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Inevitably, January is filled with predictions and resolutions. We ponder the innovations and evolutions that may unfold in the technologies we use, and consider the issues we want to tackle in our work and communities.

Me? I’m focused on data. This year will, I hope, be the year of data. I see more organizations looking for ways to be data-driven in decision making, communications, campaigning, and marketing, and I see a growing interest in and understanding of the value in sharing data. The more we share our data with each other inside and outside of our organizations, the more data-driven we can be in our work collectively.

If you’ve been waiting for an invitation to dive into data, this is it. You are cordially invited to start tracking, measuring, evaluating, and sharing! Here are a few ways to get started:

Data for Promotion

Many organizations use selected statistics, data, or other information in press releases and calls to action, but we may not look at those numbers or statistics as stories that compel us to share, respond, and take action. There are ways, however, to use data to tell a more active story. Here’s an infographic that Points of Light shared during the ramp up to its 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service events. Looking at the cumulative impact of volunteers is really powerful when it’s presented in this way:

Data for Engagement

Using real-time tools to engage people through data can help increase both the time people spend on your site and the amount of information you can convey quickly. Mapping is one of the most-used and easily recognizable options. It’s easy to see and understand a map right away (especially using something like Google Maps, which most people have seen before or even used themselves). One great example is the wayEpic Change uses a map as the main interface for its To Mama With Love campaign.

The To Mama With Love site encourages visitors, without any written instructions, to click locations on the map, read through the user-created word, photo, and video dedications to moms (or, “heartspaces”), and engage with others’ stories by sharing or donating.

Data for Reporting

Organizations are also sharing data in many ways. Some if it is visual, such as in this terrific infographic that illustrates trends for where we are giving our time and money:

This year, I would love to see nonprofit organizations, service agencies, and local groups working together to share their data in the effort to more accurately map our collective impact and to identify new opportunities for partnership and collaboration. Imagine if you could see a map of hunger in your city that included a broader set of data than what Share Our Strength, Feeding America, or your local food bank has collected. What if the map included information from service providers, schools, and other local organizations? You would get a clearer picture of the issues causing hunger in your community—and be that much clearer about how to tackle the problem. Maps can reveal things such duplicated efforts and can help us understand where to invest. I would love to see that map! And I would love to help.

What are you looking to do this year with your data? What are you working on now? I would love to see or hear about any examples you already have.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Groupon Case Study: Jolkona’s Groupon Experiment | Community Organizer 2.0 – Check out this great interview by Debra Askanase with Laura Kimball, discussing their experiment using Groupon! "Jolkona ran a Groupon deal as an experiment to try to raise money for a specific campaign using Groupon. Jolkona partnered with the Seattle International Foundation (SIF), which pledged to match every donation, dollar for dollar, up to $25,000. Starting July 26th, Groupon Seattle’s G-Team allowed subscribers to join Jolkona and SIF in making an investment in women’s leadership by pledging support in increments of $10. For each $500 collected, Jolkona would fund one week of training for a woman leader to come to Seattle and participate in a 10-week fellowship program, run by iLEAP: The Center for Critical Service."
• Year-end appeals have you stumped? Four quick tips to get the ball rolling | Big Duck – "This is the time of year when most people I know are thinking about ‘back to school’ and beginning to plan their fall/winter holidays and vacations. Of course for us Ducks and most of you, this time of year is dominated by the ever-glorious year-end fundraising appeal. These days, the year-end giving season starts as early as October. In fact, as I write this (in mid-August), we’re already at work on several year-end campaigns. If you’re not quite there yet, here are a few quick tips I hope you’ll find useful to get your fundraising wheels in motion."
• When Communities Identify Their Own Poor, Aid Has The Most Effect | Fast Company – "When governments and NGOs plan on giving assistance to the most needy, how do they know who needs the most assistance? It's a question people are at great pains to answer, yet social welfare programs around the world are still plagued by error and abuse. That has not deterred the development of programs to help people escape extreme poverty. But because the poor–especially those earning less than $2 or $3 per day–typically hold informal jobs with no official records about their earnings, conventional ways to determine need are ineffective. MIT researchers in a recent study (PDF) looked at two alternative methods for establishing who needs assistance."
• 7 Things Nonprofits Can Talk About on Facebook Besides Themselves « – "Recently I met with a client who was sensitive about what they posted on Facebook, because they not only had privacy issues to be concerned with of their constituents, but they didn’t think that the other things they do would be applicable to their fans on Facebook. In other words they didn’t think that their fans on Facebook cared about what their organization was doing other than fundraising."
• Complex and Contradictory: A New Way to Think of Digital Activism | The Meta-Activism Project – "The effect of digital technology on political contention is neither good nor bad, it is both.  Yes, the Internet can help activists mobilize and re-frame public issues.  It can also distract citizens and feed apathy.  It can also help repressive governments watch and censor their citizens.  The sooner we accept digital technology’s complex and contradictory effect of political power dynamics, the sooner we can move forward to answering more interesting questions about those effects.  What contextual factors lead to these different outcomes?  Why does one factor win out over others when all three are in play?"
• 5 Reasons Social Media Measurement is Making You Lie to Yourself | social media measurement | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert – I love the comparision Jay makes here between Twitter and email, followers equals sends and actual Twitter reach (people reading and responding) equals open rate. Really changes the impact of those Twitter numbers! "Social media measurement causes unsavory (and ineffective) marketing behavior because unlike the rest of our marketing key performance indicators, social media metrics are out there for anyone to see."

