Nonprofits: Move your mission forward by following these examples

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, government agencies, universities, businesses, research institutions.

Guest post by Kurt Voelker
CTO, Forum One

Data is the new black. These days everyone is releasing it, visualizing it, aggregating it, and mashing it up. And for good reason. Data is so much more than a stack of numbers or a server filled with client outputs. It can justify the work that your organization is doing, help others understand why it is critical, and offer exciting new ways to motivate others to help solve the problems your organization is working on.

And chances are your nonprofit, government agency, foundation, or research institution has gobs of it just sitting around. It’s locked in white papers, policy briefs, and fact sheets. It’s hidden away in project output reports and research Excel files.

Given the attention that data gets from the media, influencers, and Capitol Hill, we believe that every communications department is obligated to look closer at their data and how they are using it – and consider how you should be tapping into it to get work done toward your organizations goals.

One effective way to transform your data from an afterthought into a powerful communications product is through visualizations that help tell your story.

Here are 6 ways to tell your stories with data that you can apply to your own web and communications work:

Speak with numbers

1Sometimes it’s best to just let the numbers speak for themselves. Numbers are a universal language. You can make a big impression of site visitors just by presenting them clearly and in context with your Web content.

charity: water, an organization that raises money to build wells in Africa has learned the lesson. Look how elegantly they tell the story of the need for fresh drinking water and the difference their prorgrams are making.

Reveal change

2Many of the stories we’d like our site visitors to understand are centered on revealing the truth behind a situation. The truth can become obvious when you reveal the change in data in a visual way. By simply removing everthing except the changing data, your data will suddenly reveal the compelling story you are looking to spread – whether you are revealing conditions that are worsening, attitudes that are changing or the improvements you organization is making.

My favorite example of this technique is the Descry Project’s Obesity Epidemic visualization. By using the simple metaphor of T-shirt size to represent a US state’s obesity rate, and making them “grow” over a two decade period, we can quickly see how America’s waistline has ballooned in since 1987.

Focus the story

3We touched on this principle above. If you really want users to understand the story your data tells, you need to remove everything except the story. Focus their attention, and they’ll get it. Everything else is just noise.

In this sample infographic from David McCandles, he was inspired by Clay Shirky’s claim that the world has an enormous “cognitive surplus” – untapped hours that we could be using our brains, but simply are not. David zeroed in on two relevant data points to tell the story: the number of hours Americans spend watching TV in a year, and the total combined man hours needed to create all of Wikipedia.

Provide context

4Users need a grounding point to understand your data. They need something to put into a perspective that they relate to intuitively. When telling your story with data, look outside your own data set to find other data that makes your story more accessible and puts it in context.

Check out another of David McCandless’s beauties, above. Again, David uses the simple comparitive size of blocks to put “a billion dollars” into context.

Let users explore, discover and control

5Moving beyond infographics into interactive tools that let the users take control of the data themselves is another powerful way to reveal your story through data. The best interactive data tools make it simple for users to jump into the data:

• They don’t just start with a blank canvas asking users to select mysterious indicators, metrics or variables.
• They do get the user started with a pre-selected set of data that already tell a story.
• They don’t take an “everything and kitchen sink” approach but rather provide tools enabling users to manipulate the data.
• They understand the most common way a user would like to approach the data and provide one or two data-manipulating tools that help them on their way.

Let’s look at another example of this in practice. CUP is a New York City based organization that educates and informs the public, educators and policy makers to help them make smarter urban growth decisions. Their Envisioning Development project helps people understand “What is affordable housing” in New York City. This map-based interactive data visualization makes it simple to select a neighborhood and quickly see the neighborhood’s income distribution and the real cost of hosing in that ‘hood, and then reveals the gaps.

Tell your story, literally!

6Sometimes the best way to explain your data is to do just that – explain it. Using video explanations of even simple charts and graphs can help site visitors quickly get the big picture – and arms them with an understanding of the data that lets them explore and discover more confidently on their own.

Hans Rosling, the Dutch economist famous for his TED Talk’s that reveal the insight we can gain from data, has popularized the approach. And even better, through his collaboration with Google, he’s made his data visualization software available to everyone through GapMinder.com.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start transforming your organization’s locked-up data into powerful communication tools.

Have you tried any of these techniques, or others, using data? Please 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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Facebook Insights allows you to view daily interactions by type in a report called “Daily Active Users Breakdown.”

