Listen, implement & measure to keep up with your users’ needs

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, metrics specialists, educators.

Guest post by Ritu Sharma
Social Media for Nonprofits

Like many of the nonprofits Social Media for Nonprofits works with, we were excited by the recent release of Beth’s new book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

In line with the book’s focus on turning data into knowledge through powerful, insightful measurement and analytics of social media efforts, we wanted to share three simple tips and resources that nonprofits can put to work.

All of these platforms have been profiled at our recent Social Media for Nonprofits conferences, which is about to produce its final U..S program of the year in Seattle on Monday, before we head to New Delhi in December, and then back to New York City, Silicon Valley, Vancouver, plus most other major U.S. markets in 2013.

And now, for those tips and tools:

Get to know your audience

1Want to know what makes your online audience tick? Then check out Simply Measured. In particular, their free reports give you your social audience’s pulse on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and other platforms. There’s a gold mine of intelligence presented in their 8-10 insightful, colorful analysis tools. Learn who your followers are, what issues they care about, which posts are firing up your base, and what types of content are gaining steam and going viral.

Make your website shine

2How can you make your web footprint work for you and complement your social strategy? Nonprofits get free access to Google Analytics, a robust tool that tracks what turns your audience on or off when they land on your site. This tool highlights the behaviors that are most important to understand, including where your audience came from, what content they looked at, how long they stuck around, where you lost them, and to what extent your readers engaged with your content.

Monitor social conversations

3Discover a social treasure of other cause-driven folks like you connecting with like-minded professionals, sharing content, and tracking followers by analyzing your nonprofit’s social media presence. Keep an eye on all your social conversations, wherever they take place, with Sprout Social (think HootSuite on steroids).

Nonprofits can save 50 percent on this low-cost tool, which gives you the ability to engage with your base, strategically search for better followers, identify posts that get superb traction, and of courser, schedule your posts in advance. Note: Pre-scheduling posts should only be used for Twitter and LinkedIn posts, but Facebook de-prioritizes posts scheduled via third party platforms, so that’s a no-no. Thankfully, you can now pre-schedule posts on Facebook directly.

We hope you decide to take advantage of these powerful tools, and that you join us at any of the upcoming Social Media for Nonprofits conferences around the world for more insights, tips, and tools. Come see great speakers like everyone’s favorite, Beth Kanter, plus Guy Kawasaki and senior leaders from leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, plus nonprofit executives from National Geographic, American Red Cross, Greenpeace, Kiva.org, Story of Stuff, DonorsChoose, and charity:water. To ensure broad accessibility, we keep conference registration fees down to about $100, including breakfast, lunch, and access to the full-day program. Scholarships are available for smaller nonprofits.

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Sometimes impact can be achieved without money, an adult or a car

This post was written by Beth Kanter, co-author of the new book Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World. She and co-author KD Paine appear at TechSoup headquarters, 525 Brannan St., Suite 300 in San Francisco on Wednesday from noon to 1:30 p.m. Register to attend the free talk.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers, general public.

Guest post by Beth Kanter
beth’s blog

The New York-based nonprofit DoSomething.org has a big social change goal: To harness the energy of young people 25 and under and unleash it through national campaigns on causes teens care about. The call to action is always something that has a real impact and does not require money, an adult, or a car. Their measurable goal is to get 5 million active teen members engaged in social change campaigns by 2015. They use social media, mobile, and data to reach that goal.

A recent example is their “Pregnancy Text” campaign featured on their quarterly dashboard. This clever sex education campaign is an updated version of the teen pregnancy education program where young people carried eggs around and pretended they were babies. It was a text campaign where teens opted-in to receive texts on their mobile phones from the “baby.” Once they joined (and they could share it with their friends), they received regular annoying text messages at all hours from the “baby”  that poops, cries, and needs their immediate attention.

The team at DoSomething.org uses data to determine the program design, key performance indicators, and a hypothesis to be tested.

They looked at survey data from the National Campaign: 87 percent of young people surveyed said it would be much easier for teens to delay sexual activity and avoid teen pregnancy if they were able to have more open, honest conversations about these topics with their parents and/or friends. So, success of this campaign would mean that participants talk with their family or friends about the issue and delay sexual activity.