Location: New Orleans, LA

Topic: Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns

Description: Integrating volunteers into online campaigns for requires a great community organizer. Traditional community organizing lays the groundwork for online campaigns and effective movements. In this session, participants will get their hands dirty planning a social media campaign that integrates traditional organizing theory and practice. During the workshop, we will present traditional community organizing principles, campaign mapping methods and case studies. Attendees will divide into breakout sessions to design an online campaign. Each group will present its campaign strategy and tactics. Workshop leaders will offer feedback, and the nonprofit will select a winning strategy.

Related Links:

• NCVS
• Points of Light
• Slides and notes

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Whether it’s political or personal, global or local, funded or a grassroots effort, organizations and communities are campaigning for change in many ways, all of the time. Unfortunately, there are times when we lose focus on our ultimate goals for change and instead fixate on the campaign itself or let a concept for engagement overshadow our real calls to action. When we do that, we can compromise the relationship we have with our supporters and donors, and limit our capacity for building momentum towards action and a movement for our cause. But, it doesn’t have to be that way!

Start with Metrics

When building a campaign and exploring your options for the structure, actions and engagement pieces, look first at your organizational metrics. What do you measure every day, week, month, year? What do you point to when funders, donors, board members and the community ask if you are making a difference? How do you evaluate your programs and services? Those metrics and goals are the best resources for identifying the focus and the calls to action for your campaign.

For example, if you are an organization working on public education policy changes, you probably recognize teachers as a core demographic to your work – both in supporting the changes you propose as well as helping identify the changes that can and should be made. Maybe you want to run a campaign for awareness around one of your proposals and want to showcase teachers in the process. Asking supporters to take an apple to their teacher may sound like a fun call to action – it engages students and parents in any grade level, is a simple and straightforward ask, and has teachers at the center. But how does it help you move closer to your goal?

Instead, what if you asked students to finish the sentence “My teacher deserves an apple because…” Whether people respond with pictures, video, or text you have engaged them at the same degree as you would have with the apple, but you also have all of those responses that you can aggregate and share back in real time, bubbling up the energy of all those participating and following along. You also have media of various kinds that you can use in messaging, calls to action, and in the advocacy for your work in front of teachers, administrators and ultimately policymakers.

Revisit your Story

What’s your organization’s story? You have one. It’s the story you tell in a grant application, on your website, in an elevator, and to a room of volunteers getting ready to help you with a project or event. As much as your goals and metrics will help you identify the actions your campaign can focus on, your story helps you identify where the campaign fits in your work and how to position it to the community and the world at large. How are you using your story to engage people around the campaign specifically and your work as a whole?

For example, using that same organization from the example above, perhaps our story is that the community has all the resources teachers and schools need to be successful, if only there was more coordination and access to those resources when they were needed. As such, a campaign that reinforces that story by asking for people to register resources in their business, home, or local community instead of just donate.

Campaigns in Action

I want to use two real campaigns to reinforce these two points. First, is the Kiss Malaria Goodbye campaign:

Metrics – It’s easy to see what the ask is. But it’s hard to see from the perspective of someone coming across the campaign website how responding to that call to action will make a difference. And ultimately, we take action to be part of something as we already have plenty of opportunities to take and share video, photo and messages with our friends or the world at large. The action of sharing a kiss doesn’t seem to align with the actions needed to get rid of Malaria.

