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Session Title: Evaluating Electronic Advocacy and Communications

Panel Session 749 to be held in Adams Room on Saturday, November 10, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM

Sponsored by the Advocacy and Policy Change TIG

Chair(s):

Julia payday loan  Coffman payday loan ,  Harvard Family Research Project,  jcoffman@evaluationexchange.org

Abstract: Advocates increasingly are harnessing the power of technology to achieve policy change and communicate more effectively in general. Tools such as email messaging and blogging are offering the opportunity for many people to be meaningfully, but easily, engaged in social change efforts. Evaluators in the advocacy and policy field are challenged by how to utilize these electronic tools for evaluation purposes. In particular, we need to know how to assess their use by advocates. In addition, we need to know how we can take advantage of them in our evaluation methodology. This panel will focus on tested approaches for tracking and interpreting electronic advocacy and communications efforts, and on ways evaluators can use technology for advocacy evaluation. Panelists will focus specifically on useful evaluation data linked to website usage, email messaging, and blogging.

Gauging Nonprofit Online Effectiveness Tarek payday loan  Rizk payday loan ,  Global Interdependence Initiative,  tarek.rizk@aspeninst.org All modern advocacy and social change efforts recognize the Internet's value for engaging and mobilizing large numbers of individuals to action. Nonprofits incorporate the Internet into their advocacy strategies and create dynamic websites and electronic forums that allow users to engage with issues and with each other for purposes of exchanging information and participating in the policy process. These efforts generate a wealth of potentially useful data about the effectiveness of Web-based strategies, but it can be difficult to sort out which statistics to pay attention to and how to use them. This presentation will demonstrate what data evaluators and nonprofits can collect and use to learn whether and how their websites and online strategies are working.

But What do the Numbers Mean? Benchmarks for E-Advocacy and Fundraising Karen payday loan  Matheson payday loan ,  M+R Strategic Services,  kmatheson@mrss.com In the for-profit dot.com world, the bottom line is easy to measure-it comes down to dollars and cents. For nonprofit organizations using the Internet and online communications, success is more difficult to define. Even when nonprofit electronic performance is tracked, questions still exist about what those numbers actually mean. This presentation will describe The eNonprofit Benchmarks Study from M+R Strategic Services and the Advocacy Institute, which offers key metrics and benchmarks for nonprofit online communications-including email advocacy and fundraising-that evaluators can use to interpret nonprofit online performance data. The presentation also will review two additional studies on this topic-the Online Marketing (eCRM) Nonprofit Benchmark Index Study from Convio and the donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis from the Target Analysis Group and Donordigital-to identify shared findings from all three studies.

Tracking Blogs to Gauge Buzz Julia payday loan  Coffman payday loan ,  Harvard Family Research Project,  jcoffman@evaluationexchange.org Blogs are a dynamic medium that allow any Internet user to have a voice and become an active information generator rather than a passive consumer. Of the 147 million Americans who now use the Internet, 39 percent read at least one blog regularly. Unlike professional journalists or reporters, almost no bloggers are paid to identify and cover issues. Rather, these 'Internet storytellers' develop blogs on their own time, covering the issues that are most important to them personally. As a result, the discussion of issues in the blogosphere is more than an indicator of whether bloggers are aware of certain issues; it is an indicator that bloggers perceive those issues as important enough to engage with and act on. This presentation will describe how to use blog tracking as a methodology for gauging whether policy issues (that advocates focus on) are gaining enough visibility to generate 'buzz' in the blogosphere.