A Giant Brain Dump
by Brian Reich | 23 Apr 2009, 10:26pm
I wrote this post off and on all day. I started to write about Facebook Causes and the challenge of getting nonprofit organizations to understand how to truly leverage the opportunities that technology, and the internet, and online communities can create. Somewhere along the way I got off track and launched into a broader discussion of social impact and how to measure it. But then I realized I didn’t have a great answer. I am not even sure what my point is anymore. Anyway, there is a lot here. There might be some nuggets of real insight. Its possible I haven’t said anything of value at all. Let me know what you think.
When it launched two (or so) years ago, Facebook Causes had the potential to change the way nonprofit organizations use the internet. It has not lived up to its potential.
The Causes team gave nonprofit organizations access to a toolset that could change the way they communicate with, engage, educate, and ultimately mobilize people in support of their work (whether that mobilization was around some kind of action, or in the form of fundraising, or whatever) and tap the incredibly powerful community that was building on Facebook in the process. But not enough has been done beyond developing and promoting a robust set of tools to put nonprofit organizations in a position to take advantage of Causes in a meaningful way. And so, two (or so) years have passed and Facebook Causes still hasn’t lived up to the expectations that we all had for the platform.
For two years, I have been telling nonprofit organizations that the Facebook Causes toolset was worth exploring — but that success (however you defined it) would require significant effort on the part of the nonprofit organization to figure out how to communicate effectively, promote the right kinds of actions, and cultivate strong relationships with the Facebook audience. I told them that the Facebook Causes team, while well meaning, did not have experience or insight into how nonprofit organizations work, nor did they seem all that interest in supporting their use of the platform. I have actually been delivering the same message to nonprofits about technology solutions (database solutions, content management systems, advocacy toolsets, email programs, mobile donation providers, you name it) for years. But they didn’t want to hear it — the nonprofit signed on, experimented a bit, and when they didn’t see an immediate, dramatic, or significant return they got frustrated and (largely) abandoned the platform. This story has been repeated over and over and over again.
When I first met the team from Facebook Causes I told them I was impressed with the platform, but that my experience working with nonprofit organizations led me to believe that they had some work to do still before they could have the kind of impact they were talking about. They needed more support for nonprofits, and education for the audience. They needed to marry the robust set of tools with content and guidance on how to take advantage of everything, and what success looked like. At each of the half-dozen or so events where I have seen the Facebook Causes team present, or display, I told them the same thing. Nothing. I know the potential for Facebook Causes to really succeed still exists. And I think the team that Facebook Causes is smart, committed to helping nonprofits succeed. But the list of things that need to happen is still the same.
Here is what I think Facebook Causes needs to really be a game changer:
Part I: Educate and Support
Facebook Causes must educate and support the nonprofits who use their platform: Most nonprofit organizations are still struggling to understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their mission. You can have the best toolset imaginable, but if the nonprofits who are using the platform don’t understand how to take advantage of the resources you are providing, it won’t work. The Facebook Causes tools are relatively simple, but communicating with, engaging, educating, and mobilizing audiences around serious issues and causes is anything but. The Facebook Causes team needs to be in the business of explaining how and why people take action, what motivates them, and how their platform can help to facilitate those efforts. You must also support the nonprofits, continuously, so that they can evolve their understanding of the online environment, the Facebook Causes platform, the audience and how it behaves, and similar. Case studies aren’t enough — learning that some other organization, using completely different messaging and working to achieve a totally different type of outcome, doesn’t provide much in terms of insight to a nonprofit about how to succeed in their work. In some cases this support can be generalized — a newsletter or blog post — but in most cases you will have to work closely with each nonprofit organization who seeks to use your tools and work with them to develop the best possible strategy for maximizing the tools.
Facebook Causes must educate and support the audience that uses their platform. People are willing to organize (online or offline) in support of an issue, give money to support a cause, or take action to help support an organization — but most don’t know how. You’d be surprised how difficult or confusing some of the requests organizations make can be. Moreover, nonprofit organizations often assume that the level of knowledge and comfort that their audience has is greater than it is. Your tools may make it easier to take certain actions, but they don’t help the audience understand what they are supposed to do. They need help and it is your responsibility to help them. If you are Facebook Causes, and your success is measured (at least in part) by the willingness and ability for audiences to take action through your platform, you need to teach those audiences how to get involved. You need to not only show them how to find the causes they want to support - but in some cases help them figure out what organizations are doing work they think is important. Part of that is functional help - explaining which buttons to click or how to fill in certain fields (even when something seems simple, a little extra bit of explaining still goes a long way). But helping the audience to understand how their support is important, and tying their actions into other opportunities to learn more, do more, is also critical. While that is really the responsibility of the nonprofit or cause, they aren’t always capable or realize the need (see above about how you should teach nonprofits as well), and so the Facebook Causes team must pick up the slack or the whole system will fail.
