Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook users.

You may have heard of the term “social media ROI calculator.” It refers to a method of figuring out whether you’re getting an adequate return on investment for your organization’s investment in Facebook, blogging, Twitter or other social media.

The trouble is, most of these ROI calculations include factors for investments and gains, but not many include factors for loss. This means that any “collateral damage” of your campaign might often be overlooked.

Let’s consider an example. Imagine you have a fundraising campaign that includes a Facebook component. A partner gives you $2,000 toward Facebook ads. After the campaign is over, you walk away with $20,000 in donations from these ads.

But you also ticked off hundreds of people.

Financial success in this example is one thing, but without considering negative comments received during the campaign, a true ROI calculation can’t be made.

What are the loss metrics in Facebook?

Facebook has four data points that show you how people negatively reacted to your post:

• Hiding your post
• Hiding all posts from your page
• Reporting your post as spam
• Unliking your page

You can find these in Facebook Insights under the Engagement column.

Why does this matter?

You might be asking why this matters within the scope of growing your community and raising money. Negative feedback shows you how you are hurting the growth of your community (if at all). It also helps you fine-tune your content strategy with a more holistic understanding of your fan base.

What do you think?

The post 4 Facebook metrics your nonprofit shouldn’t overlook appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Ryann Miller
frogloop

Last week I attended the Women Who Tech TeleSummit. One of the most anticipated sessions was the session with blogger Beth Kanter and Lauren Varga of Radian6 and moderated by Roz Lemieux of Fission Strategy.

I’ve long admired and respected Beth, and I’m a fan of Radian6, a social media monitoring service. The session covered a lot of ground for a fairly contained topic and I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the presentation. Beth and Lauren discussed both strategy and tools, tips and metrics, leaving little ground uncovered. The focus was around the return on investment: how to think of the value of social media, the things you need before starting any campaign, and how to measure, analyze and sell campaigns. Here’s a recap:

Part I: A guide for your social media adventure

Let’s say you want to get started using social media. Where? How? While this session wasn’t a primer, Beth’s four ‘I’s, plus the discussion on objectives and SMART analysis, are a fantastic starting point.

The philosophy and definition of ROI

Beth’s four ‘I’ terms are a contextual lens through which to look at social media ROI. She said she takes a broader definition of ROI, to include:

1. Return on Insight: this is about harvesting intelligence about what works and what doesn’t, to apply to the future. Listening, learning and adapting – sometimes called an iterative process – means that you take a longer-term view of the project, that sometimes a culture change within your organization is necessary to make room for reflection, and that you’ll find success and know what it is when you find it. If you find that tweeting about the hard-hitting emotional stuff seems to get the biggest reaction every time, apply this to remaining communications for this medium even if it means going back and changing agreed-upon communication pieces. Beyond that, remember it for future campaigns.
 
2. Return on Interaction: it’s about engagement and relationship building with your audience. The goal is to set people on the ladder of engagement to become donors/members/lovers of your cause. But before you get there, how are they engaging with you? What are they saying? How do they treat your brand? This has to be monitored in order to be evaluated.
 
3. Return on Investment: investment is about value, and measuring the relationship between what you’ve done and what it costs. Some tangible indicators are: fundraised dollars, new activists or email list growth, new volunteers,
 
4. Return on Impact: this is about our big goal – to effect social change. Sometimes impact is different or more than just about investment. If you can use Twitter to stop a company from doing something, or vote for something, while that may be hard to quantify, there is a return on impact.

These four ‘I’s are valuable as a starting point for any organization looking to dive into social media in a concerted way. I’d recommend a discussion around these four ‘I’s by any team about to start a social media campaign, because it’ll help you to be thoughtful and reflective, and therefore more strategic, as you get started and get comfortable with social media metrics and measurement. I think Beth’s underlying point here is: Do this thoughtfully and with goals and guidelines.