Story – The action is aligned with the story of “kiss Malaria goodbye” but that is, ultimately, just a slogan. The story here is of how 1 child dies of Malaria in Africa every 45 seconds. Perhaps the campaign could have been anchored in that fact and asked people to make a 45 second or less video to get involved.

The next example, is 350.org and their Days of Action:

Metrics – The campaigns 350 runs are centered on numbers: both the number 350 (ppm) as well as the sheer scale of participants that can be involved in a collective action. Both are powerful. They reinforce the call for legislative action to bring the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere back down to 350 ppm in everything they do by encouraging participants to use the number in their messages and to take/post images and videos of the actions organized in major cities and tiny villages around the world.

Story – 350.org’s story is that our changing climate and toxic levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are affecting everyone on earth. As such, their messages and calls to action are geared at showcasing diversity and participation from all corners of the planet.

Your Opportunity

Your supporters take action because they share your vision – or at least a piece of it – and want to join you in making change. Don’t let your call to action diminish the potential you and your community have for changing the world!

Photo credit: Flickr leehaywood

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• UNICEF Haiti365 – Be Their Voice – I'm really excited to see this new campaign from UNICEF – focused on the children in Haiti, and building on a multimedia effort to move people into engagement. "Haiti 365 will continue to evolve as more people create videos and sign-up to show their support. This project, housed on a social media enhanced micro-site allows people to commit to a year of service via an email sign up. This means throughout the year we will ask them to help send messages to the government to keep the focus in Haiti on the children, we'll update members on progress or specific needs and we'll also engage them in outreach when needed. The most touching piece of this campaign is the ability to read and share a constantly changing selection of stories and anecdotes from the children themselves."
• Why I'm dancing: The Point + Groupon = G-team – My Social Actions – I'm really excited about the news Christine shared on the Social Actions blog: the potential being harnessed by Groupon/The Point to get social impact into the stream of success that Groupon has created. Check it out! "So I'm especially thrilled to see Groupon announce the launch of G-team, an experiment in complementing Groupon's deals with The Point-type campaigns. The sky is clearly the limit in coming up with creative ways to tack social actions campaigns onto Groupon deals. Take a look at the examples on the G-team page and let your imagination run wild."
• MLK2011 – Join Us Live! – "Get HandsOn! and join HandsOn Network and your community in leading deliberate dialogues that turns conversation into action. Don't forget to tell us about your conversation!" Check out these excellent opportunities for turning MLK Day into a day for igniting important, purposeful conversations in your community. What will you be doing on January 17th – I'd love to hear your plans for making the holiday a day of action!
• Animoto – For a Cause – "How can we help your cause? Animoto supports not-for-profits and other humanitarian causes with free pro accounts." Thanks to Stacey Monk for the tip that Animoto let's nonprofits apply for free pro accounts – looking for a tool to help with your video storytelling, multimedia fundraising and more? Check out Animoto!
• Ten for Ten: Philanthropy from 2010-2020 (December 20, 2010) | Opinion Blog | Stanford Social Innovation Review – "Earlier this year, I took a look back at my decade of predictions, 1999-2009. You can find that online here. I’ve also published my annual forecast for what will matter in philanthropy and social investing in 2011—you can find that online here (use the special SSIR discount code). With this post I’m going to take a slightly different tack on the end-of-year ritual top 10 lists. Rather than focus in (anymore than the buzzwords list already does) on the top 10 of the year gone by, let’s think about the factors that will shape philanthropy for the decade ahead."

For Mother’s Day, Epic Change wants to help Mama Lucy realize another dream – to build a home on campus where in-need children will live. Towards that end, Epic Change has created an online collaborative art project to honor moms across the globe called To Mama With Love. The call-to-action is to create a “heartspace” for a mom you love consisting of words, photos and video.

As Stacey Monk, the founder and CEO of Epic Change, explains:

With www.ToMamaWithLove.org, we hope to build this home out of the love we share for moms across the globe.  Just imagine.
According to the LA Times, this year Americans alone will spend $14.6 billion on Mother’s Day.  Imagine if the gifts we gave made the world a better place for children & mamas everywhere.

Here’s mine:

Happy Mother’s Day, mom! (For more love to my mom, check out my Ada Lovelace Day post, too!)

