Full Circle Associates

I’ve been co-designing and c0-facilitating a number of workshops for the CGIAR and FAO over the past few years about knowledge sharing, and more recently, this phenomenon people call “social media.” Part of this work has been to  comb through resources and create some launch pads that are relevant to NGOs and non profits. I thought I’d share a few of them on this blog.  I’ve edited this one a bit more since the first writing.

Over time, most of this material will also be added to the every growing “KS Toolkit,” another collaborative resource I’ve pointed to frequently.

Simone Staiger, my frequent collaborator in these efforts, pointed out this quote and URL from Margaret Wheatley that is a good kick off for the topic.

In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.)

Social Media Strategy Planning & Measurement - What’s Working?

As people responsible for getting things done in your organization, you know the value of having a clear strategy and a way of evaluating if your strategy is working. With social media,  however, strategy is a compass, not a map, because it is a fast changing territory.

This topic is designed to give you some tools and ideas for including social media appropriately in your overall  organizational strategic plan and to measure its effectiveness.

Strategic Social Media Planning

You might want to look at the very useful “Social Media Strategic Planning Worksheet: from WE ARE MEDIA. Like any good communications strategic planning, social media strategy takes into consideration goals and target audiences AND the technology implications. This is the fundamental part that most of us are familiar with.

Bill Anderson (in a comment on this post, which was so good I’m editing it into the post) wrote:

I have three engineering like questions to add to the list that come directly from the late Neil Postman.

From an engineering perspective any technology, be it a tool, software, or processes and procedures, or new work practices, is a solution. Whenever considering adopting a solution consider asking the following three questions.

(1) What problem will it solve?
(2) Whose problem is it?
(3) What new problems are likely to arise by adopting it?

These three simple questions help me clarify my (sometimes hidden) assumptions about what I’m doing and why I think a particular technology is useful. I think they complement the set of questions you suggest in this post.

While it might be easy to say most of your constituents are not even online, some of your strategic audiences may be, such as funders, researchers and policy makers. So scan your audiences and look for possibilities.

Social media, however, is like a river you swim in. It is always flowing past, sometimes carrying us along, sometimes dumping us on the rocks of the shore. It is important to think iteratively of your strategy so you can adjust to changing conditions.   The advice  is to experiment often, fail quickly and learn, learn, learn to allow you to adapt your strategy. Think in 6 weeks or 6 months, not 3 year cycles. Keep an eye on the goal, but but ready to switch how you get to it.

Social Media Policies

Often people’s first questions are “how do we manage and control this stuff?” Organizations working with limited bandwidth want to block applications to prioritize internet use. Organizations working in more conservative parts of the world worry about what people will access if they start using web based tools.  The first thing to know here is that you can’t control all of this. So building on your core values and developing agreements is a sound strategy.

Some organizations find having a social media policy useful — as long as the policy doesn’t squash the initiatives right from the start! Always try and look at policies from two perspectives: control and emergence. Too much control and  you will miss the innovation and inventiveness that is a core benefit of social media.

Here are two articles that you might find helpful from IBM:

• http://www.elsua.net/2008/05/14/ibms-social-computing-guidelines-now-updated/
• http://www.elsua.net/2009/03/09/impact-of-social-software-within-the-enterprise-by-jon-iwata/ (this last one has a nice video that makes it really clear!)

And a few more if you like to read…

• http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/04/04/the-variance-of-corporate-social-media-policies/ (compares various corporate social media policies)
• 10 Must Have Social Media Policy Elements http://mashable.com/2009/06/02/social-media-policy-musts/

What we have observed is that NGOs have been slower to consider their policies. This can be an advantage to the early innovators (few barriers) but may cause worry as leadership, not familiar with social media themselves,   want to overreact rather than thoughtfully consider policy.

Work Iteratively - Measure as You Go

The good thing about using social media is it is fairly simple to experiment, iterate or throw out an experiment that is not working for you. Think small, frequent experiments and low risk, rather than trying to build “the perfect system” and over investing in any one thing until you understand the value. For example, you may try a blog as an alternative to a traditional email newsletter. Track how many times a blog post has been viewed (using your blog software or a tool like Google Analytics). See how many comments you get when you post entries that specifically ask for feedback. (People are more likely to respond to open ended questions rather than traditional press releases!). Do a search to see who has linked to that post? (Do you know how to do this on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft search? What about the new Bing.com?)

These are examples of  using quantitative metrics. For a great list of more metrics you might consider, see Rachel Happe’s blog post on Social Media Metrics. See what blog posts are more read and then start adjusting your posting style. Some people call this “social listening.” In the early phases of using social media, you are trying things out and “listening” for the response as indicated by page views, links, responses or even action by your target audience. To read more about this, check out Beth Kanter’s blog post about evaluating first projects.