This report can be found by selecting the “Users” report on the left-hand side of your Insights panel:

Understanding the breakdown of Daily Active Users

Halfway down the Users report, you’ll find the Daily Active Users Breakdown chart:

This chart provides daily numbers on five different stats. Mousing over any data point in this chart will allow you to see details for a specific day.

• Unique Page Views – This is the number of users per day that have viewed your Page.
• Post Views – This is the number of people per day who have viewed your posts. This number is typically higher than the other data points because posts receive a large amount of exposure in news feeds.
• Liked a Post – The number of unique fans per day who have liked a post.
• Commented on a Post – The number of unique fans per day who have commented on a post.
• Wall Posts – This is the number of unique fans who have posted to your Page (includes updates, photos, videos, links).

What does this tell data me about my fans?

Like any set of data, it always makes more sense in context. The quickest way to get context is to view a time period of at least 30 days.

Two trends that stand out in the above example:

1. Concentration of active fans – You’ll notice that Post Viewers is much higher than Unique Page Views. This means that most of the interactions are from a small group of fans.
2. Creators need reminders – Wall Posts were apparent on days when five or more fans commented on Page posts. This could mean that active fans like to stand out from the crowd with their own ideas.

I’ll be taking a deep dive into Facebook Insights with Charityhowto on May 18th, 2011.

Related

• Facebook Page Insights analytics: Users vs. Interactions
• What does “Active Users” mean in Facebook Page Insights?

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This is day 4 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Yesterday we spoke about measuring stats on your blog. Today we’ll be gathering some stats on where you’re at on Twitter.

In two weeks we’ll discuss how to analyze your network more deeply to build specific strategies. For now, we want to set a baseline so you can measure growth over the next 2, 3 and 6 months.

The three basic measurements

1. Followers

This number indicates reach. Your followers number is the number of people that have shown on interest in your Twitter stream. Track how your follower numbers grow by jotting it down every month or so in an excel spreadsheet. You’ll notice the more followers you gain, the faster this number will grow (to a point). Keep in mind that some of these folks only followed you in hopes that you’d follow back and may not be part of your actual community.

2. Following

This number has meaning when put next to your followers number. Are you following more people than the number of people following you? If so, you might want to look at adding more value on Twitter. If you’re new on Twitter, keep in mind that this number might be higher than your follower number. That will change with time and effort.

3. Lists

This number indicates the amount of value you create for others on Twitter. Look though the lists that people have put you on to see how people perceive your contribution on Twitter. For example, if you look at the lists I’m on, most of them have to do with non-profit social media topics.

Measuring network and impact

Measuring your network and your impact can be done in a number of ways (and with a number of tools), but remember, you simply want to document where you’re at on Twitter right now.

Two tools make it easy to measure your impact. Both are free.

4. Measure Your Network with Twitter Friends

Twitter Friends is a free tool for measuring the health of your network. There are three basic reports you should study:

Network overlap: This graph shows you the level of two-way conversations you have with folks.

Conversation Quotient: The Twitter-Friends FAQ states, “People with a high CQ are using Twitter to have direct conversations with other users. People with a low CQ are using it more for broadcasting links or status messages.”

Retweet Quotient: This tells you what percent of your tweets are retweeted by others.

5. Measure Your Impact With Twitter Grader and Klout

Twitter Grader is a free tool from HubSpot that grades your use of Twitter and offers recommendations for improvement. Of course, a computer won’t take into account the nuances of your blog strategy, you can get a few useful suggestion, and a grade of your use of Twitter from 0-100.

Klout is another free tool that allows you “track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph”. I like this tool, because, like Hubspot’s Twitter Grader,  it’s very easy to understand. For example, they give you an overall klout score and even suggest what “personality type” you are:

You can also see a list of your most retweeted posts:

Measuring how your content is tweeted

6. Tweetmeme Analytics

Tweetmeme is a tool that allows you to analyze how people are talking about your content on twitter. You need to set up an account with Tweetmeme so you can view the analytics directly in WordPress (download this free overview of Tweetmeme’s reporting).

Homework: Capture these 6 sets of Twitter stats in an excel spreadsheet. Update as often as you like, but at least note the date when you collected today’s homework.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

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One of the first assignments in our series on optimizing your blog for social media is to take the pulse of your blog using Google Analytics.

How much traffic are you getting from search? From referring traffic? What pages are people viewing the most? Knowing this data will enable you to set specific and achievable goals for social media.

Check out the screencast at top.

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