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I recently wrote about methods for measuring “Blog Conversations” on your blog.  Blog conversations are the dialogue between an author and his/her readers, or between readers themselves on a blog. For any organization, direct conversations with stakeholders reading a blog have important benefits across all sectors: programming, efficiency, fundraising, program delivery, volunteer activity, organizing, and management.

For the non-profit organizational blog, engaging stakeholders is the goal.  Your organization is not just its name, but a real company with real people who engage in the blogosphere, and want to be involved in every part of the organization. Give them that opportunity.

Here are some of the types of blog posts that could increase the level of blog conversation on your non-profit blog. These are just a the starting point; I’d love to hear about other ideas that could increase the level of “blog conversation!”

• Use the blogging platform to crowdsource new ideas. Float ideas and listen to how they are received. Use the reader feedback to tweak your ideas for new programming, organizational change, program delivery, organizing campaigns, and almost any other organizational decision where involving stakeholders means that your decisions will be better received.
• Involving donors in the blog conversation brings in the money.  Why not ask your donors why they donate and what would make them want to donate more in a blog post? You will certainly bring them into conversation on the blog, and guess what…people they know might read it as well.
• Ask small and big donors to guest post about why they donate. Ask them to ask their friends to read it.
• Review activities and ask for feedback. Did your organization just hold an annual meeting? Did participants just complete a big training program? Did you hold a clean-up day in the neighborhood? Have you just completed a large fundraising campaign? How was that last speaker series received? Any type of initiative that your organization has completed should elicit feedback. Send the blog link to the participants and ask for their feedback. One upside is stakeholder involvement: their opinions are valued by your organization and they are more likely to continue their involvement. The second upside is that you can respond to the concerns of your stakeholders. The last is obvious: feedback improves activities!
• Use the blog as a call to action. Once you’ve got an active and involved readership, you can ask them to act. Ask for a needed donation and blog about whether or not the post readers moved to donate.  For this strategy to work, though, your organization needs both people who read the blog and people who actively comment on the blog.  Many organizations post calls to action. But are the readers involved enough to move from their chair, pick up the phone, and call? Or look at another website? Creating posts that involve readers will lead to an increasingly involved membership overall…who will act when called upon. Blog conversations bring in new volunteers. They demonstrate that your organization is active, committed, and open. Volunteers want to participate, be recognized and become involved in an organization that includes their voices.

Non-profits need to change the relatively static, or “passive” non-profit blog into an active, participatory medium. I have seen too many blogs where the organization just posts its activities and nothing else. If that is the case, why not save time and effort and just send out an e-mail update?

What is the best measurement for a successful blog? Is it number of unique visitors, returning visitors, page views, incoming links, or Technorati ranking? Do any one of these typical measurement tools by themselves tells us what we need to know: who is engaged? Non-profit organizations want to engage stakeholders through social media and ideally move them to act on their behalf. We know that, without engagement, people are not moved to act.

Blogs are a particularly challenging platform for creating engagement. It’s easy to passively read a blog. How do you know if you’ve engaged?

Three metrics for measuring “blog conversation” are: number of unique engaged readers, average number of engaged readers per blog post, and number of posts that engaged readers in blog conversations.

1. What is an unique “engaged reader” and how should we count them? A blog reader that has commented at least once on your blog is engaged. When you count your “unique engaged readers” on your blog,  you can measure of the breadth of your engaged base. What does that mean for your organization?

• The engaged reader cares enough about the topic to participate. This defines the commenter as  a “critic” in the Forrester Social Technographics paradigm.  He/she also cares enough about your organization to participate and add to the blog post.  *This is a potential volunteer, donor, activist or ally.*
• The number of engaged readers adds weight to your organization’s credibility. You can call upon these readers to mobilize for a cause, or utilize this statistic for fundraising purposes.

2. Why measure “average number of engaged readers per post?” This tells you, in general, if your blog posts are engaging your stakeholders. Avinash Kaushik developed what he calls the “conversation rate” in his thoughtful piece on blog measurement statistics here. (Beth Kanter built upon Kaushik’s four blog metrics and wrote about this paradigm using her own blog measurements here.)

It is simply # reader comments that are not the author’s/ # posts. Discount pingbacks if they appear in the comments section. For example, I have a total of 23 comments that are not mine, divided by 25 posts.  This is an average engaged reader of less than one per post. Not a great statistic, but I’m just getting started.  My goal is three by the end of June, and I’ll let you know if I make it.

Why should non-profits care about this statistic?

• It gives you a sense of whether or not you are engaging your stakeholders enough for them to put down what they are doing and comment.
• It tells you whether or not your posts are generating interest in a conversation, which is really your goal. By involving your stakeholders, they are also contributing actively to the success of your organization.
• *The higher this statistic, the more likely that you will be able to mobilize your readers to donate or act on your group’s behalf.*

3. Number of blog posts that engaged readers in “blog conversations.” Not every post will engage readers. It is a good idea to step back every quarter and look at the number of posts that engendered real conversations — where a back and forth discussion occurred between your organization and its readers.  How can we measure this?  I suggest initial segmentation by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than one comment.  You can further segment by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than X number of comments.

Why should you care about engaging in blog conversations?

• Your goal should be a conversation that moves the post to another level and gives the commenter a real sense of contributing to the organization’s thinking and success. More than one comment per post leads to real conversations.
• *Programming starts with conversation.* If you are considering new programs, evaluating old ones or looking for any type of organizational feedback, you need to know that you people will give it to you. The higher number that this statistic is, the better feedback you will get on any conversation you want to initiate. You have created engaged blog stakeholders who are eager and interested in commenting and conversing with you.

To sum up: Use these metrics to understand the depth and breadth of the stakeholders visiting your blog. Utilize this information to raise funds, mobilize.  mine your stakeholders for valuable feedback and ideas, and understand their needs.

I’ve tried to come up with some easy-to-use metrics for a non-profit to measure blog conversations and engagement.However, I’m not a professional statistician or analyst.  If you have other additions or suggestions, please feel free to tell me and I’ll add them!

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