If you haven’t done so yet, please take a look at this infographic which sums up the key findings of the report nicely.

Time is more valuable than money

It is good to see that around 45 per cent of NGOs say that they have a budget for social media. However, money is not the main resource you need to build a successful social media presence – it is time: time to listen to your followers and to engage them.

Full-time employees working on social media (Source: 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report)

Unfortunately 67 per cent of all respondents said that they only have one quarter or less of an employees dedicated to social media. To me that sounds like someone simply added “social media” to the job description of a person in the communications or marketing department and decided that that was enough. Well, it is not.

Their reluctance is your chance

The good news is, that this also means that it is comparatively easy to zip past the competition.

Think about it: by dedicating a single full time staff member (and no, I’m not talking about interns) to social media, you have more resources at your disposal than 80 per cent of all non-profits! Considering that the report also says that each Facebook follower can be valued at around 214 USD, this should be a no-brainer.

Granted, small non-profits might not need someone to work eight hours per day on Facebook and Twitter; maybe someone who works 50 per cent really is enough for them. However, even then I would argue for a dedicated social media person, rather than someone who has this as part of their portfolio – and anything less than 50 per cent is simply not serious.

What is your opinion? What is the minimum number of resources a non-profit should invest in social media?

Related posts:

1. Social Media as a Tool for Humanitarian Protection
2. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The perfect wine to drink while looking for a new CMS (Photo: quinn.anya)

Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in major web relaunch and content management (CMS) projects. In addition, I spent a lot of time listening to the woes of colleagues in other organizations, exchanging experiences and discussing ideas how to select the best CMS.

Over the next couple of months I’m planning to write a document (maybe just a PDF, maybe an e-book) that could help NGOs, non-profits and international organizations to select web content management systems as part of a web relaunch.

The document will not focus on individual systems, but rather on a method how to define your needs and then select a system, as well as the most common pitfalls, such as the perils of content migration or integrating your CMS with you design.

If you have experience with CMS selection/implementation and are interested in contributing to the guide, I would love to hear from you.

Please use the comment section below or the contact form to get in touch with me.

Related posts:

1. YouTube’s new guide for non-profit organizations
2. How to prepare your non-profit page for Facebook Timelines
3. A call for investing into information management in aidwork

Most people know how to upload and share a video, but many people and organizations struggle with any steps beyond the basics. YouTube has now published an excellent free “playbook” for non-profit organizations and NGOs that can help you use YouTube more effectively.

This guide should be required reading for any organization that either already uses YouTube or is planning to use it. It is particularly useful for decentralised organisations where many offices/chapters/branches have their own YouTube channels.

The guide covers all the basics, like titles and descriptions, but also explains more advanced topics like branding and channel overlays. In addition, YouTube shares good practice around digital story telling and how to make your audience part of your story.

The only thing I didn’t like about the playbook is that it fails to mention that accepting donations through Google Checkout is only possible for organizations in a very limited number of country.

Download the “Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good” (pdf).

Related posts:

1. My new project: “How to choose a content management system – the non-profit guide”
2. Sharing photos online – a decision matrix for non-profit organizations
3. How to prepare your non-profit page for Facebook Timelines

Campaign poster for the presidential elections in Liberia, October 2011.

Liberians will go to the polls on 11 October 2011 to vote for a new house of representative, a new senate and – most importantly – they’ll decide who will be the president for the next six years.  Ushahidi has set up a website to monitor the elections.

This is going to be the first time I’m in a country where Ushahidi is used to monitor elections. And while I’m skeptical about its usefulness as a tool for (first) responders in an emergency situation, I think that it can be a very useful tool to monitor elections or in development contexts.

I’m looking forward to seeing what reports Ushahidi will have from Nimba County and Sanniquellie, where I’m based, because I think that in Liberia Ushahidi has to deal with a number of challenges in order to be able to give a comprehensive picture:

• Many people don’t have mobile phones or no credit or no electricity to charge their phones. This has an impact on how many people will be able to send reports to Ushahidi
• SMS are not widely used by Liberians
• Very, very, very few people have access to the internet
• The monitoring project has not been promoted very well. I only found out about this weekend – from an ICT-interested expatriate.

All of this limits the size of the crowd that Ushahidi can draw on and I would be interested to see a demographic breakdown of the people who submit reports.

Update 11 October 2011: It turns out that Ushahidi is working with 11 organizations in Liberia who are submitting reports to the web platform. These include local organizations, organizations specialised on monitoring elections and UNMIL. While this limits the size of the crowd it probably means that the reports are more accurate and more topical. Particularly the inclusion of UNMIL is interesting because UNMIL is in charge of providing security in the country in case anything goes wrong.

Update 13 October 2011: Please read my follow-up post on how I experienced Ushahidi’s performance.

Related posts:

1. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia
2. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The difference between data and information

Data or information?

