To blog or not to blog?

Good topic. I hope that you'll take a look at some of the information I posted about intermediary organizations. I think that PR companies and communications schools in colleges and universities could be creating blogs for non profits, and could be researching and writing stories on a more consistent basis than the programs can do for themselves.

I use blogs as part of my marketing mix and encourage others to share their own ideas and network with my organization and each other. Such blog exchanges have the potential to help small organizations attract attention that they might not be able to generate for themselves. I also use blogs to express the idea I just shared with you and others who might visit this discussion.

My primary blog is http://tutormentor.blogspot.com. The links on the blog point to other sites where I host information and/or blog, and to lists of other blogs and forums related to tutoring/mentoring.

While I spend time using these tools everyday, I find that many non profits don't have an on-line communications strategy. I host links to more than 200 different tutor/mentor programs in Chicago. This past month I've had a couple of interns from Korea reviewing the links, to see which do an effective job of communicating their tutor/mentor strategy. You can read the comments at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com/group/cktmc/forum

In many cases the tutoring/mentoring is part of a larger organization with a more diverse mission, such as a church. In my opinion, one way for the tutor/mentor program within such an umbrella organization to get attention and attract volunteers is to create a blog that talks specifically about what they do and why it is important. They might even enlist the youth and volunteers in their programs as writers, and turn the blog into a learning experience.

I fee we have a long way to go before a majority of non profit tutor/mentor programs are integrating blogs into their marketing. Yet, without demonstrating ways they can do this, through forums like this, many may never adopt this strategy, and may always struggle to find resources needed to achieve their missions.

I look forward to hearing what others have to say about the pros and cons of blogs.

Thanks, Daniel. Good stuff. I think you raise a good point in highlighting that many non-profits don't have broader online communication strategies. As a relative newcomer to the nonprofit space, this has struck me as particularly ironic, since online communications are generally more cost effective and less time consuming than almost any other form of communications I can think of. A downside, of course, is a perception of a loss of the "human touch." This is where blogs, in particular, can help, by personalizing the organization.

It's definitely an advantage to create a blog, provided that it's well written, addresses a key segment that you're trying to reach, and that there is value in the information you communicate.

I've used blogging very effectively to reach potential partners and supporters for my organization. It's a great outreach tool, and a way to present yourself as a SME on any topic relevant to your mission.

The biggest drawback is the time commitment involved. Developing content can be very time consuming, and can strain even the most creative and motivated writer.

I've seen some really great blogs, and some very ineffective ones as well. The successful ones usually have a few things in common: they tend to be in a high-visibility network (not just your organizational website), incorporate a mix of personal experiences and opinion with educational / informational content, address the day to day concerns of the audience, and are updated frequently.

In order for a blog to be effective, the reader needs to be able to relate to the author on a semi-personal level... it's not as much a reference source as it is a connection to someone else in familiar circumstances.

Thanks, Jonathan. I agree that content development can be the biggest challenge in blogging. I think the trick is mixing is up. I think most organizations have something interesting going on every day that the various stakeholders would be interested in - making a presentation at a conference, launching a new service, maybe hiring somebody interesting. So short blog posts around things like this can help bridge between the longer, more developed posts a blogger might like to write. Another way around this is a small group blog, where three or four people post. It has the disadvantage of not being "the voice" of a single individual, but I think it's a format that can work, particularly if each of the bloggers does emerge with his or her own recognizable style.

Hi - I'm a big fan, personally, but I would only advise if it fits with the organisation's capacity and plans; not because it's cool and web 2.0-tastic.

See my post on the pros of blogging: Should social entrepreneurs blog? and my slideshow delivered to social entrepreneurs on How and why to blog

Well said. I see way too many organizations jumping into blogging / soc nets / webcasting because it's trendy, instead of being a good fit for their resources and strategy.

Result: lots of wasted effort developing content that produces little or no meaningful benefit.

To be frank, the medium of a blog can and often does serve as a form of bully pulpit which runs against the grain of transparency when it can also be anonymous, defamatory and breach copyright rules.

I'll go along with Nick and say, just because it's Web 2.0 doesn't mean that the good outweighs the harm in a social context, with major providers considering themselves beyond reproach for hosting such content.