Start at the beginning: Define objectives that you can measure

To follow up on the idea of what you need before getting started, one of the main points by both Lauren and Beth was to have your objectives mapped out prior to any campaign or project. Beth discussed using a SMART Analysis: all objectives must be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed. if you could only take away one point from this presentation, that should be it. With these objectives determined, you’re as prepared as you can be going in, and you’ll have tangible metrics to do proper analysis on your way out. Only after you have your objectives should you start looking at the technology itself.

Part 2: What are you seeing and why does it matter?

What to measure, besides dollars raised: With that theoretical primer under our belts, it’s time to talk measurement. Lauren discussed the usual suspects regarding measurement metrics: volume, engagement, sentiment, share of voice and share of conversation. (Quick distinction here from me, not Beth or Lauren: share of voice refers to your brand mentions (in blog posts, tweets, videos, etc.) compared to your competitors within your issue or sector, while share of conversation refers to the degree to which your organization is associated with the issue/problem that you want to fix/resolve/improve).

What you measure has be decided in part by the objectives and goals you have. Want to grow your non-donor file? Measure the quantity of new supporters, based on what engagement in what time frame, and what issue they came in on. Want to raise money? You might then be less concerned with the quantity of new names and more focused on the quality. Have they taken any actions sent to them, such as sending to a friend, signing a petition? Sentiment might be very important if you’re trying to build loyalty and engagement, but not if you’re trying to stop a bill from being passed.

I think share of voice is a critical metric and organizations should consider measuring SOV based on critical keywords outside of any specific campaign. In this age of hyper-competition, a savvy organization is one that knows where its brand reputation stands for any given month. The value is that it’s the outside world telling you who you’re up against and by how much, not what you think, and not market research. Who owns the dialogue? How are you distinguishing yourself and claiming ownership of the issue? How are your competitors drawing attention? None of that is intrinsically obvious without ongoing measurement of your share of voice within your sector or issue area.

Do’s and don’ts of social media ROI

Last, a solid collection of do’s and don’t-do’s when assessing social media ROI:

• Track the essential keywords regarding both your organization and your campaign.
• Don’t do drive-by analysis, take some time
• When identifying benefits, remember that some will be quantitative while others while be qualitative. For example, increased loyalty, sentiment and engagement are valuable benefits.
• Link metrics back to results and avoid “metrics as therapy” – the condition whereby you’re gratified simply because you have new followers and they seem to like you.
• “Spreadsheet aerobics”: only collect data that works for you, that makes sense, and that you make actionable. Keep spreadsheets thin and trim. You should spend less time on the spreadsheet than the project itself.
• Be low risk, be simple, don’t overdesign any test or campaign.
• Think about what results you want to communicate: Be concise, show the overall value and how you measured that, not every minute detail and metric. Don’t forget this is both storytelling and a business case.
• Better that you start with a small and successful test, rather than a large and unsuccessful campaign.

Useful links

• http://socialmedia-listening.wikispaces.com/Tools

• http://www.bethkanter.org/wwt-ro/

• http://www.kdpaine.com/ (the metrics guru)

• http://www.smartchart.org/

I took away a lot from this session, from the theoretical to the practical, from the small to the very large. While the parts seemed somewhat disconnected, Beth and Lauren know their material inside and out and did a great job of distilling everything.

The post Social media ROI: The metrics and strategies appeared first on Socialbrite.

New tool helps small nonprofits improve their social media savvy

Should small nonprofits wade into the sometimes daunting terrain of social media?

Increasingly, the answer is: Yes, because that’s where their members and supporters are, and social media is the most effective way to reach them. (If you’re unclear about some of these terms or concepts, see Socialbrite’s Social Media Glossary.)

Last year TechSoup Global won a grant from Kellogg Action Lab/ Fieldstone Alliance with an impressive goal: to create a tool that helps nonprofits assess their current social media capabilities and to connect them with resources to get them started down the right track.

TechSoup Global hired Socialbrite to manage the project and build the tool, and our team spent weeks interviewing the top executives of 50 mostly small nonprofits: CARES Foundation, Down Syndrome Network, Net Literacy, Legal Community Against Violence, National Autism Association and dozens of others.

