PhilanTopic

How RWJF Tackles the 'Social Media, So What?' Question

(Debra Joy Perez [@djoyperez] currently is serving as interim vice president of research and evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest healthcare philanthropy in the country. The following Q&A was conducted by our colleagues in the Foundation Center's San Francisco office and originally appeared on Transparency Talk, the Glasspockets blog.)

Last year, after Steve Downs, chief technology and information office at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shared a post on Transparency Talk detailing the foundation's social media strategy, we conducted a series of interviews (here, here, and here) with RWJF staff members that explored how social media and, more broadly, the transparency and participation they offer was adding a new, critical dimension to their work.

The latest Q&A in the series, featuring Debra Joy Perez, the foundation's interim vice president of research and evaluation, explores how RWJF's use of social media, which has become essential to its communication efforts, can be measured to reflect the impact of that work in the context of achieving the foundation's larger social change goals.

TT: Give us a quick overview of your work at the foundation in light of these new technologies. Why are social media metrics important to RWJF?

DJP: RWJF has a forty-year history of developing evidence-based programming. We're known for our research and evaluation work nationally and internationally. But as efforts to advance our goals in health and health care have become more reliant on technology, we've struggled with measuring success and accountability.

Since 2009, RWJF has been incorporating Web 2.0 technology into our everyday work, and with the September launch of our redesigned Web site, we now have more social sharing facilitation tools on the site. We're also doing more on on Twitter and Facebook to invite conversation about how to advance health and health care and are producing content to serve the needs of various online communities.

All that activity allows us to clearly see the present and future value of social media, which we believe can help us create social change and build movements around the causes we care deeply about. And, guided by the principles of openness, participation, and decentralization, we have learned a number of important lessons from that work. They include:

• Personal outreach matters;
• Responsiveness to requests for engagement is important;
• Criticism can lead to healthy dialogue;
• Engagement needs to be easy and simple; and
• Real engagement requires work and dedicated resources.

These takeaways underscore the importance of ongoing conversation about the policies and processes needed to achieve our goals. For instance, with each social media campaign, we have to be explicit about our expectations. Metrics are an essential part of that effort. Measurement allows us to see how we're doing against those expectations and to improve our use of social media to achieve our broader goals.

TT: What does an effective social media campaign look like?

DJP: Where to start? Well, you might start by acknowledging what you are already doing with social media and celebrating that. Do you have a Facebook page, an organizational presence on Twitter, a Tumblr? Conduct an inventory of what you are doing as an organization, as well as the level of engagement with your intended audiences. Are staff using social media to leverage their activities? Have they been able to extend the organization's reach? Do they regularly appear on relevant blogs?

As you conduct your inventory, you're likely to begin to realize how much you don't know. That's okay. It's important not to let the "not-knowing" paralyze you. Here are a few tips for doing that:

• Have an explicit dialogue with staff about your organizational goals, what you are trying to accomplish with your social media efforts, the purpose of tweeting something, the specific action or actions you want audience members to take, and so on. And remember, although click-throughs are not themselves an outcome, they are a process measure.
• Identify your networks. You probably already have more of a network than you realize. If you haven't already, read Measuring the Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and KD Paine.
• Schedule a more formal discussion with staff about value proposition. Find out who on staff is adding value and who isn't. Don't expect everyone to tweet. Some people are natural long-form writers and might be better suited for blogging.
• Establish data points for measuring the impact of your efforts.
• Create unique URLs for product releases and then use AB testing to test them against each other to see which is more effective.

Most importantly, remember that social media is a tool, a tool to achieve larger goals. While it can be a very powerful tool, it shouldn't be mistaken for the end in itself.

TT: Do you have an expected ROI for social media?

DJP: As more and more people build trusted networks of individuals and organizations and engage with each other online, we believe social media can really help us extend our reach. It also makes it easier for us to provide our health and health care advocates -- also known as message evangelists -- with the information they need, when they need it. And by making data more accessible through interactives, data visualizations and infographics, we're able to illustrate and promote key messages in compelling ways and do a better job of building awareness.

All of that is worth measuring. But while there are a plethora of ready-to-use analytical tools on the market, the challenge is to avoid the "low-hanging fruit" trap of measuring activity instead of impact. If we do our job correctly, eventually we expect to be able to say what works and what doesn't, and to be able to distinguish our impact online from off.

