Last week, Bill Gates' 2013 Annual Letter highlighted the power of data and measurement to help lift the world's most needy up from poverty.     I heard about it from several tweets asking me if he had read "Measuring the Networked Nonprofit" and colleague, Marion Conway, wrote a great summary of the letter which was also available in an interactive format on the web. There are many takeaways from his letter, but I wanted to identify a few inspiring quotes here. 1.   Define A Clear Goal for … [Read more...]

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...]

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...]