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Gathering evaluation resources for Extension educators around the country
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Sarah Baughman
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Sarah Baughman's insight:
This is the recording of the eXtension Network Literacy CoP conversation on the role of evaluation in determining the public value of Extension. Dr. Mary Arnold of Oregon State University, Dr. Nancy Franz of Iowa State University and I are the panelists.
Although the public value conversation has been happening for over a decade now, many systems are either not embracing it or are just now beginning to think about framing our work in public language. My question is, will it make a difference? I don't know that we have enough states using public value to assess if it makes a difference, especially in these tough budget times. Delete the scoop?
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With the new Pinterest Web Analytics, business pages that have switched to the “new look” of Pinterest and have a verified website, will be able to access these analytics.
Sarah Baughman's insight:
In a recent presentation on social media measurement I lamented the lack of a decent tool for Pinterest Analytics. It looks like the folks at Pinterest were listening! The new PInterest Web Analytics allows "verified" users to see site metrics such as number of impressions per pin and what pinners are pinning from your website. The attached link includes a useful video from Pinterest. Delete the scoop?
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Sarah Baughman's insight:
I love this article from Reuters about the Pope's twitter account! It has some great nuggets about measuring social media. First it's awesome that the Vatican has measured the twitter activity of both the Pope and Justin Bieber. And they didn't just use followers, the Vatican points out that although Justin Beiber has more followers, the Pope has more retweets. End of story, right? Maybe? The data is based on one day, and not the same day for both accounts. The days were chosen (apparently) by the most popular tweets for the Pope and Justin Beiber. So, really the Pope's most popular tweet was retweeted more than Justin Beiber's most popular tweet. What we don't know is what the data looks like over time. Additionally there is an assumption made that retweets are good. Retweets are a measure of engagement and do indicate a level of interaction with the account. However with celebrity accounts it also seems likely that retweets may not always be positive. The lesson here is that measuring social media is mainstream now, so if you are tweeting you should be taking a look at your metrics and comparing yourself to similar accounts if possible. But be careful what assumptions you are making about engagement and be sure to compare apples to apples over time.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/catholicism/
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KISSmetrics put together this interesting list of tools to measure reach and engagement on twitter. I regularly use TweetReach and find it easy to use and particularly like the nice clean reports it will generate. I haven't tried the other tools, let me know if you have and what you think.
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This post from Sociagility offers 5 reasons to measure social media. As social media plays in increasing role in our Extension work I thought it would be a great reminder of why we should not overlook measuring social media as part of our overall planning and reporting strategies. The task of measuring social media can seem daunting at first but it is possible so here are 5 great reasons to get started: 1. to establish a starting point 2. To set direction. 3. To track progress. 4. To demonstrate success and 5. To justify further investment. Delete the scoop?
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I have noticed a growing number of Cooperative Extension people using Pinterest to curate information for specific content areas. Which, of course, will soon beg the question of "impacts." This blog post from Beth Kanter offers some resources for understanding Pinterest users, measurement tools and a great paragraph on understanding how using pinterest relates to your overal programmatic goals. I have not yet played with any of the measurement tools on pinterest but would love to hear from you if you have. Delete the scoop?
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Great blog post from KDPaine. Her target audience is marketers but she makes salient points for anyone interested in measurement and data analysis. Here she discuss the focus on data rather than action. Her three primary points are - 1. Stop collecting data, start understanding it 2. Stop making lists, start making informed decisions 3. Trusting a computer to get you the right answer is stupid.
What does this mean for educators? #1Keep your data collection simple and make sure you know what you are looking for so you can use your data to improve your programs or report results. #2 I am a serious list keeper so this made me laugh! But it is critical to USE your data to help make decisions - and I am not talking about what to offer for lunch at the next workshop. And when you have decisions to make, go back to the information (i.e. data) you have.In Virginia Cooperative Extension our county offices do a situational analysis every five years or so. That's a great source of data - instead of guessing what programs to offer (or not) go back to that community based data. #3 Dig into that data, what does it mean? Is it really telling you anything about behavior change? Is what the data (or statistian or computer) are telling you making sense?
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Presented as a free seminar on 4/19/12 by Laura Quinn of Idealware. You've got data. This presentation has some great tips for presenting data accurately and simply as well as some tools to help you! Delete the scoop?
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New startup Pinerly wants to help you get a grip on your "Pinalytics." We go hands-on with the beta service. Here's another promising tool for Pinterest analytics. It's still in beta but looks to have some nice features. It appears that you create your "pins" for Pinterest within Pinerly (say that three times fast!) to generate analytics such as repins, likes and clicks. It will also give you suggestions on who to follow, tips for increasing traffic, and suggested content. If you give it a try, let me know what you think. Delete the scoop?