Whether you teach nonprofit organizations and audiences yourself, through white papers, podcasts, video tutorials, live events, webinars and conference calls, one-to-one tutoring, or other methods, or ask the experts (folks like Alison Fine or Beth Katner, among others) who do understand this world to do it for you, you have to do it. Whether you take responsibility for providing ongoing support directly to nonprofit organizations, or simply create a marketplace where consultants or community members help folks to navigate the challenges, without that kind of support, the nonprofits will never fully utilize Facebook Causes, and you will never reach your goals.
Part II: Focus on Impact, Not Activity
I wrote a post yesterday about how I believe the internet has made us lazy. I noted:
“Organizations send millions of emails but settle for ridiculously low open rates. People sign petitions online every day, with one click of a mouse, but those petitions rarely (if ever) change minds or impact the outcome of a vote. Organizations raise millions of dollars online, to cure disease or address hunger, but while the organizations and their reach grows, those problems and many others seem more intractable than ever.”
Basically, I think we have lost sight of what real impact looks like, how to change behavior, and how success should be measured. We’ve settled for low open rates, and dollars raised, and names on an email list — but while those are interesting metrics, they aren’t measure of the organizational missions being achieved. This is organization building and nothing more. If that is your goal, great. But last I checked, most nonprofit groups went into business to do something, not raise money or build email lists for a living. People are doing too much serving of the cause and not enough solving of the the cause.
I want to offer four thoughts:
Awareness is not impact. Organizations send emails, write blog posts, host events, give interviews, and a host of other things on a daily basis. They do this across dozens of different platforms online, and offline as well. And all of these activities are for the purpose of raising awareness about an issue or an organization. Raising awareness is important, and its a necessary step in the process of generating meaningful, measurable (and sustainable) impact — but it is not impact on its own. The fact that people know about the existence of a climate crisis, or the number of food insecure people in this country, or the lifesaving benefits of providing clean water does not result in any significant change in that situation on its own. Other steps are needed, and those steps won’t happen without some kind of directed action. So when organizations measure their success (and claim impact) because they have attained press coverage about an issue, or because they have built a new website or sent a large number of emails, that is not enough. And when we, as a community, applaud the organizations that have raised a lot of money or hosted a great event, we are only reinforcing this misunderstanding.
Measure your impact against your goals. The idea of measuring impact is straightforward, assuming your organization has a clear set of goals. For example, if your mission is to reduce the number of hungry people in the country, you should be able to easily track whether your efforts have had the intended result or not. Simply count the number of hungry people in the country before you mount your campaign and then measure again afterwards - the results speak for themselves. I’m not trying to suggest that measurement is easy, it is time consuming and expensive, and can be confusing. Real impact and measurable change can take time, sometimes generations, to occur, but if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve, the determination of whether you have been successful is not difficult to determine. And if you cant’ measure whether an activity is helping you to achieve your goals, you shouldn’t be doing it. That’s easy to say, but more difficult to make happen, i realize. Maybe you don’t have enough patience (or your supporters don’t) to wait that long to see a real impact, or perhaps you don’t think you can sustain the level of energy across your entire audience all the way until you realize the successful completion of your work. That doesn’t mean you should stop measuring impact, and working towards those goals. There is no single path to success and more than one way to measure something — so establish goals that can be tracked continuously and measured incrementally, so that you are make progress and demonstrate impact as you go. Just don’t let the size of your email list or the launch of your new website get confused with your real mission.
On a related note, there is also a need to measure whether individual actions — or the work of communities for example — are meaningful and contributing to the larger outcome. We are still a ways from figuring out exactly how to make that happen. Its necessary to measure the impact of these actions because without clear data, most of what we do to address causes is guess work. I believe, and have experience to suggest, that canvassing is an effective way to get people to show up at the polls for an election, for example, but what about the canvassing activity is triggering certain action, how those experiences can be translated to nonprofits and serious issues is far from an exact science. And when you start to look at online activities, we have next to nothing to measure against. My personal belief is that the online audience has grown weary of online petitions, and that most email newsletters from organizations are worthwhile (and that’s just for starters), for example. I have open rates that tell me only a fraction of the audience on an email list is interested, but no way to measure why someone does or does not open something, or what changed from the time they signed up. Similarly, I can watch how a piece of legislation moves through the legislature towards approval - but what weight an online petition is given by a legislature is unknown, and there are so many variables its tough to determine what pushed something past that tipping point. My gut says what we are doing needs to change, but experience and perspective only goes so far.
The data you need to collect. There are two broad categories of data that I believe need to be collected, and then analyzed, to begin to measure how individual and community actions result in social change. First you need to measure the activities that people are undertaking at each stage of a campaign. You must track all the different factors that contribute to someone taking a certain action. And you need to keep track of how the effort is progressing, whether people are doing X or Y, and what action on your end triggered that. In most cases, the tools for measuring this level of detail - especially online - exist (though too many of the tools only go one level deep when the really interesting information comes from deeper). But in some cases the tools have aren’t sophisticated enough, or aren’t designed to track individualized behavior, and marry it with personal information and similar. If the tools are available, the organizations don’t have the resources or the knowledge to maintain that level of detail. Its easy to see where the system can break down.