We found that these nonprofits — often run on a shoestring budget with a bare-bones staff — are well aware that major changes are taking place in the media and communications landscape. Often they seem to feel baffled by the disruptions. Many wonder whether they have the resources to effectively use social media, given the resources and time commitment required inside organizations where everyone does everything — and then some. “There hasn’t been a lot of data that justifies putting labor into this. How sure are we that social networking is worth prioritizing?” one foundation’s communications director asked me.

Still, the vast majority of nonprofits said they were eager to learn and to push forward internally with modest social media programs. While the survey results are confidential, I can point you to the Social Media Literacy Tool we built that was based on our interviews with nonprofits. (The tool is geared to nonprofits but can be used by anyone.)

Update: the Social Media Literacy Tool is live!

How social media will benefit your nonprofit

When I discuss the need to embrace social media with nonprofit leaders, the reasons usually fall into these buckets:

(1) Social media has altered the balance of power

The same tectonic shifts that have disrupted other spheres of society — the public’s interactions with brands, with media, with government — are starting to affect other sectors as well, including the nonprofit community. The smartest reaction would be to identify key learnings from watching the other sectors and then adapt and apply those takeaways to your own. People no longer want their only interactions with a favorite cause or nonprofit to be restricted to their credit cards — they want to participate (at least some of them do) at all levels of your core mission, from communicating with members of your team to communicating with each other to helping you raise money or connect with community resources.

It’s likely that there are rich conversations taking place online about your nonprofit or your cause. You should be a part of those conversations.

(2) You can copy what has worked elsewhere

The real-world results are in: There are now tons of case studies proving that social media has moved the needle in a positive direction for organizations — nonprofits and businesses alike — that know how to how to create a social media action plan, which begins with a strategy and then an implementation of the proper tactics. I’ll refrain from citing Twestival, which every “social media expert” on the Web cites, and instead point to efforts like:

• Awareness campaigns (PDF) by PBS KIDS and War Child Canada

• charity: water’s September birthday campaign

• CouchSurfing International’s efforts to forge connections across borders

• Invisible Children’s Visible Children Scholarship Program

• epic change’s Tweetsgiving program

• The American Cancer Society’s More Birthdays program

The nonprofit Society for New Communications Research — of which I’m a senior fellow — honors nonprofits, universities, media organizations and businesses with annual awards in categories like communities, collaboration, social media production and more. Head over to our sister site, Socialmedia.biz, to read some great case studies.

(3) Your nonprofit has a compelling (untold) story

In every conversation I had with nonprofits, it emerged that their organization or cause had a heart-tugging, compelling story that wasn’t being effectively captured or conveyed on their website. Social media’s strongest component is its ability to give supporters an easy way to create and share stories about the things that matter to them most. Whether it’s using Twitter to spread the word about your latest campaign or using a Flip cam to interview people who are being directly helped by nonprofit, social media expands the range of possibilities in a dynamic, conversation-driven, low-cost way.

(4) Your staff’s internal dynamics will thrive

Time after time we’ve heard from nonprofits about how a strong social media effort not only improves the connections between your organization and its supporters but also strengthens the fabric that binds your staffers together. When employees are empowered to interact with the community, their stake in your organization rises immeasurably. When employees use new tools to communicate with each other more effectively, they get more accomplished and form deeper ties as a team. And when your nonprofit begins each day by listening to and talking with your community, deeper understanding follows.

Everyone is after the holy grail of return on investment (ROI). The top ROI of using social media for your nonprofit? Insight.

Related articles

• Social Media Resources (TechSoup Global)
• Understanding The ROI of Social Media (slideshare.net)
• What’s the real value of social media for communicators? (willmarlow.com)
• What nonprofits need to know about social media (smartblogs.com)
• Streamline Your Nonprofit on Twitter (ricksrss.com)

Related

• Social Media Literacy Tool (TechSoup Global)

The post Social media 101 for small nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.