What I Like:

The elements of this campaign that I like are the same ones that Epic Change always gets right:

1. Time sensitive: Mother’s Day is this Sunday in the US and this campaign creates an easy to understand timeline for participation + real impact
2. Real Impact: The changes and impact are always real, visible, and important, and Stacey and all those involved do a great, consistent job of sharing the stories of the kids (and Mama Lucy) benefiting.
3. From the Heart: Just like Tweetsgiving, and everything that Mama Lucy is doing in Tanzania, the To Mama with Love campaign is all from the heart. It’s honest and simple and creates great ways for people to share love and passion for each other (opposed to all those campaigns built on fear or anger).
4. Real People: Just like the element of real impact, this campaign and Tweetsgiving both succeed because they are created by, benefit, and involve real people, being themselves.  At the end of the day, we are humans. We don’t need to pretend we aren’t.

How You Can Share:

• Visit http://www.tomamawithlove.org/ to see the heartspaces already popping up on the map from around the world
• Use #tomamawithlove in Twitter
• Create a heartspace and share your story! (You can see the one Stacey made here.)
• Join the streaming conversation! You can connect with others via voice or video on Friday – find out more here!

Thanks so much, Mama Lucy, for all the hard work and dedication you have devoted to the kids and community.  And thank you, to my mom, for all your love!

“The Totally Baldacious campaign is a great way to show your love and solidarity with cancer patients while you help raise awareness and funds for cures.  Whether you decide to shave your head or color your hair, you will be helping The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society raise money for much-needed, life-saving cancer research.”

I really like so many aspects of this campaign that instead of simply changing my profile picture or tweeting about the campaign, I wanted to take a closer look, share with you some of the elements that are making it a great campaign, and some suggestions for ways it can be improved.

What Works:

Microsite: Creating a space for your campaign that is separate from your organization’s website can be really helpful for those new to your work or finding your campaign via social media.  People know they are in the right place, any tabs or links they click on will help them learn more about the campaign (and not get lost in the various sections of your organization’s website) and target information to them about the rest of your work based on their interest in the campaign.  Creating a separate web space isn’t always necessary, but in this example it really works.

Options: The barrier to entry to the Totally Baldacious campaign is low enough that everyone can participate in a way that contributes to the campaign, but that they are still comfortable with.  Asking people to shave their heads is a big deal, so creating innovative ways for them to join together without having to commit to something they just can’t commit to is really essential to high participation numbers.  Encouraging people to lighten the color of their hair instead of shaving it, or changing their online profile picture to a bald head to raise awareness all play on the same theme for support of those who’ve lost their hair from their fight with cancer, but don’t make people feel bad if they don’t want to “go all the way.”

Calls to Action: What may seem simple, is often very difficult to achieve, and in this case it’s the calls to action.  The Totally Baldacious campaign, though, does an excellent job making the calls to action clear, consistent, and do-able.  It’s so important that your calls to action – both buttons and actions – are the same throughout your site or campaign space (don’t want people getting confused about what you want them to do) and are easy to identify quickly (don’t want people poking around trying to find how they can participate).  Make it as clear as possible, like they did, with a “how can I participate” section.

What Could Improve:

Visible Goal: Even though the calls to action are very clear, the goal of those actions is a bit muddled. Is it to raise money? Is it to raise awareness? Is it to grow the list of supporters? It can’t be all of them.  It can be one, and the others can be bonuses; but all three can’t exist together as the ultimate goal.  Depending on the page you are on or the call to action you are joining, the goal you are helping to reach can be different.  It would be great if all signs pointed back to the same place.  (Individual fundraising pages have goal meters, why not an overall goal and thermometer graphic?)

Visible Participants: A campaign like this draws on the power of social media and the networks of it’s supporters. People that change their profile image to a Baldacious bald image (like mine above) should be able to see others who have done the same, and those who haven’t done it yet should get to see the latest newly-bald faces to inspire them to join.  People contributing money to an individual’s campaign or to the campaign over all should be able to see other’s who have donated, and those thinking about donating should be able to see other recent donors to inspire them to give.  These are just a few of the many ways to make the participating community more visible.

Movement Building: Don’t ever forget that what we are trying to do isn’t just get people to change a picture or donate money; it’s to change our world into one without the issues, illnesses, and struggles too many people face every day.  With that in mind, it would be great to see the Totally Baldacious campaign create a global-facing or at least globally open portal, too – through the way participation is made visible (previous point) or in other ways.  I see such potential in campaigns that get it right on so many levels to also get it right by catalyzing collaborations and truly building towards a movement.

