Facebook Metrics! Measure from the start

August 23, 2010 is the planned date that the YMCA of Metro Chicago will be launching about 20 Facebook pages, one for each of our membership centers.  In about 2 months time we have created a process to build the pages, train the authors, drive the strategy and make it happen.  But we recognize that we will need to measure our progress. So this is when I turned to Beth Kanter for advice, well her blog, not her personally.

Spreadsheet aerobics is a blog post from Beth that talks about how to measure your Facebook work and experiments. I took her advice, but I am doing it one step at a time. 

We have created a set of trainings, materials and steps to rapidly deploy our social media sites.  Our first effort is Facebook for our membership centers. Our first goal is to establish our presence and provide the foundation to begin to connect with our members.  We want to be where our communities are and communicate with them they want to.

Once we have the basics working, authors trained and a presence established we will work to equip our YMCA staff as authors to begin to create engagement with purpose. But we have to start somewhere, which for us will be creating the presence, training our staff and just getting it rolling!

In that effort, we will just be tracking the basic stats straight from Facebook Insights.  Each our Facebook page administrators will download the interactions stats into Excel and send it to us.  We will then copy those numbers straight into this report format.  Our hope is to be able to show the correlation between those actively interacting on their page with the increase in participation of fans.

Anyway, here is spreadsheet report, based on concepts from Beth Kanter.

Facebook metrics

View more documents from Steve Heye.

NTEN Tech Leadership Academy and what I learned already.

While I have been working on my transition from Steve Heye to just "the Steve," I have been too busy to post to my blog.  So instead I am just going to share some of the things I have learned while preparing for the upcoming Tech Leadership Academy from NTEN. I'm presenting with John Merritt, but I have already learned a few things without the event even happening yet, just imagine once it does happen.



Incredible training op from NTEN - Technology Leadership Academy! This is a free training for smaller orgs, but it is so much more than just a training.  They have assembled some of the best trainers, well plus me, to cover the spectrum of technology topics.

Apply before July 30 right here! http://www.nten.org/techacademy

Part of what they will be covering in the Academy above is a great diagram that is in a slideshow from the awesome Holly Ross . The slide shows an adapted, simplified version of the IT Alignment stages that I refer to a lot. But they have added some arrows indicating that as alignment increases the technology brings additional service to the mission.  I like the simplicity of it.

But then she also a second diagram (but it looks like she is borrowing it from Save the Children) of a IT Strategy pyramid that talks about how to progress forward in these IT Alignment stages. This diagram helps illustrate that only one of the levels is solely focused on tech tools, the foundation.

The second level requires examining your operations and tech. The third level is not just business steps, it is how you deliver your programs, serve your constituents, meet your mission with tech.

The top of the triangle is all about what you do differently, this requires not just thinking about how you deliver services, but how you can leverage technology to completely change your whole organization, add a new service or completely redefine the way you meet your mission leveraging technology.

To see the full presentation that Holly created you can visit SlideShare at: http://www.slideshare.net/nten_hross/let-a-thousand-tech-flowers-bloom

Thanks for inviting me to participate Holly, looking forward to it!