January, 2007

Nancy Schwartz invited me to submit a piece for this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants theme on “How do Nonprofit Communicators Compete for Audiences’ Attention?”

So here goes…

Back in October, in my second post to this blog, I wrote about what I believe is our sector’s secret weapon: storytelling

Some fifteen years ago, I frequently travelled around the UK for Oxfam talking to often quite large groups of the charity’s dedicated supporters about ‘third world debt’ and ’structural adjustment’. Inevitably, I weaved in human stories from the ‘field’ to help illustrate the impact of these reforms on those living in poverty, the intended beneficiaries of Oxfam’s projects.

It seems that Michael Gilbert of Nonprofit Online News has a similar past. In his review of “Storytelling: Branding in Practice“, Michael says:

Back when I was a lobbyist for environmental and consumer organizations in the mid Eighties, I came to the conclusion that our cause had a secret weapon. We didn’t have the advantage of good ol’ boy webs of relationships with legislators. We certainly didn’t have the cash that built and sustained those relationships. But when the system worked and the fourth estate was functioning properly, we sometimes, just sometimes, had an amazing power on our side: the power of the true story.

Of course, we’re not talking about stories in a ‘newsworthy’ sense, but rather stories that remind your colleagues of the reasons they joined your organisation: passion for the cause.

In my last post, I went on a bit (too long?) about engagement. Now, I’ve always found it difficult to engage with a piece of direct mail, and this will only get more difficult with the trend towards a more visual culture. (But I’m looking forward to listening to and learning from Anna Crofton of Whitewater when I meet her on Wednesday.)

I’ve written previously about how Kresta King Cutcher has been posting powerful images from Rwanda to the Flickr photo-sharing community. And you could try weaving your Flickr photos into a storyboard.

For a primer on digital storytelling, you can do no better than read J.D. Lasica’s 10 Easy Steps tutorial.

When all the ingredients are in place, you get something like this:

• The Water Buffalo Movie by Robert Thompson

A plea: make a little time (8 minutes to be precise) to watch this inspiring story about a water buffalo donated to the Su family in China (thanks to Carnet for the tip).

It moved me to tears.

I can imagine empowering the entrepreneurs on Kiva to tell their own stories in a similar way.

By the way, I learned from these guys that this week is National Storytelling Week here in the UK. Good timing, eh?

Update: after posting this in a bit of a hurry, I’ve since noticed that Robert has a whole page dedicated to the water buffalo story. He’ll revisit the Su family in March to do a follow-up interview.

Measuring ‘engagement’ is like eating an elephant: it’s a big job and you’re not sure where to start.

I’m no exception, and my thinking on this topic still feels heavy and a little clumsy. So, please indulge me for a moment…

At the start of the year, I wrote:

The page view is dead, long live, err… something else! Hmm… web metrics just do not cut it (and just when you’d got to grips with it!). But what should we be looking at now? In 2007, the sector needs to identify new measures of ‘engagement’ online. This work is urgent, especially as charities need to show accountability for everything they do.

In one sense, this may seem a pointless exercise - preparing to get the tape measure out as the social web gets widgetised, atomised, and more distributed.

But engagement was a key theme explored at the Future of Information Summit ‘07 presented by Experian recently. Last month, a Factiva roundtable reached to figure out how to measure social media the best way, and Robert Scoble (no less) had already added his call for a new metric for engagement.

I’m equally aware that some people do not care for the term, ‘engagement’ (possibly because of all this attention). Anyway, for want of anything better, I’m sticking with it for now. More importantly, a lot of people whom I listen to in the sector are using the e-word. So there.

So, why all the talk about social media measurement? Well, it’s one thing to have an engaged website, but more and more the action takes place in other places, in existing communities and social networks. Charities must turn from ‘owning’ their cause to enabling networks to run with the ball. Yet again, this was reinforced to me over the weekend after reading Robin’s Hamman’s post about BBC 2.0.

So what are we measuring? Influence? Reach? Audience…?

Brian Oberkirch helped me make some more sense of this conundrum, although he admitted it was tough: “Like nailing down a shadow”…

That’s why I have a bit of trepidation over the rush to quantify and reify ‘engagement’ as the baseline by which all social media work should be evaluated. JKO called these ‘the holy grail’ as part of the discussion, and that’s what is problematic. ‘Engagement’, like ‘conversation’ is one of those terms that feels like it means something, but really is mushy enough for anyone to bend it to their will.

