Yesterday's SXSW Nonprofit Social Media Poetry Slam was so much fun and from the feedback we all learned a lot about measuring the return of social media for nonprofits. The panels, judges, twitter moderators and audience rocked! Who knew that using the discipline of poetic form could generate such a great discussion about measurement and metrics.
We used the hashtag #roi for audience participation and we trended 8th on Twitter, generating some entertaining tweets. Some participants even rhymed in 140 characters or less. The twitter feedback was very positive.
Some takeaways about measurement and ROI:
- Need to incorporate tracking of how many people that you involved in engaging conversations via social media become donors. What is your conversion rate? Need that to show the ROI.
- Acquisition of email names - while that metric is important to "management" to justify social media effort - there is a need to track other metrics. Also thinking about the "life time" value of the email address or contact information.
- Having benchmarks from other similar organizations in your space is important and valuable. If it doesn't exist, reach out to colleagues and share that information.
- Need for way to track people's participation in social media and what it generated in other channels - how many signed up for the newsletter
Brian Fitzgerald wrote a blog post of the panel in verse!
Fantastic to watch, impossible to describe,
A poetry slam about non-profit ROI
The groups that take blogs and facebooks and twitters
And turn them to saving both people and critters
Spun iambics and rhymes around all their banter
In this panel assembled by (brilliant) Beth Kanter
They told of Twestivals, LoL Seals, and Apps
That raised money, awareness, and the eyebrows of chaps
In management who aren’t down with the groove
Of using these cool social marketing tools
They took tweets from the audience, how cool is that?
And one of them wore that cat hat cat’s hat!
I loved it, I learned stuff, I had a great time
And yeah, I was the guy who was tweeting in rhyme.
Here's a round up of blog posts and tweets:
KD Paine,Poetry for Measurement Geeks
She was one of our expert judges - the Queen of Measurement. My favorite couplet
Renee Alexander, SXSW Smiles Journal
Amy Sample Ward, SXSW Poetry Slam
Ed Schipul, Tweet w/ links to the Photos
Shannon Aron, Top Ten Lessons from the ROI Poetry Slam
Will Coley, Did you miss SXSW Interactive? Check out this excellent workshop on ROI
Videos
From Holly Ross, NTEN
From Brian Fitzgerald
Celebrating with a drink afterwards, Wendy Harman got some good luck!
Wow - OK, articulating a social media strategy is hard enough, but to do so in such a clever and engaging way is truly impressive. Doing some research now to spur our own social media thinking, and I think I learned more in the Dr. Seuss version than any white paper I've read! The participants and their presentations were amazing - thanks for sharing.
:joan @ globalgiving
Posted by: Joan | March 15, 2009 at 01:36 PM
Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!
Posted by: dissertation help | March 16, 2009 at 10:05 PM
Hi Beth,
As promised, here is the link to my blog about the ROI Poetry Slam:http://aroconsult.net/blog
Also, here is the link to flickr pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36164494@N03
Cheers,
Shannon
Posted by: Shannon K. Aronin | March 16, 2009 at 10:50 PM
Oh man! Beth thanks for having us. It was fun and I'm already excited about our panel submissions for next year at SXSW.
Posted by: David J. Neff | March 18, 2009 at 09:39 AM
It was fabulous and fun. Thank you Beth!!
Posted by: Wendy | March 19, 2009 at 11:24 AM
Got some of David Neff's performance on video as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z3rI5BjqIE
Posted by: Brianfit | March 22, 2009 at 11:33 PM