TT: What's the state of play in terms of social media measurement? And where do you go from here?

DJP: The potential of social is undeniable, and we continue to look for ways to test our assumptions about what we are doing in the space. As the unit responsible for measuring the impact of our work, we regularly ask ourselves questions such as: What are we using social for? Who are our target audiences? (By the way, developing metrics that include audience demographics is an important part of that measurement effort.) What is the action/behavior we want to see? How do we measure behavior change? How can we go beyond measuring online activity -- page views, unique visitors, tweets, retweets -- to measure the impact of that activity on off-line action and policy change?

That is one of the key challenges for philanthropy today. As a foundation accountable to our board and the public, we have to establish goals and benchmarks for our investment in social media just as we do for our programmatic investments. We have to be able to answer the "so-what" question in terms of the investment of staff time and talent in social media. As a sector, we are becoming much more sophisticated in our use of strategic communications to advance our work. Figuring out how to measure social media activity should fit within that broader framework. Fortunately, social media, because it is digital and quantifiable, lends itself to measurement.

As I said, we really believe in this stuff and are working to produce a set of social media indicators in five foundation-focused areas:

• that we are viewed as a valuable information source;
• that we are viewed as transparent;
• that the lessons we learn are disseminated effectively, multiplying our impact beyond our traditional reach;
• that our social media efforts help to increase knowledge, advocacy, and action in key strategic areas; and
• that our social media efforts serve to strengthen and diversify our networks.

There are already some foundations doing great work in this space, and we hope others will join them and us in advancing the field of social media measurement. It's an exciting time.

How Collaborative Learning Can Make Organizations Smarter, Stronger, and Better Positioned to Scale: A Q&A with Andrew Wolk and Wendy Yallowitz

Andrew Wolk is founder of Root Cause,
a nonprofit research and consulting firm that partners with nonprofits, philanthropy, government, and business to advance solutions to today's toughest social issues, and Wendy Yallowitz is a program officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Vulnerable Populations Portfolio, which supports social innovations with the potential to grow to scale. For almost two years, Root Cause helped guide RWJF grantee More Than Wheels, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps people get the best deal on a reliable and fuel-efficient car, through a facilitated merger exploration with Ways to Work, a Milwaukee-based community development financial institution that provides short-term low-interest loans to working poor families with challenging credit histories -- a merger that ultimately failed to materialize. From the process, however, Root Cause and RWJF developed a "collaborative learning" framework that allowed both organizations to learn from each other and emerge with stronger, smarter strategies than they would have on their own. The lessons learned are available in "Collaborative Learning: A Case Study on More Than Wheels and Ways to Work," which is available as a as a downloadable PDF from the RWJF site bookstore.

In the following Q&A, Andrew and Wendy shed light on how collaborative learning turned a failed merger exploration into a success. A version of this post originally appeared on the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog.

Transparency Talk: What is collaborative learning, and what are its origins?

Andrew Wolk: It's an intentional effort between two organizations to exchange, analyze, and apply knowledge that will lead to better outcomes. More specifically, collaborative learning is a structured, facilitated learning process that allows for in-depth knowledge exchange without the organizational and cultural challenges of mergers. Based on a four-step framework, the process can serve as an alternative to merger discussions -- or a "plan B" in the middle of merger talks that aren't working out.

Wendy Yallowitz: It's a good time for this type of framework. When you consider how nonprofits continue to grow in number and are continually asked to do more with less, it's more common for foundations to encourage similar organizations to figure out whether there's a way to optimize resources. Hence, we're seeing more merger explorations like the one we pursued with More Than Wheels and Ways to Work.

AW: As for origins, this potential merger brought about the framework. We know from past experience merger talks can present huge barriers, and we were running into some of those things. At a certain point, we decided to take an approach whereby we lifted the pressure of mergers or formal collaborations and partnerships as expectations so that the two organizations could work together to solve problems and grapple with strategic questions.

TT: What are the benefits of collaborative learning?

