Social impact camp, number one

Last week saw the very first Social Impact Camp, which I was lucky enough to get myself along to.

It brought together people from all sorts of groups, from not-for-profit organisations like the Parent Pupil Partnership, regional government agency Social Enterprise London and social business consultants like Rob Greenland

Why? To begin to collaboratively work out how to better demonstrate and measure social impact – something wikipedia describes as: “In business and government policy, social impact refers to how the organisation’s actions affect the surrounding community”.

Started by Ben Matthews, founder of the amazing volunteer-led communications agency Bright One, it’s been inspired by Measurement Camp – the monthly meetup to discuss measurement and social media.

Social Impact Camp follows a similar format (brief presentations, breakout groups and general discussion) but also stems from a similar need.

Measurement Camp came about (kicked off by Will back in 2008) because those working in social media knew that what they were doing had value and an impact, but that there are ways to improve how success is tracked and measured – and that sharing knowledge is going to get benefit everyone.

It was clear from this meetup that organisations working to create a positive social impact feel the same about what they’re doing.

Even though it was the first event, with a group of people who’d never met before, the discussion was lively, interesting and useful.

We talked about the challenges in aligning the reporting needs of your stakeholders with what actually indicates real-world success, how putting a set of metrics in place can risk inadvertently molding your activity to fit, and the problems in consistently measuring things like the changes in someone’s perception of their opportunities in life.

I went along partly because we’re working on a project where metrics for success are going to be based on social capital and social return on investment (which deserves a post in itself) and because it’s going to help bring new ways to measure value beyond the bottom line to the third sector and public sector clients we work with

If I took one thing away from the evening it’s that measuring this stuff is clearly complicated, straddling quantitative and qualitative, online, offline and the inner world of individuals, but that if we can better demonstrate the value and ongoing need for people, projects and organisatons that add value to the world around us, then we’ll generate even more support for them.

Can’t wait for the next one.

Max St John wrote this on 28.01.10 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Events & conferences, NixonMcInnes, measurement box

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Measuring the real ROI of social media

Here’s an interesting presentation about measuring the real ROI of social media that’s been doing the rounds this week. It’s worth it for the picture of the ‘Social Media Manager’ alone :)

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

I love the focus on getting to the real ROI of social media in financial terms (not followers, friends, fans, retweets, comments…) but it left two questions in my mind:

1) In a large organisation, how realistic is it to benchmark financial performance ‘before social media’ and ‘after social media’? If a large publicly listed company posts great quarterly results after starting a social media programme, could you really assert that social media was the cause when there are thousands of other programmes running in the business to try to cut costs and increase revenue.

2) The presentation says we should try to correlate social media measurements with financial indicators. But there’s the old problem of establishing causation: Did sales increase as a result of positive buzz increasing, or was the company doing some other things right that led to increased sales and positive buzz? It reminded me of this study about the Nissan Pathfinder.

I can see this model working in businesses that are relatively easy to measure like online retail but is it too simple to be a panacea for measuring social media ROI across the board? I’d love to know what others think about this.

Tom wrote this on 12.11.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the measurement box