Qualitative Evaluation

There is more than quantitative metrics for evaluating your social media ROI. As you know, communications is as much a qualitative thing as a quantitative thing. Some things are intangible. Like a funder reading a blog post that told the STORY of some work and begins to engage more deeply to support the project. Or the people who start following the messages you send out on Twitter and gain a deeper appreciation for food and hunger in the world and start making small changes in their own lives. These things require a deeper listening - finding stories, doing interviews with people from your target audience. For more on this, here is another blog post from Beth Kanter.

As you get a sense of how social media is helping you achieve your communications strategy, you can begin to fold social media evaluation into your overall communications evaluation work. Keep what is working. Adjust the things that might be working. Stop doing the things that aren’t working. Just a note on this. Sometimes it takes both experimentation and time to find out if something is working. So don’t give up too quickly.

Examples of social media evaluation efforts:

• Understanding the value of facilitation of social media interactions - ROI on Community managers
• Dutch perspective on ROI
• WiserEarth Community Evaluation Metrics

Questions:

• What communications objective do you want to try and support with social media?
• Do you want or need to have a social media policy?
• What are the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that a social media strategy might offer? What value does our social media strategy provide to our organization or stakeholders?
• What type of quantitative and qualitative information do we need to track to measure our success or learn how to improve our social media strategy?

Additional Resources:

• ICT-KM blog post ( by Antonella Pastore)
• Social Media Strategic Planning Worksheet (browse this site for more in-depth tools for social media measurement and evaluation
• Is your target audience using social media? Check out this Groundswell calculator .
• Social Media Campaign ROI calculator
• Slidedeck on Social Media Measurement
• Principles for Social Media for Change
• Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
• Darren Barefoot on “Social Media Releases” (good for the marcom folks)
• Social Media:A Pathway to Make Research Outputs Available and Accessible
• Digital Identity Workbook for NGOs
• Dave Pollard on Implementing Web 2.0 in your Organization
• Jane Hart’s Social Media Reading List

Jon Thompson pointed me to a very interesting social media project at the World Food Programme, CipCip. Here is a brief bit about it.

The Life of a Project Called “Deliver”: CipCip: It is not what you do, but who you do it with
Long gone are the times where you put a knowledgeable person somewhere and she or he could do the job. Our work has become so complex, time-critical and crucial to saving lives that “collaboration” with others has become a must. Not only with external parties like donors, government counterparts and other NGOs/UN agencies but also internally within the organisation.

“Information” is a key part of the collaboration. Accessing and sharing information a must.

And data is everywhere. From corporate servers, to Access databases in field offices, to Excel spreadsheets somewhere on individual computers. There is not one bit of information that exists, which is not in a digital form, apart from the feeling of the sand between your toes on a romantic summer evening.

The data exists. But is hardly made accessible let alone shared.

With the DELIVER project we aim to make the information, essential for moving 4.7 million tons of food annually, available to all those who need it. And more.

One of the key goals of DELIVER is the collection, analysis, storage and dispatch of time critical information, generated by systems, people or by public sources.

This is a cool project and reminds me of some other efforts that are swirling around as people in NGOs/NPOs seek to understand a strategic application of social media. Look at the cool work that Tracker is doing. There is this liberating idea that no one organization or person is the central source of information. They key is capturing useful information into a flow, then use the intelligence of the associated community to pull out key stuff and connections with people who can tell more or act on the ’stuff.’

We talk about overwhelm. It is reality now. So schemes to swim productively in the overwhelm in a strategic matter should be our focus.

What is your scheme? (Or is that the wrong word?)

My friend and colleague, Shirley Williams, pointed me to a great resource on digital identity (DI) that she and her colleagues created for their students at Reading University in the UK.  It is called “This Is Me.”

As I saw that lovely Creative Commons license on it, I thought I’d whip up a version for folks interested in social media and the digital identity implications in the non profit and NGO sectors. I thought it would be handing in an upcoming workshop I’m facilitating for the CGIAR starting next week.

Pat Parslow and Shirley uploaded a version to a Google doc. We edited, I did some rewrites and trims, and here is the first draft. I’d love feedback!

This Is Me NGO/NPO-v1.1

(updated to latest version on Thursday, May 21)

A bunch of friends and colleagues have just written/edited a new book on stewarding technology in non profits and NGOs. Holly Ross, Katrin Verclas and Alison Levine wrangled some authors together to write Meet Your Mission. You can read about it on their wiki, including seeing chapter outlines and “bonus material.” Here is the overall scoop:

Nonprofit decision makers need to know how IT can help extend the reach and scope of their organizations. With contributions from the top experts in the nonprofit tech field, this book provides nonprofit decision makers with information to make smart, strategic decisions about technology. This book hones in on how to manage technology in an organization and offers practical advice on critical subject matter unfamiliar or mysterious to many in nonprofits. It offers a foundation of Information Technology (IT) and shows how technology can be strategically deployed in their organizations to better accomplish a nonprofit’s mission.