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Here's a nice post from Mashable on third party sites that will help you get more out of pinterest. And my favorite is.... wait for it....... PinReach. That's right folks, you knew it was coming. A tool to measure Pinterest influence. I have not tried it out yet as I have just started using Pinterest and don't have enough pins to make it worth measuring yet. There are also some other non-measurement tools here that will allow you to pin quotes, screenshots and all kinds of nifty stuff. Delete the scoop?
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An interesting take on measuring the ROI or return on investment for social media based on Tourism Ireland sucess with their Facebook Page. These are metrics that I've discussed in other posts/places with a different spin. Mark Henry the marketing director of Tourism Ireland proposes 4 "consumer engagement" metrics: 1. Post Impressions: viewing a brand post.
If you think of your program as the "brand" these are a useful way to consider the return on investment. A financial value was calculated for the cost of delivering differeing levels of engagement. Would be interesting to consider the cost for local/state and national level Extension programs. Delete the scoop?
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Lately I have been delving some into data visualization and infographics. I do not have a design background and struggle a bit with making things look the way I would like them to. So I'm always looking for cool tools to help me make data more visually appealing and easy to understand. These tools are geared more towards personal data and I haven't had a chance yet to play with them all but thought it would be worth sharing. Let me know if you find some of them particularly helpful or are able to use them for data that is project or program oriented. Delete the scoop?
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Want to find out how your YouTube channel is performing? Find out how to use YouTube Analytics to gain insight into your YouTube channel and video performance.
Sarah Baughman's insight:
Many Extension systems and faculty are using YouTube as a way to reach and engage with new audiences. As with all social media it's important to define what success looks like and measure how you are doing. This is a great article detailing the specifics of YouTube Analytics.
Key things to pay attention to are actual views including how long the video was watched. This can help you determing if people are actually watching your videos all the way to the end. If not, perhaps your videos are too long or you are not reaching the right audience. You can also get demographic information to help determine if you are reaching your intended audience. YouTube analytics also provides some engagement metrics such as likes, shares, subscribers, and favorites.
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Sarah Baughman's insight:
Data visualization is a trend that is here to stay. Using good visuals to help tell the evaluation story is an important skill - and one that I am still working on. The authors offer three tactics: 1. captivate the readers with visuals 2. Choose the design that's right for the client - not the deisn that's right for the data 3. Strengthen the dataviz literacy of your troops.
I wonder what we can do in Cooperative Extension to help our stakeholders improve their skills in reading visualizations? Delete the scoop?
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Create infographics and interactive online charts. It's free and super-easy! Follow other users and discover amazing data stories!
Sarah Baughman's insight:
Infographics can be found everywhere on pretty much any topic. Here is a nice, easy to use tool for creating your own infographics if you have farily simple data. I created several infographics for our Ask an Expert historical data that can be found here http://create.extension.org/node/2790 . ;
Extension educators can use this tool to present data or other information in newsletters, facebook pages, county web pages or written reports. Visual representation of your data (beyond basic charts) can be a powerful tool to get people to pay attention to your work and more importantly the impact of your work.
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This post from Mark Schaefer of Social Media Today discusses how he went about discovering if his blog had any impact. Quite simply, he contacted people who had left comments on his blog and spoke with them directly. He was able to discover a very real impact he had on readers this way. If you blog as part of your Extension work and want to document impact a great place to start is with your commenters. You have a couple of options - you can create a survey to send to them or you can contact them individually and have an informal conversations. We often measure engagement on blogs through the number of comments but this offers a way to go beyond basic engagement metrics and find out how you are really impacting your audience. This also gives you a way to discover more about your audience. Who are they and why do they read your blog out of the millions of blogs on the web. How did they discover you? Have they learned anything or changed practice based on your blog? Let me know if you have other ways you have dug deeper into evaluating your blog. 
John Blue's comment,
December 25, 2012 10:47 AM
Love the analogy of Wordpress as an asteroid making a statement on the world.
John Blue's comment,
December 25, 2012 11:06 AM
For Truffle Media episodes we have several approaches to seeing if there is impact made: periodic surveys, episode download counts, reviewing general Google analytics, email update clicks (opens metrics tracked but less important), and going to events and talking with people.
The objective metrics (clicks, downloads, etc) are what drive revenue but the subjective stories are what people love to hear. We aim to collect both and be able to tell various stories about how people feel, act, and take action. Delete the scoop?
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This blog post from Beth Kanter is a treasure trove of useful information. I was initially drawn to the post by the title because I have been working closely with our network literacy community of practice on helping our military and extension audiences build personal learning networks. However, for me, the most useful information is the assessment framework and theory of change she presents. I am a big advocate of theories of change for extension because a good theory of change helps educators think beyond activities to community change. The social media maturity of practice model looks very useful for helping integrate social media into our larger programs and gives some great indicators to use when measuring/determining progress along the model. 