Second, you need to understand why people took certain actions. You need to ask what role your organization’s work had in their decision making, what outside factors influenced them, and what will be required to sustain their involvement over time (if not increase it). You need to understand what kind of environment your audience is operating in, what experiences they carry with them, and the like. This information is very hard to quantify, to apply a score or value to, or to measure head-to-head against other data. In most cases it can’t be. But that is where we are headed, towards the ability to customize and personalize every communication, and request for action, and measure of impact on a certain campaign or a broader cause. Without that, we may never know for sure how to really change things.
How to use that knowledge: Our tendency is to want to roll up that data, to find the larger trends and the broadest of factors that can be applied. But in today’s fragmented society, its reasonable to assume that every member of your audience is unique and the ways to spur them to greater involvement must be unique as well. Consider this scenario: we know that people are more likely to act if they get a personal message from a friend. And we know that people are more likely to act if the request is specific to their interests. With the proper tools and sufficient resources, we could keep track of what triggers people’s behaviors, who are their friends, and what type of message they need to receive in order to do something. But having millions of individual, personalized, issue-specific and detailed conversations is improbable. So what is missing? We need tools that allows us to scale individual conversations on a mass scale. We need to take the data that we have about people’s behaviors, their connections, and their interests and marry them together into a formula that churns out specific directives. We need to take the concept that Amazon.com has mastered in recommending books, or iTunes has developed to suggest music you should buy and apply it to social issues and support of important causes. But more than just an algorithm that measures all those factors, we need to find a way to apply that human ingenuity to make sure we don’t miss out on the special detail that makes things happen.
Part III: What Needs To Change
A few wrap up thoughts:
The news media is a big part of the problem. There are lots of people who ‘get it’ — consultants, nonprofit leaders, technology people and such. We are in the business of helping nonprofit organizations, as well as folks like the team from Facebook Causes, to understand the true value of technology in the context of communications, and fundraising, and other activities online. Its a slow process, but progress is definitely being made. At the same time, nonprofits probably give more weight to something in the Washington Post or New York Times (not to mention CNN, the Philanthropy Journal, and so on) than anything else. And in my experience, most of the news media doesn’t ‘get it.’ You read article after article about the tools and gadgets, or a big story about how one group raised a bunch of money or built a big email list. But those stories rarely get into the heart of the matter and those articles fall short of explaining all the factors that contributed to a set of outcomes. No matter, the message they send is readily shared and embraced by people everywhere, in the nonprofit community, technology circles, and even the broader audience — and their perspective is shaped. As long as the news media continues to tell that limited story, we are fighting an uphill battle.
Technology people need to change their message. One of the contributing factors to all this confusion and frustration are the Facebook Causes folks themselves. They are sending the wrong message to the nonprofits. I have been at numerous presentations by the founders, and other staff from Facebook Causes, and talked with them at various points directly — and at every turn they explain how easy it is for nonprofit organizations to use their tools to raise money. They lead nonprofits to believe that their tools are the reason groups have raised money, or generated a following, or similar. That message resonates, the groups sign on to Facebook causes, and they truly believe they have found an easy way to raise money or grow their organization. And by the time they realize that the technology doesn’t replace the other aspects of fundraising and communications, or that it will take time to cultivate a loyal audience and such, they have expended a lot of energy and reached a high level of frustration and disappointment. The result is a chilling effect across the entire organization, not just for Facebook Causes, but for the internet and technology more widely. Its obviously not just Facebook Causes that does this - technology providers across the board have been selling their tools as the solution to a variety of nonprofit communications, engagement, fundraising and other challenges since technology first came around. Maybe those technology providers really believe their tools will result in a quick win for nonprofits (I disagree). Or maybe they just know that it is effective marketing and care more about selling tools than supporting nonprofits in meeting their missions (I hope not). Either way, the unfortunate result is that too many organizations have invested significant funds in technology and not seen enough of a return, not enough nonprofit organizations truly understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their efforts, and few, if any, are paying attention to how communications and engagement and fundraising have changed as a result of our society being so connected and what that means to how they need to operate as a nonprofit period. The message that the technology folks push is often simpler, seems easier than the long hard slog that is relationship building and community engagement online, and nonprofit groups keep making the same mistakes over and over. That needs to change.
This will take all of us. The nonprofit community is fragmented. The technology community is competitive. The audience is distracted. And while that all happens, the issues that we need to address continue to get worse. We have the potential to transform the way we operate - as individuals and as organizations - to address these serious issues. But we can’t do it without true collaboration and cooperation. We can’t keep investing time and energy in one piece of technology or another, without considering what the outcomes will be and how we measure them. We can’t keep churning out emails and demanding actions from the audience without being able to demonstrate their their work is helping to achieve something meaningful. And we can’t keep talking at a tactical level - how to improve open rates, or how to get more people to give money — if we can’t figure out the bigger issues that will lead to real solutions.
I’m not sure where to go next, but I am trying to figure it out. So any help you want to provide or thoughts you want to offer, I’m all for it.
