Note from Beth: In a report entitled Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data, authors Beth Novek and Daniel Goroff address the challenges of obtaining better, more usable data on the nonprofit sector to match the field’s growing importance. Information found in Form 990s, like other important data collected by governments, could potentially be far more useful if it were not only public but ‘open’ data. Government and philanthropy leaders talk today about this groundbreaking … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2013
How ACLU NJ Defines Social Media Success: The First Important Measurement Step
When nonprofits started to read and apply our book, "Measuring the Networked Nonprofit," I noticed this tweet from the ACLU in NJ showing a white board capturing their team meetings to define success for social media. I followed up with Eliza Straim (Communications Associate) and Katie Wang (Communications Director) to learn more about how they went about this first very important first step for measuring social media - defining results. Our book introduces nonprofits to the 7 steps of … [Read more...]
Why I Use Pen and Paper Notebooks AND Digital Tools To Take Notes
My colleague, Alexandra Samuel, wrote a provocative post on the HBR blog titled, "Dear Colleague, Put Down Your Notebook" where she makes an argument for switching to digital note taking tools like Evernote is more efficient than taking notes on paper. (She recently authored an excellent e-book on how to use Evernote). I agree with Alexandra's point about efficiency, but I don't always think that digital note taking is always effective for certain situations. I tend to use both. For … [Read more...]
How To Make Content Creation More Efficient: Use An Idea Dashboard
Been thinking a lot about of the work processes around creating content and measuring its against outcomes this week. One idea that came up in my post earlier this week about creating and measuring content, was the concept of an idea dashboard. This post takes it a bit deeper. Sustaining a content strategy requires establishing a good pipeline of content and engagement across channels. It starts, of course, with identifying your audience and objectives and gets better with … [Read more...]
6 Ways Nonprofits Learn from Affordable Losses or Little Bets To Improve Impact
Best moment of #MIForum?Lifting my arms and voices to say "I FAILED, NOW LETS MOVE ON."Led by @kanter — Wendy Hanamura (@WHanamura) January 25, 2013 Last Friday, Media Impact Funders brought together technologists, journalists, philanthropists and innovators for a day-long conversation on the future of media and tech innovation. I had the honor facilitating a session on measuring impact with Greg Baldwin and Jay Backstrand from VolunteerMatch discussing how their approach to measuring impact … [Read more...]