AW: Collaborative learning can accelerate knowledge very quickly in a resource-efficient way, provided both organizations are mutually investing in sharing and learning. We built the framework around four phases, starting with an assessment of need wherein you ask whether it would be beneficial to look inside another organization to address your own challenges. You have to be willing to look inward at your own gaps in knowledge and share information. So right off the bat, entering this phase pushes you to evolve in some way.

From there you move to establishing trust and facilitation by a neutral third party, which entails conversations, adherence to a collaborative learning scope of work, and relying on a facilitator to help set and make progress against goals. Next is an in-depth exchange and analysis of knowledge -- in the case of More Than Wheels and Ways to Work, that involved an immersive exchange of client profiles, program and financial models, and how success is measured. Last up is application of knowledge to challenges faced, which involves applying what you learned to the challenges that originally brought you to the table and perhaps other areas.

WY: What ended up being really key was facilitation of the learning. If you really want it to work and be more than just an information-gathering exercise, you need a facilitator. Root Cause was able to pull out themes and lessons by asking, "What did we learn from this?" They ensured ideas and opportunities would be carried out.

TT: How does collaborative learning relate to scaling?

WY: This is about scaling impact collaboratively, working with a similar organization that also wants to grow beyond its challenges. For example, as a result of these conversations, Terri [Steingrebe, CEO of More Than Wheels] was able to look at her strategy and see more than one way to scale More Than Wheels. Their initial model was to open physical offices where they saw a need, and that's evolved after assessing Ways to Work's affiliate model. Through a new partnership-based model, More Than Wheels can increase the number of people they serve without needing to establish a new client base in new communities or set up new offices. All in all, they expect to lower per-client costs by 40 percent.

Likewise, Ways to Work gained appreciation for More Than Wheels' one-on-one consumer counseling and financial education and went on to establish an online financial education course for clients, set higher expectations for financial fitness and education before loan approval, and -- based on More Than Wheels' success -- increased loan amounts beyond original estimates.

TT: Why should funders consider supporting grantees interested in participating in collaborative learning?

WY: RWJF has worked to connect grantees interested in talking about opportunities to work together, but collaborative learning adds a layer of purpose, with goals and outcomes very much part of the mix. So, at the end of the day, we see this as a long-term cost-effective way to build capacity among those grantees for whom this is an appropriate option. And funding the process, of course, contributes greatly to providing the resources needed to explore a merger and engage in collaborative learning.

A by-product of this process was building trust with our grantee. I encouraged Terri to have the conversation but did not push her to merge -- that was never a rigid expectation. She never felt awkward coming to me with honest feedback. It helped me gain a real appreciation for the collaborative learning process.

AW: What we're seeing is more organizations that want to learn from each other. We believe there’s a fundamental culture beginning to build around performance for impact. The nonprofit sector should be having these conversations because, in the end, it's about whether there's impact.

TT: Thanks for sharing the case study. Potential mergers and collaborations are often shrouded in secrecy, and the same is true of failed foundation experiments. Why do you think it's important to bring these efforts to light?

WY: RWJF has long been committed to sharing the results of our work with the field, whether those results represented success or failure. We release grantee results reports and evaluation findings as a matter of routine, but I agree that process results such as those stemming from merger and collaboration attempts often are not approached with the same spirit of transparency. In this case, the deep exchange of information about the models we were looking to merge resulted in a wealth of learnings, including important signals that a merger might not be the right fit for either group. That wasn't viewed as a loss or a wasted effort; rather, it opened our eyes to new possibilities for each group in terms of their models and growth strategies. And wWe believe it's important to share those learnings widely in hopes they prove to be of value to other funders and nonprofits that are wrestling with the challenges associated with growing to scale.

-- Natasha Isajlovic-Terry

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts (October 2012)

Here in Manhattan, things post-Sandy are slooowly getting back to normal. For tens of thousands of people in Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey, "normal" will never be the same. Our thoughts and prayers are with all who lost loved ones. For everyone else, these were the most popular posts on PhilanTopic in October:

• Walking the Talk: Philanthropy 'Does' Big Data (Brad Smith)
• Preparing Students for College and Careers (Jessica Pliska)
• Of Fire Trucks, Obama, Romney and Philanthropy (Brad Smith)
• On 'Networked Nonprofits' and Measurement: A 'Flip' Chat With Beth Kanter (Regina Mahone)
• Hurricane Sandy Resource Page (Mitch Nauffts)

What have you read/watched/listened to lately that you liked?

