· Does effort = effect? ·
There's so many Web 2.0 tools out there it's overwhelming. How do not-for-profits work out which ones to use? Particularly as each tool requires a significant amount of resources, be it time, money, knowledge, or a combination of all three.
I've been thinking about Mark Ghuneim/Wiredset's Types of Engagement chart for a while, which seeks to demonstrate how engaged a visitor is likely to be by types of Web 2.0 and other online tools. While the chart is great, I wanted to expand on it by showing whether the amount of effort a not-for-profit (or any organisation for that matter) puts into online tools is worth the effect the organisation hopes it will achieve (i.e. a cost-benefit analysis of sorts). Ok, so I promised this back in February ... it's been a long time coming :)
I've given a couple of talks over the past six months that have tried to describe to not-for-profit webbies the benefits of certain Web 2.0 tools, and the way I did this was to rate out of five the amount of time required to develop the tool, the amount of money required, and the amount of in-house geekiness (or technical knowledge) required. If you take the sum of these three to make a score out of 15, that makes up an Effort score.
In addition to this, I tried to mark the level of likely Effectiveness each tool would bring to the organisation.
Obviously, these scores would be different for every organisation, particularly for tools such as YouTube where having a volunteer who is skilled at film production and has their own film editing suite is going to rate much lower on the Effort scale than an organisation who has no such resources to draw on.
In the end, you can plot your Effort rating on the Y axis of a scatter chart, and your Effect rating on the X axis. You will end up with a chart similar to that below, however your dots will probably be in different places to mine. You will probably also have slightly different tools listed, depending on how interested your organisation is in utilising Web 2.0 tools. The example below is the current scatter graph for ANTaR.
In the bottom right quarter, coloured gold, you will see the tools that are must-haves. They are must-haves because they require little effort to implement, but are likely to have a large effect. In the top right quarter, coloured green, you will see the tools that you should have. They require a fair bit of effort to implement, however they are also likely to have a high effect so it is still worthwhile spending your resources on them.
In the bottom left corner, coloured white, you will see the tools that you can implement if you don't spend much time on them. This is because although they don't require much effort, the effect isn't likely to be very high.
In the top left corner, coloured blue, are the tools to avoid because they require a large amount of effort for little effect.
I was surprised when I first plotted this chart. I didn't expect demographic websites (i.e. those websites that appeal to a particular demographic in the same vein as ActNow where each not-for-profit is provided with a page to write about how people can get involved) to be so firmly in the golden square. I was also surprised to see maps in the green square, and YouTube in the blue square. It's given me guidance on where to take the ANTaR web presence from here. I will continue to revise the chart as my geek knowledge and funding rises and amount of time is reduced (due to being committed to maintaining other online tools).
Feel free to use and republish this chart. It is published under a Creative Commons license so attribution is required (a link to this site mentioning both the site name and my name).
Tuesday May 8, 2007
Categories: Campaigning Technology
Commenting is closed for this article.
Very cool excercise. I cried a little tear to see that RSS wasn’t on there, though. I’d also argue that these are very subjective judgements, particularly in terms of benefits. It depends on how you use any of these tools, too. I’ve used social bookmarking and Digg and seen huge gains from it but I’ll be darned if I know how to work with maps, for example.
I bet if everyone in an org made a chart like this, comparing would be very useful.
Good luck!
— Marshall Kirkpatrick 9 May 2007 #
Thanks Marshall!
Yes, poor RSS missed out, largely due to my attitude about RSS. For ANTaR, the website and RSS go hand-in-hand, I don’t tend to see them as separate tools. Other organisations will have a different attitude and will want to plot RSS as a separate item, particularly if they’re not already using it.
And I completely agree with you that these judgements are hugely subjective. An organisation’s attitude to any of these tools is likely to change over time, so it’s important for anybody wanting to use this method to remember that it’s merely an indicator for an organisation’s web strategy, a way of narrowing down which tools to use in an environment where there is too much choice and not enough resources :)
— Priscilla 9 May 2007 #
Subjective may be too strong a word. Perhaps you can think of it as applying your expert knowledge about an organization and the tools. Maybe this is just a fancy way of saying subjective?
I agree with the thoughts about RSS. When I update my website, it will be a blog or blog-like in case anyone wants to “grab” my thoughts.
Help!
What is bespoke and demographic?
Catherine
— Catherine Carey 17 May 2007 #
@Catherine: Thanks for your comment.
Bespoke is a site or sub-site that has been developed and designed specifically for your organisation. That is why the amount of effort is so high … it often requires a lot of time, money and expertise to implement. You would expect that something that has been created specifically for your organisation gets a high effect rating, otherwise it’s not worth your while. The example I use for a bespoke website is WWF’s Futuremaker’s site, or ANTaR’s Sea of Hands site.
Demographic is a site that is taylored to a particular demographic, e.g. an age range. The example I usually use in this case is Act Now, the youth activist site. They allow not-for-profits to add a page of content on their site, so the effort required is relatively low, however the organisation is able to tap into a specific demographic so the likely effect is higher than normal.
I hope that makes sense :)
— Priscilla 20 May 2007 #