Webinar – Humanitarian Standards – too much of a good thing? on Feb 28
For those readers interested in humanitarian assessment and evaluation, this webinar that I am co-hosting may be of interest:
Webinar – Humanitarian Standards – too much of a good thing? on Feb 28, 2013 2:00 PM GMT
Are you interested in driving up the quality and accountability of humanitarian action? The Joint Standards Initiative (JSI) is an exciting collaboration between HAP International, the Sphere Project and People In Aid to work out how to improve standards coherence and in turn to improve the quality of humanitarian programmes. This webinar is part of a series of stakeholder consultation events to hear the humanitarian communities views on the use, utility and relevance of humanitarian standards. John Cosgrave will present highlights from two related papers he has written for JSI on this subject and Robert Schofield (JSI Coordinator) and Glenn O’Neil (JSI Consultant) will facilitate a discussion with webinar participants.
Register here for the webinar:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8403836000444936448
Download John Cosgrave’s thinkpiece (pdf): Humanitarian Standards – too much of a good thing?
http://pool.fruitycms.com/humanitarianstandards/Humanitarian-standards-too-much-of-a-good-thing-John-Cosgrave-Feb-2013.pdf
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
The ultimate social network mapping software?
It could have been predicted…The most sophisticated network mapping tool of social networks has been developed for espionage…
“A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.”
Visualizing Information for Advocacy
Just came across this interesting guide(pdf) to using visuals for advocacy from the Tactical Technical Collective – here is an explanation from the authors:
Visualising Information for Advocacy(pdf): An Introduction to Information Design is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. This project aims to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design – a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organisation and education. Through examples, the booklet demonstrates how to use innovative visual graphics to tell a complex and powerful story in a snapshot.
How to use data to improve communications
For those interested in how data can be used to improve communications - and how can communications products can make data more accessible – here is an interesting presentation from Timo Lüge from Social Media for Good – examples are from the non-profit sector:
Best Social Media Metrics?
Further to my post of last week, here is an interesting take on the issue of social media metrics from Avinash Kaushik, a leading expert in web metrics.
Avinash sets out metrics for the following areas:
- Conversation
- Amplification
- Applause
- Economic Value
View his concept here, it’s interesting reading…
Measuring reach to engagement on social media
The #SMMStandards Initiative is a cross-industry effort to simplify and unify the measurement of social media that I’ve written about before.
Digging deeper into their proposed standards, I found interesting their preliminary guidance on how to “standardise” the following terms, as I summarise here:
Reach & impressions: how to compare visits/viewers/circulation?
They caution against using any type of “multipliers” given that it is probably overestimated the number of people actually “viewing” content, e.g. an estimated 10% of your “friends” see your average Facebook post.
Opinion/advocacy: this needs to be broken down into types: e.g. “opinions” (it’s good), “recommendations” (try it), “feeling” (makes me feel good) intended action (going to do it).
Influence: it is multi level and multi-dimensional – difficult to rely on an automated measure alone.
Engagement: occurs after reach, consider it at different levels:
Low: Facebook “like”, Twitter “follows”
Medium: Blog/video comments, Twitter “retweets”
High: Facebook “shares”, original content/video posts created by users.
The #SMMStandards Initiative have also proposed a Sources and Methods Transparency Table for use when analysing/collecting social media data which is now open for comments.
Read more about #SMMStandards Initiative here>>
Evaluation the lowest priority for US non-profits
.jpg "state report")
The US-based Innovation Network has published a very interesting study on the State of Evaluation in US non-profit organisations.
The study, based on a survey of some 550 non-profits in the US produced some interesting findings, including the headline above, which is admittedly the more pessimistic of the following:
- 90% of organizations report evaluating their work (up from 85% in 2010)
- 100% (!) of organizations reported using and communicating their evaluation findings
- Budgeting for evaluation is still low. More than 70% of organizations are spending less than 5% of organizational budgets on evaluation
- On average, evaluation-and its close relation, research, continue to be the lowest priorities (compared to fundraising, financial management, communications, etc.)
I find it incredible that 100% report using and communicating their evaluations – If only this would be “significant” usage then we would all be happy…