Text messages as a powerful platform for social change

The basic design had those who signed up challenge their friends to take care of a text baby. They could either:

1. Go to the DoSomething website and select five friends to challenge, or
2. Challenge friends after reading a quick stat on US teen pregnancy sent via text from DoSomething to its 300,000 mobile subscribers.

Participants who accepted the challenge would then start receiving texts the following morning from the text baby. After completing the challenge, participants were prompted to send it to their own friends. DoSomething also followed up with 5,000 of the users with a text-based survey to measure impact.

Once they defined their goals and identified the right data collect, here are some of the insights they gleaned, according to Nancy Lublin, CEO, and Jeffrey Bladt, chief data scientist:

• SMS as a platform: In monitoring engagement per communication channel, they determined that SMS (text messaging) was be 30 times more powerful for getting their users to take action as compared to email.
• Challenging five friends: They tested various group sizes for SMS experience and have found the a group of six (one “alpha” inviting friends) leads to the highest overall engagement.
• Research-based messaging: The general messaging for the campaign was based on survey findings that found

1. Big scare tactics — for example, getting pregnant equals not going to college — were not as effective as highlighting how being a teen parent changes daily life (for example, can’t go to the movies because the babysitter canceled)
2. A report by the Centers for Disease Control found, “The impact of strong pregnancy prevention messages directed to teenagers has been credited with the [recent] teen birth rates decline.”

• A/B testing: DoSomething pre-tested different messages and frequency of sending the messages to smaller test groups of  teens to optimize the number of messages the baby would send during the day, as well as the content. They ended up doubling the frequency and rewording several interactions as well as building in a response system (so the baby would respond if the teen texted an unsolicited response). The insights from these tests pushed up engagement and likelihood of forwarding at the end.
• Impact: They did a survey to measure this. One in two teens said participating in the Pregnancy Text campaign made it more likely they would talk about the issue of teen pregnancy with their family and friends.

As you can see from the above insights, DoSomething does more than gather and analyze topline data:

• 101,444 people took part in the campaign with 100,000 text babies delivered.
• There were 171,000 unsolicited incoming messages, or one every 20 seconds for the duration of the campaign. During the initial launch period (the first two weeks), a new text message was received every 10 seconds.
• For every one direct sign-up, DoSomething gained 2.3 additional sign-ups from forward-to-a-friend functionality. The viral coefficient was between 0.60 and 0.70 for the campaign.
• One in four (24%) of teens could not finish a day with their text baby (texted a stop word to the baby).

I heard Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, say this about Big Data at the Mashable Social Good Summit: “Data by itself is useless. I can’t feed my baby daughter data, as much as I’d love to because I love data. It’s only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit.”

You can’t do that unless identify your results, collect the right data, and generate insights.

How is your nonprofit using data to change the world? Share in the comments below.

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Make it easy to participate, make it mobile — and don’t forget the fun!

One of the great success stories of online advocacy has been DoSomething.org, a not-for-profit that encourages young people to use the power of online to “do good stuff offline.”

Last fall I moderated a panel at BlogWorld Expo with DoSomething chief technology officer George Weiner, and last month I co-presented a Social Media for Social Good bootcamp at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service with George.

So during a brief break in the action I got him to talk about how DoSomething spurs 1.2 million young people a year to take action on behalf of a social cause they care about.

“Young people have this amazing thing they can do that doesn’t require car, money or an adult,” he says. Simply put, any young person — 25 or younger, with a sweet spot of 16- to 17-year-olds — can launch a social cause campaign about any cause they feel passionately about.

The nation’s largest cause site for young people, DoSomething has about 30,000 cause projects started by young people.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Success comes down to a combination of factors

The annual DoSomething Awards airs on VH1 in August.

The site’s success comes down to these factors:

• They make it easy to participate by lowering the barriers to entry.

• They’re laser-focused on catering to young people.

• They make it easy to take part in campaigns via mobile devices.

• They try to make causes fun by emphasizing use of participants’ social networks.

“This generation is far more engaged than anyone can possibly understand or measure due to the amount of conversations going on in social media,” George says.

