Chapter 9: Gone are the days of the traditional reaction

The book gives a great example of the difference between the traditional reaction of a nonprofit back in the late 1970s and the now, social media-oriented reaction by using the Humane Society and the Michael Vick story.  They say that, if a story like the one of Michael Vick torturing and forcing dogs to fight had been released in 1977, the Humane Society would have most likely responded with a letter mailed to organization supporters highlighting the events that have taken place and asking for donations.   Instead, the response included nonstop chatting on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.  The Humane Society even launched the “Knock Out Animal Fighting YouTube Contest.”  Videos, like this one, came swarming in and were shared all over the world.  The nonprofit used a recent event to promote their organization but, they quickly learned, that the promotion is much easier when taking full advantage of social media.  Yes, it’s true.  Gone are the days of publicity via mail and telephone calls.

Learning loops, or ways to monitor and analyze topics with your goal in mind, are ways to not just solely evaluate a response quantitatively.  Instead, it is about the quality of engagement…not just the amount of times something was mentioned but WHO was saying it and WHAT were they saying.  In the Humane Society’s case, they were measuring the impact that their video contest had on the organization’s success in making their audience aware in the problem of dog fighting abuse.

First, organizations must pick a specific objective, design low-cost experiments and then articulate key learning questions.  But, how do you measure the resulting engagement in the community?  Amber Naslund from radian6 states that “While no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are, there are a few things you can look at that help guide you toward the conversations and interactions to pay attention to for deeper analysis.”  Tools like Delicious to see how many people have bookmarked your site, Google Analytics to track traffic and conversions and Spiral16 that tracks sentiment, can all be very useful tools to get your head around the quantitative numbers that your campaign has caused but these methods still don’t show whether or not the organization has succeeded at it’s goal: to create social change.

That’s where learning loops come in.  Learning loops aren’t just about a one-time campaign.  It’s about the YouTube video contest, the perpetual tweets online, and many other actions all combined that “unwind over the course of multiple efforts.”

**Information based on:  Kanter, B. & Fine, A. H. (2010). The Networked Nonprofit. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.