Beth Kanter's comment,
September 5, 2012 11:21 PM
Thanks for scooping this. I've had alot of other folks adapt this for differences audiences .. in one instance - we had a sit, crawl, walk, run, fly .. and another "teleporting" was added. I did a version for dance companies and did use different speeds of dancing. Metaphors are great to help you think. Here's a recent post explaining the model I've been using for training ssireview.org/blog/entry/becoming_a_networked_nonprofit
Sarah Baughman's comment,
September 6, 2012 9:32 AM
Appreciate your comments Beth as well as the link. Extension is not a nonprofit in the traditional sense but I have found the nonprofit sector to be a great place to find theories and resources to help our work.
's comment, September 9, 2012 11:19 PM
Thanks for sharing your link, Beth. I have found the run, walk, crawl, fly framework very valuable and appreciate how you talk about the culture change that needs to happen to really get to running or flying. Moving from social as in being part of your communications strategy to social being the way you work through networks is such a vital step, but often so difficult to do when there is not consensus or understanding of how or why such a culture change should occur within the organization (among the entire org or leadership). Ideally we want the culture change to be well-known or understood among all in our organization up-front, but often this is not the case (in my experience). By working with Sarah, I've found that evaluating our social media efforts as an on-going part of a communications strategy and then sharing the results with my leadership team can be just that catalyst needed for prompting discussions about how our organization can become more social and networked across more than just the communications unit.
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This post from KD Paine discusses the first social media measurement standards summit. What may be interesting to Cooperative Extension professionals are the guidelines on measuring reach, engagement, influence, opinion and impact. One interesting point is the statement that reach comes before engagement and influence takes place beyond engagement. I don't disagree but I think increasing engagment on social media sites also increases reach so it's not quite so clear cut. What do you think? 
John Dorner's comment,
June 28, 2012 8:08 AM
Good read! I love the quote “You have been influenced when you have thought something that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought or done something that you otherwise wouldn’t have done.” – Philip Sheldrake, “The Business of Influence”
But, how do you measure THAT? Thanks for sharing! (BTW, I've been influenced by this article, the discussion and your initial comments)
John Dorner's comment,
June 28, 2012 10:46 AM
You inspired me to share this more widely. See: http://nccetechtalk.blogspot.com/2012/06/its-all-about-influence.html
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Some great suggestions from the Philanthropy Potluck Blog on story telling with data. Short and sensible recommendations include starting by answering some questions then determine the right type of graphic. Eliminate clutter (my favorite), draw attention where you want it, tell a visual story and practice. And all these means that you can't wait until the very last minute to write that report or impact statement! Thinking about data presentation should be part of your evaluation process from the start. Delete the scoop?
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It used to be that if you wanted to get data on a certain industry, keyword, hashtag or Twitter user you had to wait for a geeky, social media scientist type to..." Here is another tool to help gather and analyze data from Twitter. I haven't had a chance to play around with it much yet so would love to hear your thoughts, experiences with TweetCharts. Is it giving you the data you want? Can you use that data to make changes, improve strategies or otherwise take action? Delete the scoop?
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This blog post from Ann Emery offers a nice collection of questions for focus groups conducted with youth participants. The questions may be useful for non-formal educators, especially 4-H educators as they work to engage youth in the evaluation process. Giving youth a voice in the evaluation process can be enlightening for both educators and youth. In my experience the youth perspective is often "unexpected" and can lead to some great discussions and potential programmatic improvements. [Photo credit to Whitney Mitchell] Delete the scoop?
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A conversation about evaluating cooperative extension programs in the age of social media with Sarah Baughman, evaluation and research specialist with the eXtension Military Familes Project. Via Bob Bertsch Delete the scoop?
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This is a nice follow up to the Getting the Most from Facebook Insights webinar I conducted with Karen Jeannette last week for eXtension. We discussed the importance of downloading data from Insights to get even more interesting metrics. This post takes it a step further and describes calculations that can be done using that downloaded data. Formula's for "average organic reach per post," "average engagement per post," and "engagements per engaged user"are presented
The pertinent question is, what would you do with this information? Do you, or your supervisers care about "engagements per engaged user?" These metrics provide further information on how your social media work is reaching and engaging audiences. Using averages allows for consistent tracking over time and will be less susceptible to extremes. Drilling down into per post and per user information may help you further refine what's working and what's not working as well as give you nice documentation on how your social media work is translating into expanding your reach and engagement.
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CYFERnet just released their new interactive website. For Extension educators working in youth programming it is worth the time to check out the new site. Evaluation tools include learning modules, a logic model builder, evaluation instruments and a survey builder. You do need to create an account to use most of the tools but it is free. Delete the scoop?
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This article introduced me to some new tools for measuring social media activities. The tools are Likelyzer, Social Crawlytics, Twitonomy and Hubspot. The important point to remember is that the tools are only one part of the equation, it's what you do with the information provided that makes all the difference.
I am lookin forward to trying some of these tools and would love to hear about any of your experiences with them.