For instance, DoSomething partnered with Better World Books on the Epic Book Drive, a campaign that collected more than 250,000 books to benefit the Recovery School District in New Orleans.

Head to DoSomething to find a cause that resonates with you. And don’t forget to look for the DoSomething Awards on VH1 in August. Have a question or need help? Text HELPME to 30644.

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The report, titled “2009 eCampaigning Review Insights & Benchmarks,” was released this past week at an event in London (and via webcast). I want to share some of the highlights from the launch presentations of Duane Raymond and Jess Day, but if you want to skip ahead to the download, you can scroll to the bottom.

Report highlights

65% of actions reviewed in the report asked people to add their own message (whether this was a petition, or post, etc.). This is great because letting your supporters personalize or otherwise get more involved in your actions will only help build a commitment to the outcome of your campaign or action as well as encourage your supporters to ask their friends or colleagues to participate as well.

Only 43% of actions linked to background information. People may worry that if someone clicks on an action button, say, on your home page, and then you provide them links to more information about the topic of the action, that they will click away and never actually complete the action. Nope. People may want more background information but that’s because they are interested! Most all of the actions reviewed in the report that even those that did link to background information, those pages didn’t link back to the action. That’s why people aren’t completing the action. Remember to link to actions from everywhere on your site that is related to the action!

Resources or capacity are still an issue — the big organizations do better with online actions. This isn’t really a surprise as bigger organizations naturally have more people/staff and time, technical capacity and so on (many groups working on advocacy have only a couple people vs a large organization with hundreds).

58% of the actions scored full marks for visibility within their websites. That’s not a very high number for succeeding at visibility of actions on the one space online you have complete control: your own website.  There are lots of places where actions could be included to be more visible, like the above note of including them on background information (or blog posts!).

11% of campaigns had no target (meaning, “join the campaign”).  Be sure that if you are just trying to get supporters, or grow your list of interested people who could sign a petition or do other actions later on in your campaign or work, that you create an action that isn’t seen as empty or short term (literally just “we want your email”).

37% of the actions did not generate a thank you email after taking action; 74% sent poor quality thank you emails; and 69% do not send a follow up email within one month of a supporter taking action. This is bad news! After someone donates, signs up or completes any other action for your organization is prime time for providing relevant follow-up options to get more involved, learn more, or support your organization/campaign in other ways.

50% of organizations had databases that included 40% or more of inactive supporters. It doesn’t help your cause to have people in your database that aren’t really there.  Provide ways for people to update their contact information or change their email address.

“If you stand back from the survey data these is one very clear message: strategic personalization and targeting are on a level of sophistication that many groups are still struggling to reach.” This means specifically working on segmenting your database and testing messages.  Track your supporters’ actions to know who you should target for which actions and when.  Succeeding at this, though, isn’t reliant on the tools but staff time and knowledge about how to do it.

Download reports

Visit the Advocacy Online website for more details and downloads.

• Advocacy Online summary document: download
• benchmark data (author:  Duane Raymond): download
• e-action review (author:  Jess Day): download
• e-campaigning survey (author:  Jess Day): download

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Photo by the TruthAbout

The success of your blog, or any social media effort, depends on your willingness to solicit feedback and take corrective action when necessary. If you want to have a successful blog that supports your organization’s goals and adds value, improvement should be continuous. You need to pick the right hard data points, or metrics, that will help you harvest insights and improve your blog.

Analyzing your blog content
First, you need to set overall goals for your blog and understand your audience. Next, you need to know the right metrics to use, and employ the proper tools to collect the data. Most important, you need a strategy—either for yourself or for a team—to gather insights from your metrics. Remember, it isn’t about the numbers alone.

Avoid Analytophilia
Alexandra Samuel coined that phrase in a post on social media analytics and metrics about the greatest peril of social media: analytophilia. It’s about obsessing on raw numbers and constantly checking the number of Twitter followers or retweets or Facebook insight clicks. She recommends that you don’t go into your analytics or stats program without composing a specific question first. I’ve been advocating this approach for a long time and offer you a set of data points and questions.

Here are seven tips to help you start measuring social media efforts.

