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Background: What’s ActionSprout

For years I have grumbled about the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow organizations to access the email addresses of their own Fans. And hopefully you never got me started on how the company has been treating organizations like frogs in a proverbial pot, slowly reducing the number of fans they deliver updates too. The idea that organizations have to pay to get an update onto a meaningful number Fans’ walls (Facebook acknowledges that it is down to 15% today) may be good business for Facebook, but the value proposition to organizations got less and less compelling.

At the same time I have watched organization struggle to engage with Facebook supporters in meaningful ways using just the actions Facebook has provided; Like, Share, or Comment. I have had numerous heated discussions with some of the loudest non-profit social media advocates about the real cost/benefit of Facebook as a platform for reaching supporters and deepening engagement with them over time.

To all who have endured my rants, you will be shocked to hear me say that I believe Facebook finally has the pieces in place to make a major impact on organizations ability to acquiring and building productive relationship with supporters. Yep, you heard me right, just at the very time Facebook is working harder than ever to monetize, I have become a believer. In fact, even their new Promote function provides nonprofits and campaigns with a rather compelling new tool for engaging organizations most ardent supporters.

Let me explain… Earlier this year Facebook rolled out their new Open Graph functionality and my long time do-gooding co-conspirator (Shawn Kemp) and I found ourselves contemplating if and how it might be utilized to help organizations acquire high quality fans on Facebook and, more importantly, build productive relationships with those supporters over time.

After months of learning and developing, we launched ActionSprout.com; to help organizations unlock their Facebook Fans with actions that move beyond Like, Share and Comment. The Facebook App gives organizations dozens of nonprofit-relevant social actions to engage supporters with directly on their own Facebook pages. For instance, instead of asking people to click “Like” on a wall post, they can now ask them to click “Recommend”, “Thank”, “Sign”, “Vote For,” “Stop,” “Contact”, “Support” or one of a dozen other actions we currently support.

Referral Rates

Over the past couple months we have been working with a few organizations and campaigns to put the system through its paces and begin to figure out how to actually use it and learn what kind of impact it can have.

Last week, we launched one of the most important pieces of the system for our team; the back-end analytics dashboard. As we push the dashboard live, we were excited and nervous. Would all these months of work be for not?

One of the key metrics we obsess over is the referral rate organizations are experiencing from their ActionSprout campaigns. In other words when a person takes an action like “Join” or simply clicks like on the post itself, do any of their friends join them? Facebook’s new Open Graph is designed to support the viral growth of highly relevant actions. Whenever a person takes an ActionSprout.com action on behalf of an organization, the app fires the Open Graph and automatically shares that action with some of their friends. We also give action takers other ways to help spread the word. But until you start seeing real traffic through an app like ActionSprout.com, there is really no way to know just what kind of referral rates to expect.

Case Study: ActionSprout and David Suzuki Foundation

One of the first organizations to run tests to measure referral traffic for ActionSprout.com was the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian Foundation working to protect the diversity of nature and Canadian’s quality of life, now and for the future. The results have far exceeded our expectations.

The Foundation launched it’s first campaign with the specific goal of testing the performance of ActionSprout.com relative to their standard campaign sign-up process (which drives people to a form on their website to complete a signup form). In order to help ensure that the data we were getting was meaningful, they were kind enough to focus on driving and measuring traffic to their ActionSprout.com campaign entirely through their Facebook wall even though they could have driven much higher performance had they also driven traffic to their ActionSprout.com campaign via email and their website.

The call to action for all posts was to join the Fall Family Challenge by clicking a link. The link on their first post drove people to the organization’s standard web form, not their ActionSprout app. This first post went out on a Saturday and resulted in 125 people signing up for the campaign. As would be expected, the vast majority of these 125 people were Fans who received the call to action from their news feed. “The results from that are meaningful,” says Sarah Hall, the Foundation’s communications manager. “After all, we can now reach out directly to each of those people via email and build deeper relationships.”

