That’s the question I asked this morning on Qriously, a new application that measures public sentiment, in real time. It works by replacing ads with questions in smartphone and tablet apps. The application is currently in a closed beta, and I was lucky enough to get access to start playing around with it. It’s so easy to use, and has so much potential for the nonprofit sector, that I couldn’t wait any longer to show it to you!

Qriously is super easy to use: you pick the type of question (two answer, slider, or star/rating), write your question and possible answers, select the location (global, regional or local – if you get a trial account, you are limited to global questions), and then how many answers you want to gather. That’s it!

I’ve run three questions so far, and here’s some of the insights to the process:

What influences your charitable giving?

The first question I asked on Qriously was: “What influences your charitable giving?” and provided the two possible responses of “friends” or “data” – I used the question style where respondents had to pick one answer or the other exclusively. As soon as the question is live, you start seeing the impressions and the responses, aggregated in real time. It’s incredible! You’ll also notice that you can see the impressions, as well as the responses.

And once all 100 responses were gathered, I took a look at all the data.

First, overall:

And when you click on “What does this chart mean?” it actually tells you, with much richer context:

I personally love data-map mashups and Qriously uses them brilliantly! The data on these maps shows the number of responses as well as the direction of response, where orange = “data” and blue = “friends”.

You can start out with a global view:

And drill town to see the data, and let it speak for itself.

What I think is really exciting about this view of the data, is when you can look across a global region and extrapolate on the cultural influences and beyond. Imagine if you were a nonprofit organization, creating a global campaign; you could use a tool like this to test messages and sentiments for various areas around the world to better design and craft the campaign as well as the communications. For example, thinking about the question of what influences giving, look at this section of the map – with exclusive data responses vs friend responses:

And looking at the US, you can see the changes in response across the states, too:

Which would you rather give?

The next question I asked was “which would you rather give?” with the answers being “time” and “money” but this time I used the slider question option, meaning respondents have a slider on the screen that they can drag anywhere along the line between the two answers. I thought this would be a good question type to use for this topic because it would let us see not just if one had more “answers” than the other, but if it was an extreme or subtle inclination towards either direction. Here’s the response:

Personally, I agree! I respect and understand the arguement that time is money, but I am able to give more of my time than my money to things that aren’t discrete. I’m happy to share my thoughts, feedback, ideas, and “expertise” and love to help others learn something that they can then do on their own (without me next time). And I often feel that organizations don’t provide a way for me to give, in a way that I think could be valuable, unless it’s financial.

Do you think you can change the world?

That’s right. I asked mobile users around the globe “do you think you can change the world?” and I chose the two-response question type, so they could only answer “yes” or “no”.

And the results? Yes!

Qriously for Nonprofits

I think there are so many potential applications for Qriously in the nonprofit sector!

Marketing

As I noted at the start, the stats provide both impressions as well as responses. So, although you may only have 100 people give you an answer, if your question said, for example, “Have you heard of NTEN?” you have far more people that aren’t responding that still saw your organization’s name.

Listening

Organizations are looking for ways to learn about their community and those they want to reach but haven’t yet. Listening is a big part of social technologies as you can tap into and follow all kinds of conversations. But Qriously offers a way of listening and learning that cuts out the middleman – go straight to the people you want! I’m using a trial account, but full accounts provide the option to target your geography and more.

Targeting

Beyond listening, maybe your organization or campaign needs to identify just who it is that actually is interested! Qriously could be used to test different messages and groups to measure where responses are strongest.

Campaigning

You don’t just have to do market research with Qriously. What if you used the tool as a way of campaigning? The questions could actually be calls to action! For example: “Have you changed to energy efficient light bulbs?” with answers of “I will” and “I did”.

And more!

There are so many ways the social impact sector could put something like Qriously to use – and not just as another shiny toy, but as a tool to meeting our missions.

If you want to check it out for yourself, use this form to apply for Qriously access. Please note that trial accounts only let you ask global questions.

What do you think? I have another question I can ask on the trial account, so please share your suggestions! If you have questions about the application, I’m happy to respond with my experience, or message the Qriously team to weigh in with more information!

Review the Table of Contents and read the report introduction now, or learn more in the following interview.

First, what does the “real-time Web” really mean?

