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Help! Metrics for ROI on social-web initiative?
I've been asked to come up with ROI metrics for a grant proposal that includes a major long-haul, long-view social-web initiative, involving:
- Enterprise-wide blogging program for staff policy experts
- Enterprise-wide initiative to train staff in use of social-networking tools of various kinds -- to bring staff online in a robust way, so that we are able to carry on many more simultaneous, varied conversations, build tighter relationships with constituents, and participate broadly in the live web.
- effort to establish beachheads in external social-web communities -- in Flickr, MySpace, Upcoming.org, Digg.com, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. Focus would be not so much on putting institutional or campaign-related profiles in these contexts, as getting staff -- actual human beings, instead of a billboard -- participating in these communities.
- Major effort to enlist constituents as primary messengers -- give them widgets, blogs, content-distribution tools, and so on, let them know their efforts to spread the word and lend us whatever they have to give -- time, creativity, whatever -- is critical to advancing my organization's mission.
What we really want to do is create passionate users -- nurture and develop "constituent evangelists."
How would you measure success on such a goal?
- Ian Wilker's blog
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Here are some ideas for measures of success
Staff policy expert blogging* Trackbacks, links and references* Number of readers
* Number comments
* Number of opportunities that arise because someone saw an NRDC post
* Adoption rate among staff
Train staff in use of social-networking tools
* Adoption rate among staff
* Number of opportunities or resources that arise because of social networking
Participation in social-web communities
* The measures are different for each community. If you post a video in YouTube, you can use the number of viewers and click throughs to your site. If you post an event in Upcoming, you can use the number of people who attend your event and say they heard about it on Upcoming.
Constituents as primary messengers
* Number of badges distributed
* ilovemountains.org has an interesting tool that shows how far your constituents' email reaches.
* Email Billy Bicket, bbicket AT compumentor.org about this one.
Fantabulously Helpful.
Thanks Britt -- great suggestions. # of badges distributed is one I'd really like to be able to forecast a little bit. (I [heart] widgets!) Convincing word-of-mouth metrics would make a world of difference. (Wish I'd been at this conference; maybe I'd have some clearer ideas.)
I would think this kind of stuff will be very helpful here -- a lot of us have to be getting similar requests from stakeholders. I figure I'll come back and share whatever metrics I come up with, in addition to what you've suggested.
A couple others I thought of:
- number of subscriptions to RSS feeds of blogs, podcasts, other "live web" feeds
- number of "friends" or "group members" in external social-web communities (on Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Frappr, Yahoo Groups, etc.)
NTEN Discussion: Blog Success Metrics
Hey Ian,
I am glad the notes were helpful. You also might want to check out the discussion on the NTEN nonprofit blogging affinity group about blogging success metrics.