Choosing a responsible medium could be an advantage. To their credit and my knowledge, Tahing IT Global is the only medium to have taken the issue of misrepresentation seriously. By this, I mean someone who doesn't like the social message, taking on one's identity to harm reputation. It's less likely to be tolerated where one's known by peers for consistency.

I absolutely concur that no one should blog just because it's Web 2.0. People need to assess whether what they have to talk about fits well into the vehicle of a blog. Blog software allows people to moderate comments, so it's generally not that difficult to keep spurious or anonymous comments out of threads. The issue of misrepresentation, obviously, is a broader one across the web, not just in terms of blogging. Thanks.

I suspect that there are many different reasons why people blog, but I wonder how many bloggers are using Google analytics of some other tool to look at the number of people who are visiting their blog each month. In the end, this is the measure of effectiveness to me.

I've been blogging for a couple of years and get 1200 to 1500 visitors a month. That's not a huge number but it means I'm reaching over 10,000 people per year and pointing them to information that is important to the mission of my organization.

How many people are counting traffic and what's some of the numbers that are being achived by the majority of bloggers?

I used to run an online student publication called Solutions Magazine (a site devoted to social entrepreneurship) and we used Statcounter and had a slightly lower visitor count (~1000 unique visitors a month). But at the end of the day, it was difficult to really gauge our impact - most of the visitors were only on the site for less than 5 seconds (my guess is around 70% based on our most recent log) - but more importantly it was impossible to tell what kind of actual impact we had on readers. Our theory of change rested on students 1) learning about social entrepreneurship because of us and 2) doing more related to social entrepreneurship because of us. But there was no easy way for us to measure our impact and I doubt that even if we had, would our numbers have been flattering.

As much as I'm a fan of blogs and technology and their potential, I question whether they are effective in their purposes. I think there needs to be better a priori program evaluation (i.e. how are we going to evaluate the effectiveness of this blog to determine whether we're getting adequate SROI on our time). With Solutions, I don't think Solutions Magazine lacked potential - we were awarded 2nd place at Stanford's Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition back in 2004 and even received some flattering press from online groups and blogs like Social Edge and Philanthropy 2173 - and we didn't lack ideas on how our efforts COULD generate impact, but we lacked any concrete EVIDENCE that our efforts DID generate impact. But with well designed a priori program evaluation that clearly articulates the theory of change/logic model, I think we would see much fewer social change blogs in the blogosphere, but in the end have a much higher quality selection.

1. S. Solutions Magazine has since been taken offline since there were sustainability issues (our judges' concern that our status as a student-run organization seemed to have been correct). Although blogs aren't terribly hard to maintain, I think the challenge we never overcame was keeping our bloggers committed - since we didn't have any way of articulating our impact, apart from anecdotal evidence. At the end of the day, we needed to be able to say, "Yes, this is really worth the time you spend." And I think a lot of blogs, unless their more for the indulgence of the blogger who writes it (which happens quite often), have trouble being able to say that the time spent running the blog is time well spent.

I think the key to sustaining an effort such as yours is to have a long term purpose for why you do what you do, as well as a clear idea of what benchmarks you'd use to guage your progress toward goal.

Our purpose is to get more people involved in tutoring/mentoring. We do this by collecting, hosting and sharing relevant information. Thus growing traffic on our various web sites is a good sign that we're making progress toward the goal.

However, we've also created some other tools to try to show impact toward goal. One is an on-line documentation system you can view at http://www.vattsystems.com/ohats/Home.aspx

As far as engaging students, one of the first conversations I participated on this forum was with a group of students from Oxford who had created a project. The question I had was how does this project sustain itself and grow its impact in future years after the original innovators graduate. How does the project keep these students involved as alumni?

I've been tying to create a "business school connection" that would engage teams from top business schools in an annual competition to "do good" in their community. You can read about it at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/GetInvolved/DiscussionForums/tabid/474/forumid/116/postid/178/view/topic/Default.aspx

I hope you'll share this with peers at Stanford, or in other business schools. If one or more volunteers steps forward to help move this toward reality, that would be progress toward goal resulting from my participation in forums like this. If such a program were instituted the awards and recognition received by teams each year would stimulate following year growth by new teams, and continued involvement by alumni. The growth of the network could be documented not only by traffic, but by actions documented, donations, volunteer involvement hours, etc.

