Nonprofits Get More from Social Media with Metrics

In Beth Kanter’s newest book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit (Jossey-Bass, 2012), she and co-author Katie Delahaye Paine write, “Affecting social change is, of course, the ultimate goal for nonprofit organizations. But you can’t get to any destination without a road map and some signposts along the way. Measurement is your map, and metrics are your signposts.”

The book is designed for “networked nonprofits,” organizations that know how to use social networks but need help figuring out how to use measurements to better understand their networks, measure outcomes and understand cause and effect. (You can get a taste of Kanter’s ideas at
“Beth’s blog,” a site devoted to how nonprofits are using social media.)

Kanter consults with nonprofits and foundations to build their use of social media and incorporate best practices for measurement. She is a visiting scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a grantmaking organization in Los Altos, California. Her projects with the foundation include running a peer learning session for grantees in the field of sustainable agriculture and leading a social media lab for participating organizations to develop experiments to try out the powers of social media — sometimes for the first time.

In a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Robert Berkman, Kanter talks about her social media spectrum of Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly, the importance of starting with a low-risk pilot to show that nothing bad will happen, and how one organization puts on “Joyful Funerals” for its failed ideas.

What are some of the key similarities and differences for a nonprofit that wants to begin a social program, compared to a typical for-profit business?

There are certain similarities. Like a small business, smaller nonprofits often don’t have a lot of staff time allocated to doing social media. I have a social media spectrum of Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly, and for small nonprofits, it’s often hard for them to get past what I call the crawling stage, which is maybe about five to 10 hours a week of staff time. For those operations, the focus is on how you can be most effective in that small amount of capacity that you have to do the work.

With larger nonprofits there’s the problem of silos, and they face some of the organizational and cultural things that might get in the way of good practices. There also can be issues around leadership not feeling comfortable with social media.

But there are differences too. For example, with nonprofits and foundations, there are certain stringent IRS guidelines around being able to accept donations, so this sometimes can lead to a very conservative legal counsel that puts a chill on a social business strategy. You can’t be lobbying, so a very strict counsel may say, “oh, you can’t tweet at all, because it could be construed as lobbying.” More progressive counsel will say, “well, yes, you can talk about some of these topics, and here are some ways to be careful.”

In MIT Sloan Management Review’s 2013 social business survey, we saw that one of the major barriers to implementing social is a lack of a strategy. Do you see that in nonprofits?

Yes. Crawlers do not even have a marketing or a communications strategy, or a clear answer to the question, “Who’s your audience?”

At the Walking stage, they have a communications or a marketing plan, they can articulate some key objectives and who they’re targeting, and they’ve done some research about their audience. And they’re able then to link their use of social to these objectives. But they’re kind of doing it on autopilot.

To get to Running, they need an integrated strategy, and, most specifically, a formal ladder of engagement or a sales funnel. A ladder of engagement with nonprofits is, how do we take an audience from just finding out about us to being our supporters.

And at the Flying stage, they have a multi-channel approach. It’s very sophisticated, with a formal process for measuring and for visualization and for reflecting on what’s working. They also have developed champions and a formal ambassador program. They’ve done social network analysis.

In my work, once I’ve diagnosed them, the key is meeting them where they’re at, so they can get the most out of it. If I have an organization that’s at the Crawling stage and I start talking to them about data visualization, it’s not going to help them.

You’re talking about incremental advancement.

Yeah. I’m a huge believer in this. It’s backed in research from other fields, that if you try to give people too much to do or too much change, it just doesn’t work. And so I tell a lot of organizations, know who your audience is, know what you want to accomplish and pick one channel to start with. Go deep on that, get best practices, and then go to the next thing.

I do the same with measurement. This might sound basic and ridiculous if you’re coming from a corporate perspective where it’s just part of the way you do work, but I’ll work with organizations and maybe we’ll start with, say, measuring the effects of Facebook. We set out to measure one goal, through two metrics, for a few months, to see if the content resonates.

We’ll look at time of the day and what day of the week content was posted at Facebook, and see if there are patterns there. So I take them very incrementally to develop a habit and a practice.

Where do you think the majority of these nonprofits land, in terms of your spectrum of advancement in social media?

I see a bell curve. In the middle, I see a lot of Walkers. There are lots of Crawlers, way more Walkers, lots of Runners, and then it drops down with Flyers.

What are the top factors which will account for a nonprofit’s ability to advance on that Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly spectrum?

It depends, but between walking and running, it’s the amount of staff time. For Crawling, it’s five hours a week. Walking is probably between six and 20 hours. And then when they can actually invest in at least a half-time position, that’s Running, and that’s where they can actually start to scale.

It’s not only just staff time, but it’s also an indicator I’ll call the “network mindset,” which is that they don’t have to do it all themselves. It doesn’t all have to be done in-house, in one department or in that organization. The top organizations really focus on what they do best and network the rest. That means having a lot of partners and champions that are working along with them. Doing it all is exhausting.

Are certain types of nonprofits more advanced or capable when it comes to using social media?

There are those organizations that are open, transparent, that build relationships and are willing to let everybody use social on behalf of the organization’s mission. These were born naturally as a network nonprofit. Those typically tend to be nonprofits that are not traditional institutions.

In addition, today there are some newer nonprofits started by younger people or those that are coming from social entrepreneurs that have a more agile kind of culture. They are more comfortable with the tools, too. There’s no change that’s needed in these types of institutions’ culture.