In my experience one of the biggest problems is that people don’t understand the difference between collecting data and analysing information. When you talk to a beneficiary, fill out a form and then archive that form somewhere, then you have collected data. However, that data only turns into useful information once you have entered it into a database or spreadsheet so that you can filter, sort, aggregate or calculate data.

If you work for a big retailer, you might think that this is obvious. However, in the humanitarian aid industry it sadly is not.

Three examples:

1. An organization working with refugees announced during a meeting that they would relocate between 2,000 and 4,000 people from host communities to a refugee camp during the next few weeks. Another organization that is in charge of providing food to that camp, said that they’d need to have a more precise number so that they know how many sacks of rice to buy. However, in the rush of the crisis the first organization had only registered heads of household and was not sure how many people were part of each household.
2. Different meeting, different actors, similar issue: Somebody announced that 458 people would be relocated to a refugee camp in the coming week. Someone working for a an education agency asked, how many of these would be children for whom schooling would have to be provided. The first organization was not able to provide that information since, while they had captured the age during registration on paper, they had only entered “minor” or “adult” into their database.
3. A while age I got to work with a big Excel spreadsheet that contained data of people who had been registered. Many of these people had two or three names (Last name, Middle name, First name), all of which were entered into a single cell called “Name” in the spreadsheet. However, people would sometimes give their last name first, and another time say their first name first, making it difficult to find them in the list. This problem was made worse by the fact that many of the people were illiterate so spellings might differ slightly from one time to the next. Once we put each name into a separate field, it was much easier to find even the ones that were misspelled because at least one of the three names would normally be consistently spelled and then you could simply scan the list of remaining names for phonetic matches.

Granularity and structure of information

I realize that collecting data during an emergency is a very challenging task. However, the three issues I described are not about an inability to collect data, they are about a lack of knowledge how to treat data properly so that you can use it to inform your decisions. In other words: they are examples of bad information management.

One frequent answer to this is “True, but we didn’t think about that in the beginning.” Well, that is exactly why you need to have professional, experienced information managers!

Particularly during the first phase of an emergency, organizations should invest in people who can help them structure the information they need in such a way that it is collected and entered in a useful way. This is something that can even be done by consultants on short-term contracts. Then, once the structure is in place, other (less expensive) people can enter data into those spreadsheets or databases and programme people can use the information as a tool.

Data confidence and errors

The second big challenge is to ensure that the data is entered correctly and stays correct. Everyone makes mistakes, particularly when you have a mind-boggling boring job like entering a list of thousands of names or dates of birth into a spreadsheet. One of the most efficient ways to prevent data entry errors is the double entry method. This means that everything is entered twice, by different people. Once all the data is entered, you can automatically compare the two data sets and look at the differences. I know, I know … I can almost hear cash-strapped managers groan at this suggestion, but hiring two data entry clerks might be only marginally more expensive then hiring one more qualified person.

The second way to reduce errors and increase data confidence is to have programme people work with the data themselves. I’m not necessarily talking about the initial massive data entry, but of the subsequent steps. In a lot of situations, updates are simply given to a person, whose job it is to update the database. This person normally has no knowledge of the programmes or the cases and most of the time never leaves the office. So for him, the data has no context and he will happily enter things that are written down, even if they don’t make sense. On the other hand, a programme person will notice inconsistencies or even be able to suggest improvements to the database. However, that means that organizations have to invest into teaching their programme people the basics of information management so that they understand how to do things and why certain things are done a certain way.

Stop reinventing the wheel

Last but not least, I’m still amazed to see people reinvent the wheel over and over again. A lot of the data that has to be captured is the same in different emergencies, with only small adjustments being necessary to fit the specific context. However, in each emergency people seem to start from scratch and build their databases and spreadsheets as they go.

It should be the role of the global cluster leads to provide standardized information management tools that can be reused and adapted. And while some clusters are already doing this, it is still too few and in the cases where the clusters do provide these tools, a lot of organizations are not aware of them – which again calls for an experienced information manager who knows where to find these tools and how to use them.

I know that hiring people with laptops and spreadsheets is not as sexy as buying trucks or as photogenic as handing out food to beneficiaries. But I am convinced that if we are serious about being efficient and about using the money that we have been given to the greatest advantage of the beneficiaries, we need to professionalize and invest into information management. The people who can do that job already exist, you just need to have to the will to find the budget and hire them. You programmes will improve because of it.

Related posts:

1. My new project: “How to choose a content management system – the non-profit guide”
2. How the UN want to use Big Data to spot crises

Not far from where I live, an organization that shall remain nameless installed two massive water tanks, which are supposed to serve a community. And to make things easier, this organization installed an electric pump that uses solar power. Unfortunately, what might have sounded like a great idea is completely useless in reality, because the solar panels never made it through their first rainy season and there is nobody who could repair or maintain them – today the tanks are completely dry and empty.

So yes, technology is great and can be sexy, but it has to be appropriate to the context and you have to make sure that you train people in their use so that they can continue to use and maintain it.

Related posts:

1. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management
2. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia
3. Posts worth reading: From finding photos and building apps to aid efficiency and communication