On the following Monday, The Foundation posted a similar call to action to their Facebook page. On this post, the call to action link pointed to their ActionSprout.com tab. That call to action drove 119 Fans to join the campaign—not bad for a Monday afternoon. But the really interesting part was what happened after they started seeing Fans take action. For each Fan who joined the campaign through ActionSprout.com, the organization has seen another 1.8 people who were not previously fans join, the campaign along with them. Where did these people come from?

• First, each time a person took the action it fires an open graph story that is shared with some of their friends and gets aggregated on their timeline. That means an open graph story is getting posted to their wall and timeline for 100% of action takers.
• Second, after taking an action The Foundation has ActionSprout configured to give the action taker a quick post to wall dialog. In their case, over 75% of action takers shared the action.
• Third, because this campaign was targeted at families with kids, many of The Foundation’s fans choose to like and share the post but didn’t sign up themselves. Some number of friends of these sharers chose to Join the campaign as well.

In other words, for every 100 Fans who joined the campaign through the ActionSprout.com app, the organization also acquired 180 new campaign members, for a total of 280 campaign members.

The thing that excites us and the David Suzuki Foundation is that those new people didn’t just click “Like” because they wanted to give a wink to a friend who was up to something. They joined a campaign that directly connected them to the organizations work. These people are new to The Foundation, but already Sarah and her colleagues know how they relate to their work and can begin to serve and engage them accordingly.

The David Suzuki Foundation also uses Salesforce as its CRM (constituent relationship management) system, and has ActionSprout.com setup to automatically add or update contact records with names and email addresses of any person who joins the campaign. (This feature is available starting on our mid-level $90/mo plan) During the two-week campaign, the David Suzuki Foundation added several hundred new constituents to its database.

Last Friday, The Foundation launched a new ActionSprout Campaign to support help them apply pressure to “Stop” a potentially disastrous China-Canada trade deal that the Prime Minister has secretly negotiated behind closed doors. This campaign has sees similar referral rates and but with much higher overall numbers. So far, their “Stop” campaign has seen more than 3000 people take the action in under 48 hours.

I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to finally be able to do more than just grumble about the limitations of Facebook for building truly productive relationships. We are excited to continue to see what organizations do with ActionSprout.com. If you’re interested in giving the system a try, here’s a 30-day free trial code that will work on all of our plans (referral code: Amy112) – so jump in and take ActionSprout for a test drive.

By Julie Macalik, with Greenlights for Nonprofit Success

The first step in starting to measure your impact is to identify the major outcomes that you want to examine. In order to be successful in this step you will need full management support and a dedicated key project lead for your team. This person will take the helm on laying out tasks in a sequence, informing other staff of their roles and assignments, and providing assistance to people as they complete their parts of the evaluation.

The standard nonprofit data points come from fundraising, communications, programs, and finance so consider these sources when gathering your team.

The standard nonprofit data points come from fundraising, communications, programs, and finance so consider these sources when gathering your team. For example, a representative from the fundraising department can make sure you consider when your funders’ reporting cycles are so that you are producing outcome measurement results at a time that aligns with their requests for information about your programs. Also, those most directly affected should provide meaningful participation, so don’t forget about your front-line staff directly involved in providing services.

Next you will want to select the outcomes that you want to examine and prioritize them. For each outcome, specify what observable measures, or indicators, will suggest that you’re achieving that key outcome for impact. After you have made your selection you can then identify what information is needed to show these indicators.

