presented at this year's Grinspoon Institute for Jewish Philanthropy's annual conference November 13-14 in Springfield, MA, and walked away impressed with some of interesting things that camps are doing with technology. Kevin Martone, the Institute's Technology Program Manger, wrote this guest post highlighting how three camps used technology creatively to meet their goals: online/offline relationship building through blogging and Facebook, engaging current families with an unique iPad/iPhone app, and social fundraising through livestreaming a phone-a-thon. As Kevin writes, "These camps evoke incredibly strong emotions in their alumni, campers, and parents. They need to use the tools available to harness these emotions and connect them to the real world.

What is your organization's primary topic of conversation online? If you don't know the answer to that, you may find that is the crux of the issue with your online strategy. Without knowing and owning the online conversation topic, your organization is doomed to wander aimlessly about in the online desert. To get at this, I often ask this simple question: "What about your industry or issue is so interesting that you want to have a conversation about it?" Taking this simple question a step further, I'll often ask: what topic of conversation is interesting to potential fans, can define your organization, but isn't about the organization itself? Knowing your conversation, then owning it, offers a map through the online desert to real engagement, trust-building, and advocacy. This post includes three examples of nonprofits who really know what their conversations are about, and execute them superbly.

Facebook's newly-revised Insights is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page's content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. Facebook believes that you should know and need to know how engaging your content really is. And they want you to do something about that. In this post, I analyze why it is such a bold move, why engagement matters, and what a game-changer the new metrics has become. This is the future of measurement.

Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. The conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement: numbers do not equal return on engagement, you can design social media activities for real engagement, how to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE), aligning SMART goals with engagement design, and three approaches to measuring ROE: community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices for designing Facebook Page engagement, practical ideas for creating engagement on the Page based on recent research, and measuring engagement and ROE. During the presentation, I also heard about some great ways that nonprofit organizations are using Facebook successfully to engage and move people to action.

Recent research on Facebook fan activity from Lithium and comScore offer three big takeaways for organizations that manage Facebook fan Pages. Lithium's research offers relevant benchmarks on how fans like to interact with a Page, how often, and how deeply. comScore's data illustrates where fans interact with fan Page content, how Pages can reach more fans, the role of friends of Fans, and how likely Fans are to visit the organization's website and use its services or purchase products.

How can an organization be personal enough to create online friendships and meaningful relationships with individuals? Ultimately, the organization must become a personal organization. This blog post considers why and how organizations can become personal, and move people to action by doing so.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don't know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won't have a clue if our campaigns to move them to act will work. I think there are three kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements.

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. Can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action? For social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE). All other activities are those leading to ROE.

In the beginning, if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you just had to know what was going on. You had to know about emerging platforms, you had to listen to the conversation and respond when necessary. But that was the old minimum. The new minimum is participation.