Weekend Link Roundup (August 18-19, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

On the Communications Network blog, Courtney Williamson talks to Allyson Burns, vice president for communications at the Case Foundation, about the foundation's Be Fearless Campaign. The initiative, which aims to "[encourage] all organizations trying to improve people’s lives 'to take risks' in how they approach their work," was inspired by a request from Case Foundation CEO and co-founder Jean Case for "a new messaging strategy that reflected how the foundation’s work has evolved since its inception." With the help of branding firm BBMG, Burns says, the foundation identified two themes, experimentation and partnership, that became the linchpin of the new strategy. "It doesn't mean we're always fearless," says Burns, "but I'm trying to do better every day."

On her Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Katya Andresen introduces a mini-guide created by her organization, Network for Good, that walks readers through the basics of e-mail engagement.

Evaluation

On the GiveWell Blog, Holden Karnofsky explains how GiveWell differentiates between strong and weak evidence when it evaluates charities. "By 'evidence,'" writes Karnofsky, "we generally mean observations that are more easily reconciled with the charity's claims about the world and its impact than with our skeptical default/'prior' assumption." General properties that make for strong evidence, Karnofsky adds, include relevant reported effects, attribution, representativeness, and consonance with other observations.

Journalism/Media

In a typically thought-provoking post, Public Parts author and Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis takes issue with the idea that mobile is the "next big thing" in media. Writes Jarvis:

Saying that mobile is what comes next means, I fear, that we're going to take what we do in media -- making content, selling audiences -- and figure out how to keep doing it on video, in social, and in mobile.

But that's not what we really do....

With newspaper companies, I've been arguing that they should abandon page views as a metric because it has been a corrupting influence that carried on the old-media myth that the more "audience" you have the more you can charge advertisers and the more money you'll make. The pursuit of page views has led news organizations to draw traffic -- people -- they cannot monetize (because they come from outside the market or come just once from search or Drudge). And the insistence that they remain in the content business has led news organizations to believe they must still sell that content; thus, pay walls.

Google views content -- our content -- as a tool that generates signals about their users, building relationships, data, and value. Google views mobile as a tool that also generates signals and provides opportunities to target content and services to the individual, where she is, and what she's doing now (thus Android's Google Now).

We in news and media should...knit a mobile strategy around learning about people and serving them better as a result -- not just serving content on smaller screens. Mobile= local=me now. We should build a strategy on people over content, on relationships....

Philanthropy

On her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz shares a list of impact investing terms curated by Beth Busenhart and Charlie Kuhn of App-X, a Colorado-based tech that works with alternative asset fund managers and institutional investors.

And in a different post, Bernholz introduces the concept of the "data dividend." "It may cost $X to get a few demo programs running or to build a few prototypes or to conduct an evaluation," writes Bernholz. But if

the process of gathering the information and the plan for distributing it after the funding is built in from the start and the information is designed to 1) help someone get something done and 2) take advantage of in-person and online sharing systems then the return on the $Y data dividend could be even higher. Suppose you spend $3 million on a school program and $250,000 documenting, learning from, and building a community of two dozen other school professionals who have said they want to learn from that original program. Where $3m gets one school program, the $250K might spark change in two dozen others. And the nature of (well structured) information is that it can keep being used, reused, shared, re-applied -- that's the data dividend.

Social Media

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, MCF Web communications associate Chris Oien recaps a recent Center for Effective Philanthropy webinar about the CEP report Grantees’ Limited Engagement With Social Media (12 pages, PDF), which found, among other things, that while 80 percent of surveyed grantees said they use social media, only 16 percent said that they "personally follow the efforts of the foundations funding them." During the webinar, Elizabeth Miller, a communications associate at the Knight Foundation, presented some social media tips for foundations (which Oien shares in his post), including the importance of creating a culture that encourages all staff -- not just a social media manager -- to use social media to engage with grantees and other audiences.

That's our abbreviated roundup for this week. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (July 21-22, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Collaboration

Minnesota Council on Foundations Web communications associate Chris Oien shares a list of free tools that make it easy to collaborate with others, including Dropbox for file sharing and Google+ Hangouts for online meetings.