Readership growth

1This means content consumption. There are two different kinds of web viewers: subscribers and visitors. Subscribers have made a commitment to regularly receive (and hopefully read or at least scan) your blog. Visitors are people who occasionally visit your blog. You should pay attention to monthly trends of content consumption over time. This will tell you a lot about your readers’ satisfaction with your content.

• Hard data points: Look at the feed subscribers trends from Feedburner and unique visitor trends from Google Analytics. Understand how Google Analytics calculates unique visitors and how Feedburner calculates subscribers, but please don’t get so hung up on the geeky part of measurement that you don’t have enough time to gather insights and apply them.
• Gathering insights: Is the number of visitors and subscribers increasing? If not, why? If yes, why? Think about your publishing frequency, the length of posts and the mix of topics.

I get a notice when someone unsubscribes to my blog. I send them a personal follow-up e-mail asking why. I’ve received excellent feedback from my inquiries about how to improve the blog’s publishing schedule, topics and more.

Reader engagement index

2This looks at how much your readers are interacting with you and your content, as well as how they are sharing your content with others.

• Hard data points: For this, I use the PostRank tool, which ranks your blog posts with a number from 1 to 10. I pick out all posts that score a perfect 10. The scores are based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting and clicking. You should understand how this model works, but don’t get distracted by trying to find flaws in how engagement measures are constructed.
• Gathering insights: What topics do the posts that receive high scores cover? Are these posts longer and more in-depth, or short and focused on one topic? Do they include information from a lot of outside resources? What’s the tone—formal or informal? Do they include tips? What is the quality of the conversation in the comments section? What did you learn from the conversation your readers started? If you have a group blog, are there differences between authors? Why? Did anything surprise you?

I have discovered a number of patterns in my highest ranked posts—for example, length, titles, the number of ideas covered in a post, the tone, style and so forth. This has been the single best source of improving the quality of the content on my blog.

Reader bookmarking

3This measures whether readers are bookmarking your content for later retrieval which provides some indication of how much they value it.

• Hard data points: You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn’t make it efficient to grab data over time. Remember bookmarked items can also positively influence your blog traffic.
• Gathering insights: What was the topic of the post that was bookmarked? Are the posts focused on providing tips, resource roundups or other formats? Are there patterns? And if so, what are they?

Conversation rate

4Conversation rate refers to the amount of commenting and conversation that is happening on your blog.

• Hard data points: You can get a list of the most commented on posts from PostRank. If you use WordPress, Joost Blog Metrics will give you a post-to-comment ratio.
• Gathering insights: What is the style of the writing? Do posts with more questions in the title and questions in the end generate more comments? Did you do any outreach to encourage commenting? Is there a conversation happening between people who comment? What do you do to facilitate it? What’s the quality of the commenting—are you learning? Are the comments positive or negative?

Authority

5This refers the number of links to a post. This metric gives you an indication of the value of the content by showing you how many people are linking to your content. It can also influence traffic.

• Hard data points: Conduct an analysis of the number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Gathering insights: Pull out the top 25 linked posts on your blog. Analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking in referrals using Google Analytics. Are there any patterns?

Page views

6This is the number of times a page (unit of content) was viewed. I’m not sure how much this will tell you about your content quality, but it could give you some insights about your outreach.

• Hard data points: You can get these metrics from Google Analytics.
• Gathering insights: Why are certain blog posts getting higher page views than others? Look at the referral traffic (including which sites visitors to your site click from or what keywords they searched to get to your site or blog). What was your outreach strategy?

Industry index

7This metric involves evaluating your performance in relation to other blogs in your space using the same metrics.

• Hard data points: I use the List of Change, which indexes several hundred nonprofit blogs across different metrics.
• Gathering insights: I review other blogs on the list to see if there are ideas that I can incorporate into my own blogging. Where is my blog on the index—high or low? What are the qualities that the top five blogs have in common? How do they compare to my blog?

This may seem like a lot of work, but it takes me about an hour every month to gather up the numbers into a spreadsheet and then set aside some time for reflection on how I can improve my blog. It is an essential part of my blogging process and success.

This article was originally posted at CW Bulletin and Beth’s Blog.

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