There are many types of technology and other management tools available to assist in this process, and now is the time to take stock of your technology and the tools you are going to use to track your data. Decide how information can be efficiently and realistically gathered utilizing the different methods that are best for your organization including:

• Surveys – Consider what features you will need. If you’re just looking to get your feet wet with a quick survey, one of the many free or low cost online tools will do the trick. In fact, a more sophisticated survey package could be considerably more difficult to use. On the other hand, if you’re looking for survey software to support rigorous research, the more advanced packages are more likely to have the features you need.
• Interviews and focus groups – The desired outcome of this type of method is to solicit data without any influence or bias. This also allows you to develop a relationship with clients or other key stakeholders and get a full range and depth of information. One benefit of focus groups is the ability for participants to feed off each other’s energy and bounce ideas off one another. Consider using an outside facilitator to help develop questions and protocol and to help identify themes from your data.
• Documentation Review – Looking at internal records including applications, forms, procedures, and finances allows you to get an impression of how programs operate without interruption and identify new methods of collection.
• Databases – Nonprofits can use these tools to track data in real time and report on results. Internally they can assist in managing performance at the departmental or affiliate-level using dashboards and benchmark progress over time.

After the data is collected, organize the information into similar categories (i.e. concerns, suggestions, strengths, etc.). From here you can identify patterns and themes to help you categorize and analyze data according to the indicators for each outcome.

Continue reading this article, which includes more resources and tips, when you subscribe to NTEN:Change for free!

I’m always weary of posts that claim to pronounce the 10 Best Things You Can Ever Do, or 7 Steps to Success, or any other lofty achievement wrapped up in just a number of items.  But, that doesn’t stop me from doing it myself!  Though, in these 5 steps, you’ll see there is a lot more to do, think about, and work on – no quick tick-off on this list!

Social media, as many have said time and again, is only part of your campaigning, part of your fundraising, and part of your communications.  It isn’t something that lives in its own department, nor does it have staff that are separate from the rest of the organization.  Just as the content distributed and conversations participated in are integrated into many different aspects of your organization’s work, so should the knowledge, access and responsibility to participate be integrated across your staff.

With all that being said, let’s dive in!

These 5 Steps are intended to help you create a successful social media strategy, but as you will see, they focus on your organization’s overall strategy!

1. Goals & Objectives

Evaluate your goals and objectives, as an organization.  You will not be able to identify tools and engagement methods for your organization online without knowing the bigger picture and without knowing it in concrete goals that will let you build and work towards them.  Hildy Gottlieb’s Pollyanna Principles are a great place to start if you want to learn more about how you can evaluate and identify your organizational goals (and larger view) in a way to successfully design projects, programs and even partnerships for real impact.

For more resources on goals & objectives:

• The Pollyanna Principles
• My review of The Pollyanna Principles

2. Capacity

Before sitting down to work on your social media strategy, evaluate what kind of capacity you already have in your network.  Things to consider include: staff knowledge and experience with different tools as well as other internal knowledge or previous work experience.  It’s also a good idea to evaluate the capacity (especially if you think collaboration or partnership is an opportunity) of related organizations.  Lastly, consider what other organizations, companies or campaigns in your sector have already done!

For more resources on capacity evaluation:

• Social by Social’s How-To archive
• How-To “Find out what’s already been done”

3. Strategy

Now it’s time to focus in on the meat of this post, the actual “social media strategy” part—apologies for making you wait this long!   But, there’s a catch: it’s another 5 steps!