I took a look at the online documentation system and I think you have a great tool to measure the actual impact of your web presence (although it isn't specifically related to your blog). Without it, I think it would be really difficult to have any kind of measurement of the kind of impact you actually have. I imagine it's still an open question whether the time you spend on the blogging aspects of T/MC is actually worth your time (do you have specifics of how many T/MC users subscribe to the blog, how many have found the blog itself useful, etc) - although it seems fairly intuitive that the blog is probably a great, and now an essential, tool that T/MC uses to engage its users and disseminate timely and relevant information.

My concern is that most bloggers don't have that strong sense of purpose for the blog itself (we might tell ourselves that we're blogging to influence the ideas and thoughts of others, but if our readership and impact is small or unmeasured, it's hard to maintain that strong sense of purpose) and most bloggers probably don't have the tools or metrics to measure the actual impact (general analytic tools like Statcounter and Google Analytics are a poor substitute for more robust measurements of impact like OHATS). Do the SocialEdge bloggers get feedback and how many people are reading their blogs and any indicators of what kind of impact they're having? Many posts can go unanswered (like d.light's question of mitigating foreign exchange risk) or uncommented on and it's unclear what kind of impact they have (versus the impact Sam Goldman could have from working on his actual venture). I personally find Sam's blog and others very valuable and believe that it has shaped my perspective, education, and decisions, but Sam probably has no idea that his blogging has influenced me so (and conversely, other bloggers may believe that lots of people find their blogging valuable when indeed that is not the case).

Where profit or advertising revenue doesn't define the success of the blog, I think we need better metrics and better tools to measure the impact of social change blogs - something that's scalable and easily deployable (i.e. maybe somekind of standardized survey or user analysis system - I know for a fact SocialEdge uses the latter when we're signed in and has more general statistics) and doesn't require lots of customization (I imagine OHATS would require fairly indepth technical knowledge).

I'm curious if any of the SocialEdge folk would be willing to share their philosophies on blogging and the tools and methods they use to measure their impact.

1. s. I was an undergraduate that studied philosophy and economics and not associated with the business school. However, I have heard of some business school students participate in the ACT (Alumni Consulting Team) program which groups alumni and students into teams that do pro-bono work for nonprofits - which sounds exactly like what you've proposed - and I'm sure they would have metrics on their work and impact (their homepage says 21 years, 372 nonprofits, 477 projects, 1092 volunteers) and might be willing to share more detailed information if you got in touch with them. https://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/act/

Thanks for taking a look at OHATS. It's the type of system that enables you to document actions toward goal. Since we're a small non profit and innovation is difficult to fund, we've been doing much of this work with the help of volunteers. We started OHATS in 1999-2000 with a small grant, but had no follow up money to keep tweeking it in the following years. Thus it was impossible for anyone to sort the documented actions to understand what we were doing or how these actions were aimed at a single goal. The OHATS you reviewed just went live a few weeks ago. It was rebuilt over the past six months by another volunteer. Thus, one measure of success is our ability to attract people to help us.

The key to blogging, and to hosting a web site, is that it can reverse the traditional process of one person trying to be a sales force to reach many people. By posting your ideas on the web, it makes it possible for many people to find those ideas. They can contact you and start a process, or they can contact people they know and encourage them to contact the web host.

If small non profits would learn to integrate this idea in their own marketing, many might be more successful than they are.

By visiting OHATS and posting a comment about it you've encouraged others to visit it. If you post a message on your blog, or on a Stanford forum, talking about this discussion at Social Edge, you'll become part of my sales force, encouraging people at Stanford to take a look at what we're all talking about. If someone contacts me and we start doing stuff together, that becomes an action I'd document in OHATS. If this person begins to share the vision, and document his/her own actions, it might be that five or ten years from now OHATS would demonstrate that it was because of them that the mission were closer to success. That would be because of your actions, too.

Of all of the projects you listed that Stanford is engaged in, how many are part of long term efforts to solve the same problem? How many deep social problems have they solved with 477 separate projects?

