It doesn’t matter what event I am speaking at, or who the participants are in the room, I can’t think of a single time I’ve spoken about nonprofit technology topics and not had at least one hand raised in the audience to ask about the number of Facebook fans an organization “should” have, or the “best” time of day to tweet, or even the frequency of posting videos on YouTube. In the book, Beth and Katie identify a number of themes. One that really speaks to me is the point that “measurement helps nonprofits understand and improve their social networks.” Often, nonprofit leaders and staff think of data as something that helps us decide on something new (a new program, a new service, a new engagement opportunity); unfortunately, we don’t always remember that data also helps us make decisions about what we are already doing. Here’s a case study of my own!

To Link or Not to Link

Before I worked at NTEN, I managed the NetSquared program at TechSoup Global. As part of that role, I was in charge of our various social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. At that time, most of NetSquared’s content came from the community blog, where anyone working at the intersection of technology and social impact could create a profile and contribute to the blog with stories, case studies, and more. The content strategy was to reflect the same community focus on the blog onto our other channels, both highlighting community members’ content as well as creating a space where people could continue sharing on their platform of choice. All of that translated to tweeting out links to blog posts all the time.

Watching the metrics every week, though, it was clear we weren’t looking just for traffic to the blog. We were looking to build the same kind of group sharing on social platforms that we were seeing on the blog. We also saw that retweets as a total or an average really varied. So, we dug deeper. In an attempt to ensure that we connected the “why” of whether something was successful or not to the “what” of the content itself, I started splitting apart our metrics. Instead of watching the average or total retweets for the week, I was looking at the number of tweets that went out with a link and the number that went out without a link, and the corresponding rewteets.

Wow, that’s when things got interesting! I started to see that the more I posted without a link or retweeted someone else’s link, the more response and engagement I built within the channel (in this case, Twitter). But when I tried to push people off of Twitter and over to the blog posts, there was much less of a response. Having a better understanding of what was going on, I could make a decision about our current strategy (not just a new one for later). To ensure that our content stayed balanced, I made sure that our metrics tracking documents separated % of posts with a link from those without a link and set goals for the weekly post balance.

Get your copy!

I am giving away a copy of Beth and Katie’s book to be sure that I do my part to spread the knowledge and share the insights. But, I don’t just want to mail it someone, I want to use this as an opportunity to catalyze some peer sharing! Please leave a comment below about how you’ve used data to help make a decision about the social channels you were already using. Just getting started? Share what you’d like to try! I’ll select a comment at random to win the book and we can all win by learning from each other. (I’ll pick someone on Friday, December 7th – so hurry!)

Why the dog photo? Well, that’s my dog and he’s pretty cute, but Beth and Katie are also running a dog vs cat photo contest.

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).

• New Report: 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study | NTEN – "A high unsubscribe rate is bad, right? Not necessarily, according to the 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, just released at the 2011 NTC by M+R and NTEN. As it turns out, a high unsubscribe rate correlates directly with high fundraising results. People unsubscribe because they read your message and decide your cause isn't interesting to them; people donate because they read your message and decide that it is. That's just one of the fascinating drops of knowledge in the "2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study"."
• Twitter Blog: #numbers – "Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet. Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace. Here are some numbers…" Some very interesting numbers from Twitter – what are you most surprised about? When did you join Twitter, or what has kept you from joining? Would love to hear your thoughts!
• A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Nonprofits in a Networked World | Community Organizer 2.0 – "I am attending the South By Southwest Interactive panel discussion entitled “A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Nonprofits in a Networked World.” Beth Kanter of Zoetica Media is the moderator, along with fellow panelists Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Mark Horvath of Invisible People and Jessica Dheere, of Social Media Exchange Beirut in Lebanon. During the session, I captured the presentations and audience Q & A. This blog post is merely a recording of the session, with highlights of the key points. On an editorial note – the session surfaced some incredible pearls of wisdom from both panelists and audience members about how to work with free agents and nonprofits, and those are underlined."
• Amazing use of QR Codes by NYC’s Central Park – "I’ve been writing about and using QR codes quite a bit of late. I think the potential of this technology is staggering and we’ve only begun to imagine what is possible. Take a look at what New York City’s Central Park did last Arbor Day and begin to ask yourself… how could QR codes serve my customers, my employees and my business’ growth. I suspect you’ll find some pretty fascinating answers."
• Checkins (CI) Experimental Functionality – The Ushahidi Blog – "As we announced in January, we are working on a new checkins feature. We are really excited about simplifying the reporting process for those situations where you don’t need a full blown report. The checkins functionality in the Ushahidi Platform is one of the first open source checkin products that crosses multiple mobile platforms. We’ve been hard at work laying out the basic functionality ahead of SXSW and it’s now available for your deployment in the Ushahidi Repository on GitHub and is already active on Crowdmap."