1. Identify the audience or community you want to engage.
   This includes thinking about who you are already communicating with and how, as well as what groups you want to start communicating with who you currently aren’t including.  Who you want to talk to, listen to, and create a community with is the foundation for everything else you do with social media tools because it is what ultimately decides the success or failure of your other decisions—if you base your timing, tools, and process around those you want to be a part of your work, then you’ll be a lot more successful than if you pick tools you like when it’s convenient for you without considering the community you want to use them.
2. Identify the resources currently available within your organization. Resources include staff knowledge and comfort with different tools, experience levels of staff working with supports, volunteers, and the public, staff with time available, staff with appropriate job duties to include social media, available budget for training or workshops, etc.  Often, we forget that because the actual application/software/tool may be free, really using it is not.  What we put into our social media engagement is what we get out of it, like everything else in life.  If you only have an hour a week to post to a blog, then it is unreasonable to expect a lively conversation and community emerging from it, at least not very quickly.  By evaluating what resources you already have on hand in the organization, you are much more prepared to fully examine your options.  And remember, sometimes you assumptions about social media use and your staff can be way off!  There is something out there for all of us, and more and more people around the world are engaging online, so don’t assume that it’s only your college intern who knows how to use these tools!
3. Identify what success will look like. This is really helpful in order to evaluate the appropriate tools for your work.  If you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share their knowledge and experiences with each other you are going to need very different tools than if you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share that information with you.  It’s also important to remember that social media is a changing space, with tools and applications, even functionality, evolving every day.  So, your definition of success has to be flexible to the changing times and the changing needs of your audience.
4. Identify what technologies are most appropriate. Now that you know who you want to communicate with, who and what you have to work with in your organization, and where you want to go with the relationships, you can identify some tools to start exploring.  There are lots of blogs, directories, and lists available online to help you get started picking tools that match your goals.  One great way to help guide you in the process of identifying and selecting the most appropriate technologies is to ask your community!  What are they using now?  How would they like to engage with your organization?  Explain what success looks like to you and ask how they would go about getting there!
5. Identify what measures of success can be used. You know who and what, and you identified where you want to go, but before you dive in you also need to establish how you can measure and monitor activity from day 1 onward.  This includes things you are probably looking at already like the number of visitors to your website and subscribers of your emails; but, it also includes metrics based on the funcationality of the tools you choose and how you identified success.  If you are using a forum, then measuring the number of replies to post (or, if your forum allows voting, then the positive feedback on posts) could be appropriate, as well as the ratio of people signed up vs posting vs replying, etc.  It’s incredibly important for the success of your work to evaluate how things are going throughout.  If something isn’t working to the degree you had hoped, it’s okay!  Identify that issue, and correct it with either an alteration to the current tool or set up, or by shifting the group to a different, more appropriate tool.  Just be sure to openly communicate your evaluations, ask for feedback (”Do you see what we see?”), and explain any changes well ahead of time.

For more on building your social media strategy:

• Read the full post with the 5 Steps from above
• Review the POST Method
• Review the Social by Social Handbook (read for free online, or buy)

4. Feedback

Be sure that you create mechanisms for feedback and input throughout your process and throughout whatever you “build” or use (whether it’s a social networking space, a website, a blog or anything else).  You need to provide opportunities for your community, as well as your staff and any others participating on the “administrative” end of the operations to share ideas.  The best way to approach this is to create feedback opportunities that are “evergreen” or always available, like a contact form or address, a public forum, or commenting; and opportunities that are “seasonal” or based specifically on an event, idea, opportunity, etc. (like a blog post about possible functionality that could be added to the site, asking for feedback and ideas or even voting on the options).  Remember, though, that there is no point to asking for feedback and letting your community suggest their ideas if you aren’t going to listen.  More often than not, the community knows what it wants much more than you do, so listening is key!

For more on feedback and listening:

• WeAreMedia’s Listening Toolbox
• Social by Social’s How-Tos

5. Evaluate

Just as part of the social media strategy process in step 3 above calls for evaluation, so does the overall process.  Evaluation in this step is focused on the higher level:  how have your networks grown or changed? are there new opportunities for partnerships or collaborations? are there new opportunities for empowering your community either in different roles within the social media/online space or in other areas of your organization?  do you have stories of volunteers, staff, community members, or those you serve that could be sharing their stories in new or different ways to highlight your impact? And more!

For more on evaluation:

• Social by Social How-Tos
• WeAreMedia’s ROI Toolbox
• Liveblogging notes from Beth Kanter’s NTC session on “Mapping your social media strategy to metrics”

Then…repeat!

As with most everything else, it’s all a cycle.  You will always be revisiting your goals, your community needs, the options for tools and how to evaluate your work.  Continuing to keep the cyclical process moving, though, means that you will ensure that you give your organization all the opportunities to possible to improve it’s work and further it’s impact.  This is one self-perpetuating cycle that’s good for you!

What do you think? What lessons have you learned from designing social media strategies in your organization? What did I miss?  Looking forward to your conversation!