But it’s more difficult for the institutions that have been around for 100 years. And for some sub-fields in the sector, they are a little bit more risk-averse and formal. Take philanthropy, for example: it’s very slow to change, and most [charitable foundations] are not the most transparent types of organizations. So in working with foundations, we don’t try to change the culture, because that doesn’t work.

Can you say how the more social media-friendly institutions are changing what they’re actually doing or how they are running their operations?

I’ll take one organization as an example that I profiled in my book: MomsRising. Its members are people who care about financial security for families and want to make sure that family-friendly policies are passed in the U.S.

They have a huge membership and they don’t just dump messages to people, but really engage with them to bring them on and get them to act on their behalf. This is the kind of shift that you have to have for social media, or to be in social business, as opposed to being more of a broadcast organization. So MomsRising is really good at building relationships with their influencers, which are legislators, journalists, as well as their everyday members.

One example that comes to mind is the campaign that they did to save the Medicaid budget. Their goal was to turn around a perception that Medicaid didn’t have a constituency that cared a lot about the program. So they reached out to their members and got stories about how important Medicaid was. They curated the stories, and then those stories became part of their messaging that went out to legislators and influencers.

When they engaged with legislators on Twitter, they didn’t just say, “Medicaid is important,” but would say, “Look, this constituent in your district — read their story and see how they feel it’s important.” They used this level of ongoing interaction and engagement that’s bringing people up from being a passive bystander to being an advocate, a passionate advocate, for a particular issue.

What do you think it took for all this to happen successfully for MomsRising?

First of all, they needed the sort of leader who’d say, “this is the way we do it” as opposed to, “oh, my God, what if someone makes a negative comment?” There’s nothing in the culture that’s keeping them back because of fear or concerns about loss of control. They understand how to share control with their members. They understand that it’s a two-way street, that it’s interaction.

The second is that MomsRising are also measurement mavens. They’re very data-informed. They have a weekly metrics meeting. Every Monday morning, they have the entire staff sit down and they look at their metrics from campaigns and make decisions about how to improve things.

They even have formal ways to kind of reflect and learn from their failures. They have a thing called the Joyful Funeral which came out of the viewpoint of their founder, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. If something’s not working with new technology, they can call a Joyful Funeral. They’ll say, “is it time to order the flowers?” and actually go through things like giving whatever the technique was a eulogy, and when they’re burying it, they come up with how they could improve it for next time. It takes the stigma and the blame game out of things that don’t work.

Would you say MomsRising was at the Flying end of the spectrum even before social tools became available?

That’s a great question. I think yes, because a part of good Flyers is that they have agility and a learning culture. And MomsRising has both. The organizations that I see Flying are typically adaptable, able to learn fast. They fail, they learn, they improve.

Do you need to first be a transparent, nonhierarchical organization to really have social media work?

Not necessarily. We often will start with a small, low-risk pilot — I call it “the pilot that proves that nothing bad will happen” — to become just a little bit more transparent. It’s about “let’s try this.” We have a huge talk about what’s confidential and what’s not confidential, what are the fears and concerns about making this piece of non-confidential information public.

For instance, one organization I worked with, the Packard Foundation, had a funding program and a lot of intellectual property. They’d hire consultants and they had all these writers, putting together all sorts of great whitepapers on nonprofit leadership. All this was behind their firewall and not put up on the website. That meant the staff were constantly getting emails from people in the field, saying, “I heard you did the study.” The staff would email the study, because it wasn’t private information about a particular grantee, it was just really useful information that could help with their theory of change.

So they said, “What if we put up a wiki where we made this information available?” And I remember sitting in with the communications department and there were all kinds of concerns about having a non-branded site. We listened to all the concerns, and then they decided to go forward with a pilot. And what happened was they were able to get the information out there much further and they were able to save time because they weren’t constantly having to respond to emails because people could go to the site and download what they needed. The debrief was, look, we did this and nothing bad happened.

Getting back to measurement: from your experience how important is it to measure? And what should be measured?

Well, you have to measure, because if you don’t measure, you don’t know what’s not working or what’s working, and you just can replicate your mistake.

In the nonprofit field, I see five stages of measurement. At the first stage, we have denial. These are people who say, “I don’t have the time to measure.” But of course, measuring will save them time in the end, because they’ll know what not to do in their ever-so-big to-do list.

The next stage is fear, and this is the fear of failure. “What if my brilliant idea doesn’t work? What if I’ve wasted the funder’s money?” This is rampant in the nonprofit sector.

The next stage is confusion. In the nonprofit sector, people didn’t go to work there because they knew how to use spreadsheets or do pivot tables. There may be a fear of math, or confusion about it, or what tools should be used.

The next stage is data delight. There are some organizations that are collecting lots of data, but they’re not really making sense of it. They’re just generating pretty bar charts.

Finally, we have the stage of data informed, and those are the ones that actually have a system and structure and capacity in their organization where everybody is asking, “what does the data say?” and they’re applying it to the decision-making. There’s a culture of testing, organizational KPIs [key performance indicators], and really only collecting the data that will help them improve what they’re doing and make a better impact.

You said that leadership plays a large role.

Absolutely. For example, an organization like Save the Children is a traditional operation, but they’re very social — their CEO is tweeting. And it’s not just the CEO tweeting because the public relations VP is ghost-tweeting for them. The CEO will tweet posts like, “I’m going into the State Department to talk about children’s issues with them and these countries,” and she’s actually showing a little bit of her personality and authenticity. She’ll tweet a walk on the beach.

And having that authentic voice outside the organization — one authentic CEO tweet is worth a thousand by staff. It also models to staff that it’s okay to tweet, as opposed to, we only want the branded voice.