If the university, its students and/or its alumni can define visions that engage many from the university community for many years, we can unleash tremendous talent and resources. Bloggers could be the first advocates to make this happen, by the way they write about this in coming months and years.

Tony hit a key point when he spoke about the importance of a blog having purpose and using that to determine whether the blog is impactful.

Measuring the impact of a blog starts with the quantifiable metrics (such as time spent on the page, pages viewed, unique visitors) which you can track through Google Analytics or other site usage tools and, of course, the number and quality of comments left on the blog itself. Not to mention tracking subscribers through RSS.

Measuring other impact is challenging and depends on your goals. Are you trying to increase donations, expand your newsletter subscriber list, or encourage registration? Google Analytics offers options that enable you to track conversion rates (the percentage of people who do something, such as register, rather than just visit).

Are your goals to increase loyalty (engage visitors and gain return visits to your website), foster viral marketing, increase brand awareness, educate the world, build a closer connection with your community, share best practices with others in your field, or build buzz and support for your issue area? Here you may find surveys or polls help provide insights into your effectiveness.

You may just be interested in inspiring more conversations online about your issue – in which case tracking the mentions of your blog or organization by other bloggers could be a good way to see what topics inspire comments while others do not. It also helps if you make it easy for people to bookmark or share your blog by also providing the clickable links to del.icio.us, reddit, and diggit.

You may be interested in checking out the discussion on increasing traffic we had a few weeks ago (http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/marketing-communication/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-site/) and the online marketing cheat sheet on Social Edge (http://www.socialedge.org/features/issue-areas/online_marketing) for online survey companies, bookmarking, and tagging. Also take a look at blog search engines such as Technorati, Blogger, Bloglines, and IceRocket to see what others are saying about you.

However, some of your best feedback can come from anecdotal stories through email. Make it easy for people to contact you by email or to leave testimonials. Some people are not comfortable leaving their comments in a public forum, and you may find you are having a significant impact and connecting people in ways you had not imagined. This has often been the case with bloggers and discussion leaders on Social Edge who are contacted "behind the scenes" and have made valuable connections and had significant impact through this direct communication.

Cheers, Jill

Daniel, excellent point on network effects - and some of the tools that Jill mentioned (digg, reddit, del.icio.us) in addition to trackbacks, pings, and comments are a good way of measuring some of those network effects. Curious: does anyone know if Google or some other site says how many sites link to yours?

Jill, I found your framework for understanding and analyzing blogs to be well organized and articulated - wish I had your comments to look upon when running Solutions! And as much as I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis, part of me still struggles to wonder at the end of the day what our actual impact was. Although Solutions situation was unique (we weren't blogging about our work, rather our work was our blog), I think the challenge we faced is one that many blogs face. Even with hard statistics that many blogs don't have (1,000+ unique visitors a month, 500+ people on our email list, 51 peak subscribers through FeedBurner, 19 current subscribers to our inactive YouTube account, 988 channel views, three videos with over 2,500 views (The Future of Capitalism, a talk by Patrick Byrne (Overstock CEO), and the 2006 Ashoka Fellows Induction Ceremony)), I think we at Solutions really wondered what our impact was (especially since the numbers about our actual impact was so much different than our intended impact, which focused on students - and as numbers on the web go, the numbers were probably very small, though in terms of actual impact it seems huge - a conservative estimate of 2500+ unique people watching our videos and being influenced by our actions seems like a lot).

Unlike most ventures, it's hard to observe the actual effect we have on people's lives. Did people find our videos useful? Did it somehow shape their viewpoint? And if so, how transformative was our impact? We had occassional emails (randomly, a professor in the political science department asked us to post a research position on Solutions; we had an author contact us to market his book and give a talk at the Business School; a request for a video of a particular event we advertised, etc) and a few comments (since it wasn't a blog where we discussed ideas or opinions but more of a specialized news feed on social entrepreneurship), but no way of measuring whether we were reaching our target demographic (how many of the 1000+ unique visitors were students? how many were searching for something, stumbled upon our site, and left when they realized our site wasn't what they were looking for?).