Communications/Marketing

On the heels of the virtual Millennial Impact conference, Network for Good's Katya Andresen shares a few more key findings from the 2012 report on giving by younger donors on her Non-Profit Marketing blog. Among other things, Andresen reminds us that:

• Millennials prefer to hear from/about causes via social media, e-newsletters and alerts, and Web sites;
• They give online -- and in person; and
• They like to hear about volunteer opportunities from their peers.

You can read or download the report here.

Evaluation

On the GuideStar blog, Mark Miller-McLemore, dean of the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt, argues that "assessment can be meaningful, even if it might not be easily quantifiable." To that end, he shares three guidelines for nonprofit leaders to follow:

• the best action is guided by principles;
• the best action does the greatest good for the greatest number; and
• good organizations are good people doing good things well.

Governance

In light of the report issued by former FBI director Louis Freeh on the Penn State University child sex-abuse scandal -- a report which found that the university's board "failed in its duty to make reasonable inquiry into these serious matters and to demand action by the President" -- James Irvine Foundation president and CEO James E. Canales offers some advice to nonprofit board members in an op-ed piece on the Chronicle of Philanthropy site.

Responding to Canales's op-ed, Allison Fine says that the saddest part of the Penn State situation is that we've been here before, 

and, sadly, we'll be here again, and I wonder what part of the governance process or relationship or even existence is so difficult that so few organizations do it well. Senior executives feeling that they have to "manage" their boards, stop them from interfering and micro-managing, share as little as possible with them are the norms not the exception. And board members more interested in the appearance of service than actually being trained as nonprofit board members (not the same as sitting in a meeting at work!) and learning about the work of the organization and insisting on accountability are the exception not the rule. Are the models for good governance, as Jim writes in myriad pamphlets, books, training courses, etc. so difficult and unrealistic that most organization will simply never be there...?

And on his Nonprofit Communications blog, James D'Ambrosio says that Penn State should follow the advice of a New York Times contributor who recently suggested that the university donate "the next four years of football-related profits...to a fund benefiting the victims of child sexual abuse."

Human/Civil Rights

On Nelson Mandela Day, Idealist.org's Allison Jones shares a video created by Prezence Digital Production that pays tribute to the former president of South Africa. "While the video is meant to be a fun way to explore the life and impact of Nelson Mandela," writes Jones, "it also made me wonder: what role does social media play in moving social movements forward?" We're wondering the same thing. Share your thoughts in the comments section below, or at the Idealist blog here.

Philanthropy

How can foundations really understand what's going on around them? How can they map the ever-evolving topography of funding in their areas of interest? asks Mendi Blue on the Center for Effective Phlanthropy blog. One possible solution, scanning the philanthropic landscape, was highlighted in a recent Grantcraft report. As the report points out, and Blue notes, however, multi-dimensional scanning "is easier said than done."

Back from a well-deserved vacation, NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman applauds the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which recently announced plans to "cease running its own service programs and instead give out $20 million more per year in grants to high-performing nonprofits." Indeed, the "winner in this scenario," says Dorfman, "will be the families and communities that the foundation and its grantees seek to serve."

Philanthropy 2173's Lucy Bernholz adds "sensemaking" to her list of 2012 philanthropy buzzwords. Originally suggested by our colleague Lisa Philp, who oversees the Foundation Center's GrantCraft initiative, sensemaking "is what buzzword number three (data scientists) do with buzzword number one (data)," says Bernholz.

And in another post on her blog, Lucy does a deep dive on the idea of data as an essential element (think, Periodic Table of Elements) in philanthropic work. "Why does this metaphor work when thinking about data in philanthropy?" asks Bernolz. "Because these raw elements are only the beginning of the story. For data to be useful in philanthropy they have to be known, accessible, and compoundable....If everyone tracks their data separately, calls things by different names, and holds onto them behind closed doors, well, that's like having hydrogen in one room, oxygen in another and being desperate for a drink...."

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org.

-- The Editors

Evaluating the Impact of Social Media: Are We Wasting Our Time?

(Claire Gibbons, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a senior program officer in the Research & Evaluation Unit at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She spends most of her time managing R&E projects for the foundation's Quality/Equality team. A version of this post appears on the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog.)