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Thanks to all those at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and everyone else who made the campaign possible.  It looks great, is creating some fun ways for people to join in, and I hope it continues towards success!

If you haven’t yet, why not make yourself Totally Baldacious?!

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Digital Media and Learning Competition: Applications now open! | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – "The 3rd Digital Media and Learning Competition, from the MacArthur Foundation, is now accepting applications. In partnering with the White House, National Lab Day, and videogame makers Sony and EA, the Digital media and Learning Competitions has prizes up to $200,000 and is open to all kinds of innovative projects (including games) that make use of digital media for education and social change. Submissions close January 22, 2010."
• » Your Mobile Giving by State – Wendy Harman at the American Red Cross has posted a map and data about the funds donated via texting "Haiti" to 90999 to support the victims in the Haiti earthquake crisis. It's really interesting as far as mobile fundraising, but also just that the ARC are able to gather, analyze and share data like this in close to real time. Thanks for all that you are doing, ARC!
• 7 Things I learned From #Beth53 Fundraiser and PoST Class – Beth's Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change – Beth shares some great lessons from the fundraising campaign she recently ran for her birthday. "This post harvests what I learned and what I still don't know about the birthday campaign strategy and measurement as well as guest teaching a graduate school class." My favorite lesson? 5.) Design for People To Self Organize!
• After Copenhagen: Turning Activism Into Impact – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – There's a great guest post up today from Michael Silberman on the Frogloop blog: "Going to the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen (COP15) was the closest I've come to a good strong punch in the gut — the type that makes you question much of what you once believed to be true. But it was also one of the best wake-up calls I could have asked for.

  …That means setting aside our shiny online tools and tactics long enough to ensure that we're using them to deliver real impact."

• 1 vote can equal $1 million « Nonprofit Communications: Duck Call Blog – "Today is the first day people can vote in the final round of the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Between now and January 22, people who add the application can vote up to five times for five individual charities. Much has been written criticizing the contest and the initial selection of 100 charities who already received $25,000 and are now vying for the grand prize of $1,000,000. But, despite the controversy in the first round of results, I think there are some positive lessons that can be learned for nonprofits of all sizes."

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Transformative Collaboration « Alison & Associates – Alison Rapping has a terrific, comprehensive blog post today all about jump starting collaborations. It's a must-read! "Collaboration. It was the hottest “buzz word” of the last decade — And if you ask ten people to describe it, you could get ten very different answers. Collaborations are going to be a driving force in building stronger relationships and stronger communities. In the new decade we are in the “perfect collaboration storm:” energy around our “community visions”, enormous critical community needs, myriad of new nonprofit organizations, and desire for greater impact. This can only happen if we work together. Our community is whole and interconnected; we can’t create a powerful vision in silos."
• Zoetica: Connecting Organizations with Their Networks – Congrats to Beth Kanter, Geoff Livingston and Kami Watson Huyse on the launch of their new adventure: Zoetica! "Zoetica serves nonprofits and socially conscious companies with top-tier, word-of-mouth communication services. A social enterprise, Zoetica provides superior communication consulting, training, and strategy to help mindful organizations affect social change."
• GreatNonprofits: Find non-profits and charities to review, donate, or volunteer. – "GreatNonprofits and Guidestar want to hear about the great nonprofits providing job training or job placement in your communities. Tell us about YOUR experience – how are these organizations having an impact? Which ones are great? Which ones need improvement? Participate in this campaign to recognize the top-rated nonprofits developing your community through job training or job placement." Deadline: January 31, 2010
• Surprise! Only 5% of Websites Have a Twitter or Facebook Link – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – "Factual, an “open data repository” analyzed 4 million websites via data from Common Crawl, a non-profit group designed to crawl the web and provide data for anyone to use." Check out the stats highlighted by Allyson Kapin in this short but interesting post!
• Nominees for the Osocio’s Best Campaign of 2009 announced – Osocio, Social Advertising and Non-profit Campaigns – "Osocio is happy to announce a list of ten nominees for the Osocio’s Best Campaign of 2009 award. Osocio has started selecting best campaigns featured on our blog, because we want to put the most creative and innovative social ads into spotlights. So that non-profit organizations can learn and benefit from these best practices. This is the Top 10 list of the best social campaigns featured on Osocio in 2009. One of these campaigns will become the Osocio’s Best Campaign of 2009."