Check out Brian’s excellent post for some things we might want to measure. This certainly goes beyond the standard (and not so standard) toolset on web metrics deployed and listed here by Beth Kanter. To pick out one snippet from Beth’s post:

Metrics alone are not very meaningful - they need to be put into some context. Context to me means outcomes, intent, and audience. No matter what type of metrics you trying to figure out … that’s a universal metric standard.

Outcomes. That’s it. Or “Return on Objectives” (ROO) as my friend Richard Sedley is justly keen on saying.

It takes two to tango

For me, the term ‘engagement’ suggests a two-way street - it implies not simply a ‘connection’, but a reciprocal action. As Mark Ghuneim et al say in their mini-essay on the Wiredset blog, Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer…

In the traditional sense, engagement is the period between proposal and marriage

True. Many (most?) people will rebuff your advances. Others may be content to donate cash, but not wish to be ‘engaged’ in anything. A few will get mobilised into taking some form of action for your cause.

These ‘degrees of engagement’ (is there a better way of saying this?) remind me of Dick Carlson’s comment on the aforementioned Scoble post.

Dick proposes a four-level model for measuring engagement:

1. Click - A reader arrived (current metric)
2. Consume - A reader read the content
3. Understood - A reader understood the content and remembers
4. Applied - A reader applies the content in another venue

Now, let’s put some meat on the bones - with thanks to Mark Ghuneim for allowing me to reproduce this terrific graphic (original here).

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Work with your buzz director to create milestones and targets for activity for each engagement ‘type’. Roll your findings up into monthly progress reports (which should get as wide a distribution as possible). And remember, ensure what you are measuring is aligned to your organisation’s strategic goals.

The ‘goalposts’ haven’t moved; it’s just that there are now many more pitches on which you must play (a bit like Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning).

Ãœber-blogger Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion web feed is usually one of the first I read.

Today, Steve calls time on “a bunch of terms” he signals are now completely unnecessary. These include “social media,” “user generated content” and “consumer generated media.”

Now, clumsy they may be, but unnecessary? I don’t think so. But Steve continues…

Do any of these matter any more? I dislike all of these words and have stopped using them. Eric Hansen proposes we go with new media but that doesn’t quite work either. The reason is it’s ALL media.

The lexicon will hopefully change… We are all media, period.

Judging by the reaction of those commenting on Steve’s assertion, many also disagree (in fact, the majority… at least when I last checked in at 3:55pm). We do still need to differentiate between the “old” broadcast way of doing things and the “new”, more conversational.

The Mexico Tourism Board certainly didn’t get it (and probably still don’t). If anyone has the time or inclination, just check out my previous blogging cause, which I now frequently use as a case study.

In an effort to keep one of JMW Turner’s greatest paintings in the UK, the Tate and The Art Fund hope to raise at least £300,000 from the public via phone, postal donations and by donating £5 to “buy a brushstroke” online.

Tate needs to find a total of £4.9m (US$9.7m), and has allocated a record £2m to the purchase of The Blue Rigi, which represents 3 years’ interest from its endowment fund for the purchase of art. The Art Fund charity has added a further £500,000.

The BBC reports that a public appeal launched last month must raise the remaining £2.4m before 20 March, when the temporary export bar placed on the work by Culture Minister, David Lammy, will expire and the painting would be allowed to leave the country.

Several leading artists, including David Hockney, Peter Blake and Rachel Whiteread, have bought ‘brushstrokes’ to support the appeal.

As part of the campaign to save The Blue Rigi for the nation, for the first time ever the Tate has united Turner’s great Rigi watercolours. Painted in the Spring of 1842, The Blue Rigi will be shown alongside two companion pieces, The Red Rigi and The Dark Rigi, which capture the Swiss mountain at different times of day. The exhibition at Tate Britain opens today and will run until 25 March 2007.

Unlike “Your Name On Toast”, which I wrote about recently, this doesn’t quite add up to a ‘traffic pyramiding’ scheme, as you cannot ‘link’ your purchased brushstrokes through to your website. I just hope the appeal is as successful as Alex Tew’s efforts to help pay his way through university with his Million Dollar Homepage.

Reality check. This made me smile.

Hugh Macleod :: http://www.gapingvoid.com/