Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot on the science of Facebook for non-profits

by | Sep 12, 2012 | Social Signal

After reviewing 1,000 Facebook posts and updates from 20 non-profits with large followings on the site, Capulet‘s Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot can report

  1. a) that it’s a really good idea to get other people to tally the metrics for 1,000 separate posts – something they achieved through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; and
  2. people seem to just love simple, evocative text on top of a compelling image.

Actually, they can report a lot more than that… and they did, at last night’s NetTuesday meetup at downtown Vancouver’s W2 Media Cafe (a terrific space, by the way!)

Here’s my cartoon-blog post from the night…

Cartoon-blog notes from Darren and Theo's presentation

And here, if you want to dive in (and you really do), is the presentation itself, as they first delivered it at NetSquared Camp in the spring:

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit hits bookshelves in October

by | Sep 7, 2012 | Social Signal

Every once in a while, titans team up. Sometimes the results are catastrophic (Lex Luthor, meet Brainiac) — but once in a while, you get something so wonderful (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”) it’s almost enough to rehabilitate the word “synergy”.

Here’s a team-up that falls squarely into the peanut-butter-cup category: Beth Kanter, nonprofit social media visionary and pioneer, and Katie Delahaye Paine, the reigning monarch of measurement for organizational communications. Together, they’ve written Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

It’s the natural followup to The Networked Nonprofit, which Beth cowrote with Allison Fine, and Katie’s Measure What Matters. And it’s a terrific book, aiming to enable the kind of accountability that organizations have a right to expect from their communications efforts, online and offline.

That they’re tackling the challenge of measuring outcomes in the distributed, often loosely-organized world of networked nonprofits is especially ambitious… but they deliver, with concrete advice and real-world examples. I can say that with first-hand knowledge, because Beth kindly commissioned me to draw a series of original cartoons for the book. And I got to read the manuscript as it evolved and sharpened.

It was a privilege, because I believe Measuring the Networked Nonprofit will make a huge difference for organizations and the causes they support. (It’s also daunting, because I’m pretty sure KD will be able to calculate the ROI on each cartoon to three decimal places.) I’ll have more to say closer to the release date. But for now, you can get a taste of their approach in Katie’s cover article for the latest issue of NTEN: Change and — if you haven’t already — the networked nonprofit wiki, Beth’s blog and Katie’s blog.

Measuring the Networked Nonprofit hits bookshelves in October

by | Sep 7, 2012 | Social Signal

Every once in a while, titans team up. Sometimes the results are catastrophic (Lex Luthor, meet Brainiac) — but once in a while, you get something so wonderful (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”) it’s almost enough to rehabilitate the word “synergy”.

Here’s a team-up that falls squarely into the peanut-butter-cup category: Beth Kanter, nonprofit social media visionary and pioneer, and Katie Delahaye Paine, the reigning monarch of measurement for organizational communications. Together, they’ve written Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

It’s the natural followup to The Networked Nonprofit, which Beth cowrote with Allison Fine, and Katie’s Measure What Matters. And it’s a terrific book, aiming to enable the kind of accountability that organizations have a right to expect from their communications efforts, online and offline.

That they’re tackling the challenge of measuring outcomes in the distributed, often loosely-organized world of networked nonprofits is especially ambitious… but they deliver, with concrete advice and real-world examples. I can say that with first-hand knowledge, because Beth kindly commissioned me to draw a series of original cartoons for the book. And I got to read the manuscript as it evolved and sharpened.

It was a privilege, because I believe Measuring the Networked Nonprofit will make a huge difference for organizations and the causes they support. (It’s also daunting, because I’m pretty sure KD will be able to calculate the ROI on each cartoon to three decimal places.) I’ll have more to say closer to the release date. But for now, you can get a taste of their approach in Katie’s cover article for the latest issue of NTEN: Change and — if you haven’t already — the networked nonprofit wiki, Beth’s blog and Katie’s blog.

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