Among your list of goals, Solutions' goal was to blog emerging news on social entrepreneurship and educate people, primarily students, about social entrepreneurship. Unfortunately for us, despite having lots of statistics of relative "success" we had no evidence of actual impact - and it was difficult for many of us to justify the amount of time we spent working on Solutions without any concrete evidence of impact. So I guess for us we answered the question "To Blog or Not to Blog" with "Not to Blog." Our blogging didn't really fit into our theory of change and the evidence couldn't point to real impact, so eventually our organization stopped blogging because of sustainability issues.

I guess my two cents for people actually wondering whether to blog or not - articulate a clear theory of change of what you think your blogging will accomplish and come up beforehand how you're going to quantitatively or qualitatively measure your impact. It could be number of subscribers and comments to your feelings of the quality of conversations created, but the danger of not having any way of satisfactorily assessing your impact is continual doubt about the impact of your blogging that ultimately may make your blogging unsustainable.

Tony, thanks for sending me you web site to review. It's good information and I sent back some suggestions.

I consider participation in forums like this as part of the same strategy that I blog for. Thus, when Tony sent me his web site, it showed value from my time posting messages here, and hopefully will lead to future interactions.

I encourage you to visit http://mappingforjustice.blogspot.com where you can read about the year-end dinner we hosted a week ago for our Cabrini Connections tutor/mentor program. The purpose of everything I do is to support the connection of tutors/mentors in structured, longterm programs like Cabrini Connections. Thus, when we write a blog article and talk about this growing community, we're talking about progress toward goals.

I would suspect that if the Solutions program had picked specific causes, and then identified agencies on the ground who they were trying to help (and how they were trying to help them) they might have been able to find ways to see more impact from their actions. They might also have seen the need to continue the project as alumni, or as coaches for the next generation of undergrads who might take on the project.

For those in the San Francisco Bay Area I recently attended a workshop by Aspiration. They addressed these issues for non profits well. By embedding the information on blogging and other digital outreach within a discussion of campaigns and organizational development they avoided the faddish approach to adopting new technology: http://www.aspirationtech.org/training/eadvocacy/

Excellent topic with great points for pros and cons. I think a blog should be part of an SE's outreach plan. True, reach is a drawback for people without access, knowledge, and/or comfortableness. However, the power of online conversation is undeniable.

Focus and time required for a blog can also be a deterrent. Timely feedback and frequent thoughtful posts are a must to keep a blog active and relevant. Too much to ask of one person, especially the Executive Director. Group blogging can negate this issue and create more discussion points, which can be a positive.

My thought is blogging for an SE is a "must have" and should be a group blog.

As a recent contributor, I enjoy the reading material and the people I can now embrace as a community. The comments are way over to the side of it being a positive thing. As a writer, I would not have heard my own voice if it were not for blogs. It has developed my writing and made avenues available to me and I like the process. Go to www.deborahelizabethdevitt.blogspot.com and www.theeternalstand.blogspot.com and evangelinangel.blogspot.com to view my blogs. It is a must have outreach tool. For those who may not be comfortalbe with it, we must keep it as a focus as we are ever expanding communications and technology.I can't say enough about the reading. This is the other ephasis that is positive. It makes readers. It forces you to read and that is a very positive thing and I'm sure you would agree. My life is to make readers and writers out of people who would not ordinarily think of themselves as such. As a writer, I need people to read! I am becoming an entrepreneur to facilitate ways to make people into readers and have my own ideas. Please advise. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write and read. I particularly liked the idea by Bill Strickland, From Ghetto To Harvard. Best regards to all. Deborah Elizabeth Devitt

Hi all:

Thanks everyone for weighing in on this topic. Obviously, since we're all communicating on a blog, we're supporters of the tool. But it's important to recognize, as the posters here have, that a blog isn't without its challenges. I think very few of us have problems finding or creating good content. But having the content and getting it out there are not the same thing. It takes commitment, dedicating time specifically to the blog, and developing processes for ensuring you keep sufficient bandwidth the keep the blog vibrant. It also means playing more broadly in the blogosphere, tracking blogs in your space and commenting on them, when appropriate. I'm a fan of small team blogs, particularly when they represent an organization. These address many of the logistical challenges, while still allowing individual voices to be heard. Blogs by social entrepreneurs who head up organizations are great reading for all of us, but may no be realistic in many cases given time constraints. So consider a team blog.

Thanks again to all for weighing in!