Here are the Chapters/Authors:

PART ONE: PLANNING AND PEOPLE.

Chapter 1: Mission First: Achieving IT Alignment (Steve Heye)
Chapter 2: Managing Technology Change (Dahna Goldstein)
Chapter 3: Measuring the Return on Investment of Technology (Beth Kanter)
Chapter 4: How to Decide: IT Planning and Prioritizing (Peter Campbell)
Chapter 5: Finding and Keeping the Right People (James Weinberg, and Cassie Scarano)
Chapter 6: Budgeting for and Funding Technology (Scott McCallum and Keith R. Thode)

PART TWO: THE TOOLS.

Chapter 7: The Foundation: Introduction to IT and Systems (Kevin Lo and Willow Cook)
Chapter 8: Where Are Your Stakeholders, and What Are They Doing Online (Michael Cervino)
Chapter 9: Effective Online Communications (John Kenyon)
Chapter 10: Donate Now: Online Fundraising (Madeline Stanionis)
Chapter 11: Where Will We Be Tomorrow (Edward Granger-Happ)

The only thing I missed from the outline is ongoing stewardship of technology and the related human processes. Once we have it, what do we do? Regular maintenance, how to support use, etc., is a huge part of stewarding technology in non profits. Maybe that is NTEN’s next book!

Photo Credit: by kevindooley

This morning on Twitter, Idocente pointed me to The Girl Effect. WOW! As some of you know, I have been a champion of the GiGis (Girl Geeks in service of the World Cafe community) and have long been a (prejudiced) champion of females in changing the world. So it is no surprise I had a positive response to this site.  Take a look at the video.

Over breakfast today in Bonn, where I’m doing some work this week, my friend Ulf and I were talking about where we have seen positive change take place.  (Check out his cool work with Science-Connects.) We shared stories about how things seem to work better from the ground up. Where people with passion and ownship make things happen, building on assets and in spite of barriers. Girls and women are certainly catalysts for this in many parts of the world. Take a look at this data from The Girl Effect fact sheet (pdf).

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)
• An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent. (George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881[Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)
• Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels of schooling among mothers. (George T. Bicego and J. Ties Boerma, “Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries,” Social Science
  and Medicine 36 (9) [May 1993]: 1207–27.)
• When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Phil Borges, with foreword by Madeleine Albright, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World [New York: Rizzoli, 2007], 13.)

Since I was in Israel and Palestine last month, I have been struggling on how to write about my experience in a way that is not about judgement, but about reflecting what I saw. The tyranny of person over person is heartbreaking, regardless of the reasons and justifications we create. But from what I saw and learned about, women and children are victims as Israel and Palestine continue without a solution for sustainable peace. The statistics around maternal and child health paint a compelling picture that war, occupation, and the patterns that trigger them are bad for women and children. High levels of maternal depression correlate with poor child nutrition. Raising rates of stunting in children from persistent malnourishment (low nutrition and poor nutrition) are staggering. Cultural challenges that resist healthy patterns of breast feeding and trigger increased poor child health and adult obesity and heart disease in Palestinians.

Where is the hope for something better? For basic human rights of food, shelter, clothing, clean food and water and yes, even peace?

It is with the women.

The women of Palestine and Israel, both, who build bridges across the divides were the most compelling points of light I experienced amongst the bleakness that presented itself. At the conference I was attending, I met a midwife who works for the Jazoor Foundation for Health and Social Development who gave me one of the few moments of light and hope I felt during my visit. She was passionate about her profession of helping women have healthier babies. She was passionate about teaching others to be midwives, even amongst professional disdain from other health care professionals. (US midwives will remember the time when they were dismissed by doctors, and are now an important part of the maternal child health system.) Her brains, her heart, her attitude radiated light. She worked with other amazing, passionate advocates for health, social development and peace in the organization, led by another brilliant, passionate woman. (I’m kicking myself for not having her name handy, but it is on my home computer and I’m on the road!)

Women who are catalyzing positive change.

I would name this radiant midwife, and share a short video we made of her, but I have not asked her permission. I’ll try and remmber to do that when I get home to let you experience a bit of her light.

So the message of The Girl Effect site resonated with me this morning. Wherever we work - in businesses, education, non profit, or independent spirits in the world, what are we doing to foster this light in girls and women? Because so far, they are the best bet I can see for making positive change in the world. By no means am I dismissing boys. But girls are so often dismissed, when they may be the best chance we’ve got.

(A small suggestion to the Girl Effect folks. Your about page is in flash, making it hard to copy and share the stats. Yes, I know I can download the data, but that is one more step. Plus data is still locked in a PDF. For strong virality, making it simpler and easier may be more important than making it slick. )