It means different things to different people, but the most literal meaning is probably this: real-time systems push information from a publisher to a subscriber (be they a human reader or a machine consuming information) as soon as it’s available, without the subscriber having to ask if there’s anything new.

Think of how Facebook notifies you that you have new messages without having to refresh the page, or the way your Instant Messaging client shows you new messages as soon as they are sent. The underlying technologies used in those kinds of circumstances are now being integrated into all kinds of other websites because real-time delivery of information changes the user experience radically and offers all kinds of benefits. It’s smoother for users, users and systems get to take action immediately on new information and it’s much more efficient, meaning that your technology can do more with less computing expense.

When did RWW start focusing on the real-time Web?

Probably middle of 2008. Like people generally do, we thought about the impact that Twitter and Facebook were making on the web. When we looked deeper though, we quickly found out that there is far, far more going on in the real-time web than those two services.

For the report, you interviewed 50 Web experts – what were some of the surprising things you heard?

I was surprised to learn how broad this field is. We talked to people working with public records extraction in real time, with designers building lightweight, real-time presentation sharing tools, Google engineers have some incredible ideas about ways they hope that their PubSubHubbub real-time protocol will be used – stuff like real-world sensor networks and contact info syncing. When I started those interviews, I knew there were broad possibilities but I had no idea how broad.

How has the real-time Web already impacted nonprofit organizations or those focused on social impact work?

One of the organizations I did an interview with was the American Red Cross. As they say, “at the Red Cross, the real-time web saves lives.” Real-time information delivery has changed the way that organization works in radical ways. It’s amazing. Disaster response work that used to take days now takes minutes, using a combination of Sharepoint, mobile devices and airplane surveillance. The Red Cross also pays very close attention to the rest of the real-time web, though. I was fascinated to find out that the team at HQ is full of fans of the Breaking News Online iPhone app.

What impacts are right around the corner?

Organizations that choose to do so are already able to run circles around the web using these real-time technologies. I expect that some will do so and many will not. It will be like the difference between organizations that developed an effective web or email presence early vs. those that did not. If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate some elements of real-time information delivery into their work flow. Be that pushing real-time updates out to their websites and supporters, consuming updates on breaking news in their sector in real time, or collaborating remotely in real time. Using only the parts of the web that you must refresh for updates, when you remember to do so, be they email or web pages, will soon feel like putting your ear up to a tin can with a string connecting it to some other tin can far away. I don’t mean to say that everything will be real time and you must always live in that flow, but I do believe it’s fast becoming an essential form of engagement. Not just because everyone is doing it, either, but because it’s really very useful.

How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?

There are as many ways to take advantage of the real time web as there are to use the web in general. Here’s one of my favorite stories though. Some time back I was doing a workshop for nonprofit communications people and one of the attendees worked for a women’s advocacy organization. As a proof of concept, we took the RSS feed of the New York Times and filtered it for keywords related to her organization’s areas of interests, I think we used Yahoo Pipes to filter, it might have been FeedRinse.com, but that’s not hard to do in many different ways. Then we took the filtered RSS feed and we ran it through an RSS to SMS/IM alert service. I use Notify.me a lot but even faster than that now is an iPhone app called Nofitifcations. Or have your team’s geeks check out Superfeedr.com. So the idea was, this person could then watch the NYT feed automatically, get an SMS or IM alert whenever a relevant story was published and then she could call up her local newspaper or other press. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about this story breaking on a national level,” she could say, and or course they probably hadn’t because they don’t have robots watching for these things automatically, “but if you’d like to cover this topic on a local level, our Executive Director is an excellant source for information.” That journalist will love you for it. Do that enough times and your organization, no matter how small, will have a chance to grow its public profile substantially.

That’s just one idea. There are countless other ways that real-time information delivery can be leveraged by nonprofits. From live video to live updates to live collaboration, more and more experiences online are going on in real time.

How can we follow you and RWW as well as other leaders examining the real-time Web?

I’m at Marshallk.com, we’re at ReadWriteWeb.com, on Twitter I’m @marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb team is at http://twitter.com/rww/team

We’ve also assembled a list of real-time web industry thought leaders at http://twitter.com/rww/real-time-web

Review the Table of Contents and read the report introduction now, or buy the full report from ReadWriteWeb.