Twitter announced on August 13th that they will be integrating an analytics tool into the popular micro-blogging site. Organizations doing outreach on Twitter now have much more information about how those efforts are paying off.

This past fall we piloted a new service called "Schoolhouse Supplies Online".  The basic idea is to provide an online tool for parents to purchase school supplies for their children.  What makes this tool special is that all of the specifics are handled through an amazing nonprofit here in Portland called Schoolhouse Supplies.

Schoolhouse Supplies is a seven-year old Portland organization providing free school supplies to local area schools.  Teachers visit the free store and "shop" for items they need for their classroom.  The supplies are donated by businesses, or purchased by Schoolhouse Supplies through donated funds.

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."