Last month Steve Downs and I discussed some of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) experiences using social media and our first steps toward evaluating the impact of RWJF's social media use in a webinar for Council on Foundation members (you can view the slides here). In response to our evaluation discussion, a webinar participant asked whether it makes any sense to evaluate something as spontaneous and fun as social media. This was also a question raised by Allison Fine in her blog.

Allison expresses concern that a logic model "misses the essence of what makes social media so unique, the serendipity and fun that are essential parts of 'being' social." This is an interesting and valid question -- by creating a stodgy old logic model do we defeat the purpose of social media?

Before I share some thoughts on this question, let me describe briefly what we've been doing at RWJF. The staff at the foundation is using social media, and many are enthusiastic about its potential to increase our impact, but until recently no one had sat down to elicit exactly what we expect social media to accomplish. In fact, we engaged in a fairly lengthy period of discussion and experimentation before we began to plan for evaluation. One of RWJF's initial steps was to form a working group to consider how the foundation could best take advantage of Web 2.0 tools, and what it would mean for the foundation if it did use these tools. This working group released a report internally to all foundation staff in December 2009, and we began a period in which all staff was strongly encouraged to experiment with social media. (Just signing up for Twitter and listening to the conversation by following others was encouraged, for example.) A second Web 2.0 group was formed after some time passed that was charged with getting some sense of whether RWJF was moving forward with its use of social media and sharing lessons across program areas. It was at this point that we began to focus our attention on evaluation.

We decided that the first step in evaluating our use of social media should be to develop a logic model. With the help of consultant Victoria Dougherty, we did this based on interviews with staff that were knowledgeable and involved in our social media efforts and on a review of documents about our social media philosophy.

Then we created a logic model to help evaluate the impact of our social media use.

Click for a PDF version »

The logic model has two pathways: the first describes how RWJF can approach its work over the next five years and the second describes some of the outcomes of the work. For the foundation to realize the potential of social media and eventually reach its long-term goals for being a more effective agent of change and a connector and facilitator that spurs broad participation in our work, it must first position itself as a Web 2.0 organization and work to become more open and nimble. Social media use may also lead to creating new connections outside the walls of the foundation and in turn lead to a greater ability to gather information from a broad network that can result in more effective programming. (See my earlier blog post for a more in-depth discussion of our logic model.)

So, back to our earlier question: Does creating a logic model to drive an evaluation of the impact of social media use defeat the whole purpose of social media?

I don't think so. But I'm pretty sure you guessed I was going to say that, given that I'm a research and evaluation officer! So let me share my thinking.

1. Yes, social media in many cases is driven by spontaneity. Videos that go viral on YouTube are completely driven by spontaneous interest. But not all social media use is purely spontaneous. We believe that social media can be used strategically to further our programmatic goals. That means we can plan ahead to use a social media tool or tools. For example, staff at the foundation used a virtual forum to create an open platform for discussion and idea-gathering about teen dating violence prevention. Through the platform, we received thoughtful input from people working in the field, teens who had experienced dating violence and parents who lost a child due to dating violence, and many others. Read more here.



2. A logic model does not squash innovation -- it describes it. Logic models are made to be broken and expanded and changed over time. The presence of a logic model is not meant to limit anyone's activities to something that happens to be featured in a little box in a diagram. The model doesn't dictate our programming -- it's simply a way to describe what we are doing and what we think the result will be.



3. RWJF's use of social media in the workplace is predicated on the idea that it will help us achieve our goals. We could be wrong. We won't know if social media is getting us anywhere good, or anywhere good faster, unless we measure some outcomes that we think are related to our programming activities. And one very useful tool for eliciting expected programmatic and policy outcomes is a logic model.

This isn't to say that we think all possible pathways between the use of social media and good outcomes are contained in our logic model. Absolutely not! This is just the best picture we could come up with at this point in time. New tools will become available, and we'll use them. Staff will continue to innovate in ways that we haven't imagined yet, and we welcome that innovation.

We still have a long ways to go in our journey to use social media in a way that helps us reach our strategic objectives -- and in measuring and evaluating our use of social media. We certainly don't have many answers, but I think we're on the right track. What do you think?

-- Claire Gibbons