Survey: Help us understand how social media works for your nonprofit!

By Laura Quinn, April 6, 2010

 We need your help!  If your organization is using social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, video or photo sharing sites, or something else you consider social media) in any way, can you fill out a quick, one page survey about what you’re doing and how it’s working?

 
Over here at Idealware, we’re in the midst of an information gathering project to understand what social media techniques are likely to work for what purposes.  We plan to summarize this information into a free “Social Media Decision Guide,” to help nonprofits make choices for their own organization, available for free in the late summer or early fall.  
 
We’ve already published the results from our first survey  in our report Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals. Many thanks if you responded to that one!  Now we want to go deeper.  We want to understand what tools are most effective for specific purposes – is Facebook likely to be a better bet than photo sharing to recruit youth volunteers?  What about for getting people to sign a petition?  For donations?
 
And to do that, we need VOLUME!  The more examples you can share the better, about the successful, unsuccessful, or middling things your organization has tried with social media.  We’ll analyze it all and let you know the trends – what’s working for a lot of people?  What’s not working?
 
You may be saying to yourself “But I don’t have any very useful insights…” It doesn’t matter!  Please fill out the one-page survey anyway, if you have any examples of nonprofit social media use!  The more data we have, the better we can see the trends.  
 
To provide a little incentive, we’ll provide three lucky participants with a free copy of our paperback Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits. 
 
 
Thanks in advance for your help!

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Comments

How we're going to analyze this thing

by Laura Quinn - 2010-04-06 12:50

 By the way, we're getting some questions from our more research minded friends as to what we're thinking in launching a survey that's basically just 6 free text questions.  How the heck are we going to analyze it?

The answer: time consumingly.  We're going to code the data, like you typically would for a set of interviews or focus groups.  What we're using is essentially a qualitative data gathering technique, and we're going to analyze it accordingly, by coding the data and looking for trends (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research).   It looks like a survey, but it actually isn't, technically.

For more information than you probably wanted, this is a research technique called Critical Incident Collection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Incident_Technique).  Our research to date suggests that we're going to need a lot more data than is practical to gather through interviews or focus groups, so we're hoping to analyze successful and not so successful incidents in volume.