Figuring out the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts is usually pretty straightforward and simple. You just calculate how much you earned as a result of how much you invested. In the financial sense, ROI is not a hard concept—it’s formulaic and quantitative.

But, for do-gooders, ROI has always been tough to measure because the objective of our work isn’t always expressed in easily-counted dollars. In virtual mediums like Facebook and Twitter, ROI seems even more difficult to calculate because the territory and tools are less familiar.

Before you set out to monitor and measure your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish through social media. You have to know where your organization is now and set the bar for where you want to be in the future.

Maybe you’re trying to boost awareness of your cause. How? By driving more traffic to your website? By getting more followers on Facebook? Getting more subscribers to your newsletter?

Perhaps you’re trying to bring in more donations. How? By spreading the invitation to your fundraiser far and wide? Developing relationships with online influencers who can promote your fundraising campaign? Building relationships with potential future donors?

The comforting news is, once you’ve figured out your social media goals, the handiest tools for measuring the impact of your virtual efforts are also free and easy to use.

• Google Analytics – Every nonprofit needs a tool to track who’s visiting their website, where they came from, and what they’re clicking. Google Analytics can show you how people interact with your site and which of your online marketing initiatives are effective.
• Twinfluence – Your twitter influence tells you how many of your followers are actually listening to what you’re tweeting. Its metrics can help you understand the rate at which the reach of your message is growing.
• Facebook Insights – Probably the easiest, cheapest, and most accurate way to see how your Facebook page measures up. Facebook does the calculations for you. All you need to do is watch for how you’re performing against your goals.

Remember, it takes time to build your social media momentum. Give yourself several months to share and tweet (and retweet!), and look for growth trends over that time.

With the data on your virtual impact in hand, you’re ready to evaluate what you accomplished so far.

1. What benchmarks have we hit?
2. How much longer until we reach our goals?
3. Which tactics have worked?
4. Were the tactics that worked also strategic?
5. Which tactics didn’t work, and why? Are they worth fixing?
6. Are our goals still reachable? Do we need new tactics to get there?

Congratulations, you’ve calculated your online ROI!

(image courtesy Flickr user awinn233, Creative Commons)

I was in the grocery store checkout line with a very dear friend. We were roaring with laughter about one thing after another, which made the monotony of our wait hardly noticeable.

In front of us was an important-looking man in a business suit, who without a doubt could hear every one of our punch lines and giggles. My friend decided to try to bring him in on the joke too, but he wouldn’t have it. No smile. No laughter. No reaction. Nothing!

My suddenly sad-faced friend then turned to me and said, “Aww! No funny with strangers.”

Since then, this anecdote has transformed into an inspirational allegory. We at LightBox Collaborative do not want to live in a world where there’s no funny with strangers. We want to be able to laugh with the man in front of us at the grocery store, laugh with our colleagues, and importantly, laugh at ourselves.

We want funny with strangers.

We also strive to make it fun to work with us. One of our goals is to have lots of fun. No one wants to sit in a boring, stuffy meeting, and neither do we. When people are having fun they become more productive and generate better work. All around, it’s beneficial to make funny with strangers.

Here are a few simple tips to make your life and work a little more fun:

Be present: Be emotionally alert and available for the people around you. Being present shows respect, improves communication, and strengthens relationships. Interact and relate to those around you. Set aside the text messaging, inbox, and IM for a while. Squash the urge to multi-task.

Pay it forward: Find a simple way to help or delight someone in a meaningful, memorable way. Do something nice for someone because it makes them, and you, feel good.

Play! Take a time each day to channel your inner child, your creative side, your most fun self. Fun drives a creative mind, so play with every idea. Fun is a frame of mind you can—and should—bring to everything you do.

(image courtesy Flickr user presta, Creative Commons)

The SPIN Academy is near and dear to a couple of LightBoxers’ hearts. I helped found the event back in 1999 and Heath worked on it for a half-dozen years. Between the two of us, we’ve been involved in all 11 Academies to date. That’s why we were so excited when the board of the Communications Leadership Institute, which houses the SPIN Project, asked LightBox Collaborative to run this year’s event.

What is the SPIN Academy? It’s a four-day retreat that teaches the fundamentals of strategic communications to progressive activists from around the country.

We asked one of our early graduates, Paul Karr (Class of ’03) to share what the SPIN Academy is all about. Here’s what he had to say:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It was almost 15 years ago when I graduated college and became a “professional activist.” During my first years of trying to change the world, I was a union organizer, agitating workers who were desperate for change. As a researcher I investigated industries that poisoned our environment and tracked campaign contributions to their obvious corporate sources.

Eventually I grew so frustrated with what I was seeing in the world that I decided to pursue communications so I could let the world know what was happening and agitate for change—easier said than done.

I looked into graduate schools for communications. I took adult education classes to learn about writing press releases and pitching reporters. I volunteered to pick up whatever communications work organizations had for me to do. At one point I even threw up my hands and thought about infiltrating the corporate world to learn how they did public relations so effectively.

Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find what I needed to make the key transition from knowing what was wrong with the world to being able to persuasively tell the world what could be done to fix our problems—unable, that is, until spent a week at the annual SPIN Academy.

The most important thing I learned at the SPIN Academy is that communications work should never be an afterthought. On the contrary, communications work is central to any effective effort undertaken by organization, be it advocacy, policy, organizing, or fundraising. The SPIN Academy teaches you how to do communications in a strategic way.

I now seize every opportunity I find to send a young activist to the SPIN Academy, whether they’re pursuing a career in communications or not. The more people who understand how communications is vital to winning real change, the better chance we have to win on the issues we care about.
. . .
Paul Karr currently lives in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan and is a Senior Communications Officer for the Change to Win labor federation.

(image courtesy Flickr user leasepics, Creative Commons)