like Klout scores for a minimal fee.   It’s particularly useful for aggregating hashtags from events or trainings.

NutshellMail:   About a month or so ago, Manny Hernandez mentioned this free tool as a social media time saver. It grabs all your “bacn“  from social networks and aggregates into a single email.  The sources include Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  You need to customize which updates (wall posts, friend requests, Twitter lists, etc.) to make it useful for your needs.   I’m testing it with Facebook because it grabs both my personal profile stuff as well as from Facebook pages that I am an administrator of.

You can also customized the delivery time and frequency.  That means it can arrive in your email box when you’ve scheduled to work on it.    The email that arrives links you to the places you to respond. This seems like a good tool for those starting out and and with small followings.  Saves you time logging in and checking or getting separate notices in email from the social network site.

My colleague, Devon Smith, mentioned another tool, Postling, which aggregates your social networks into a single dashboard online and is also free, although it lacks the robust features of paid tools like Spredfast or SmallAct.

I’d like to update my listening/engaging tools list.

What tools you are using for listening, engaging, social media management, and finding influencers on your social media outposts?

Aug

2010

16

Category:

Content, Listening, Measurement, Mindfulness

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8 Comments

What Tools Do You Use for Making Your Nonprofit’s Social Media Use Efficient?

Flickr Photo by Roberto Ferrari - Creative Commons License Some Rights Reserved

Note from Beth: Social media is not a waste a time, but there are ways to waste your time.   On Saturday, I had the honor of presenting at Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp and one of the burning questions was about efficiency.   So, I’m going to explore this theme over the coming weeks.

A  few weeks ago,  I started a thread on my blog’s Facebook Page,  “What are the best tips and tools for saving time managing your nonprofit’s Facebook Page?”   I summarized the tips shared in this earlier post. Managing your organization’s Facebook page, particularly tracking, content, and engagement can be a time suck, particularly as your network grows.     For example,  we know that identifying and engaging with super fans/influencers on our Facebook presence is important.   But keeping a spreadsheet of the names of people who “like” and comment on threads involves a lot of cut and paste.   Is there a tool that can automate this someone asked on my blog’s Facebook page?  (unfortunately, FB Insights doesn’t do this)

Or what about a tool that helps you plan out your content strategy for the week and even schedule posts on days when you can’t?  What if you want to aggregate and look at all the comments and responses to threads before responding?

There is an evolving category of tools (some free, some not) that can help make the tasks associated with content strategy, engagement, and tracking less onerous.   On the free side, Manny Hernandez mentioned NutShell Mail, software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   James Young mentioned SpredFast (he works for them now) and he offered to write a post about how he manages him time.    And while this guest post is about one particular tool, remember when looking for a technology tool solution, think carefully about what pain point is it solving and whether it can truly work for your situation.   If you know of other tools (or tips) that make you more efficient managing content, engagement, and tracking on social media, please share them in the comments.

Guest Post by James Young,  SpredFast

And as a marketer like you, who has added social media to the mix, I struggled with the same issues you face with being efficient with my and showing the results.    Here’s how I use Spredfast to help me with these challenges.

So Many Social Networks, So Little Time

Doing social media right takes time. We engage in multiple social networks, some that you probably also use: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, our own blog, and a few other networks.

Aggregating Conversations

Conversing with people in all of these places, and creating interesting, value-add content for each is a time consuming business.  It gets worse when you consider that you have to duplicate efforts across different social networks.  With Spredfast, I can do two things that make this so much more efficient.  First, I can pull in all of the conversation taking place across all of the networks into one place, read through it, and participate where I want to. Each and every day, I look for all of the people who have mentioned us or retweeted our tweets, and I thank them. I can do it easily right from my listening dashboard.

Planning Content on Weekly Basis

Second, I can plan out the content I want to publish, schedule it out for the next few weeks, create the content (or, one day when we grow, assign it to someone to create), choose the social network or networks I want each piece to go to, and save it.  Spredfast will publish it on the schedule I’ve set. Typically, I will get a week’s worth of content ready to go ahead of time, and then spend the majority of my remaining time just engaging with individuals.

Tracking for Insights and Value

Like all activity within a good company or organization, I have to create some value. To prove I’m doing that, I need data.  Some of the social networks provide a lot of good data, others not so much. Regardless, it used to take a lot of time to go into each network and gather the data I needed, pull it back into my master spreadsheet, and then do some crunching.

Spredfast makes that a lot easier for me, because it gathers two types of data into one dashboard. First, all of the content that I send out (both planned communication as well as off the cuff conversations I engage in) is tracked. For example, for each tweet I send, I can see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, what they said, how many people could have seen the retweet, and if I included a link I can see how many times the link was clicked. For every post to my Facebook Page, I can see when someone comments, who they are, what they said, how many times the post was liked and how many times the link in my post was clicked. The list goes on across a wide variety of social networks and kinds of interaction people can have.

Second, I can see data that relates to my social media account (as opposed to my content), like number of friends, fans and followers. I can also see the volume of the conversation about my brand, like mentions in Twitter, references in blogs, etc.

The big deal is that all of this data is in one dashboard, so I can jump straight to analysis, making my weekly report a whole lot easier to produce. I just create a graph or report in Spredfast, or I export the data and use Excel and PowerPoint.

It is important track conversions and Spredfast can be integrated with my  integrated my Google Analytics account, and I tag all the links I send out in conversations.  Spredfast does some cool stuff like creating unique shortened links for each content piece (including separate links for the same post sent into both Facebook and Twitter, for example), so when I look at my web funnel data, I can actually track a conversion all the way back to the individual tweet or post. Literally, I can tell my boss how many subscriptions came from social media activity, from each social network, from each account and from each individual content piece I published.

Now, I know that not all value is measured in conversions. So, all of those other things that are valuable, like engagement levels and reach, are available too, using the data in my dashboard. We have some internal, soft values we attach to that data, and ultimately arrive at a total value comprised of soft and hard (conversion) values for my activity this week, month, or quarter.

Scaling Engagement

I know many organizations are worried about giving a lot of staff and volunteers access to the organization Twitter or Facebook accounts. This has some serious consequences. First, it usually limits the number of people empowered to engage in social media. Consequently, it decreases the quality of the social media engagement that does happen. How? Let’s face it, we don’t all have an unlimited supply of time, patience and creativity.  Having more people involved raises the quantity of engagement, time to response and content variety.

Spredfast makes this easier too, because the many authors you may have are not logging into your Twitter account directly. They’re logging into Spredfast, creating content and then publishing it to that Twitter account. One trusted person has already come in and connected Spredfast to the Twitter account.  Spredfast also has “draft” function which is particularly useful is you’re working side-by-side a social media intern.

Best practices in social media is listening, engaging, identifying influences, and tracking.    Spredfast can help your nonprofit be efficient with these tasks.  

Questions from Beth:

What tools and techniques are you using to make your social media content, engagement, and tracking more efficient?  Spredfast is one, but are there others?   What has your experience been?   At what point does it make sense to move to a paid tool for content strategy, engagement, and tracking?

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