- Source: Ervin Bartis on flickr
Can you measure your mission? Many nonprofits are being asked to provide metrics of success in order to keep and attract donations and funding.
But it’s not exactly clear how to do this. According to a working paper posted in July to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site by faculty members Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan:
The social sector is in the midst of a search for metrics of impact. Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in methodologies and tools for assessing social performance and impact, but with little systematic analysis and comparison across these approaches.
When it comes to fundraising and donors, it’s no longer enough for non-profit organizations to talk about the relative value of their mission, activities, and results. Funders are comparison-shopping, and they want to know that their gifts will deliver more bang-for-the-buck if contributed to one organization versus another.
As a sign of this bottom-line orientation, foundations increasingly speak of their contribution “portfolios” using terms borrowed from the financial industry — and nonprofit staffs are under pressure to develop their analytical capacity.
According to a 2009 article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy:
The absence of common standards means that investors can’t compare the social and environmental benefits of different investment opportunities.
The Rockefeller Foundation is working with Acumen Fund, B Lab, Deloitte, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards taxonomy. Work has also begun on a Global Impact Investing Ratings System (GIIRS), which will look at how third-party ratings systems can be developed and aggregated under IRIS.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal underscores the need:
Many potential donors worry that charities will waste their money. Measuring the impact charities have on the problems they seek to solve—and, in some cases, deciding whether one cause is more deserving than another—has become a pressing issue for the multitrillion-dollar philanthropy industry.
Read my entire post on The Scholarly Kitchen …
The notion that information wants to be free is absurd when the delivery mechanism is making a fortune and the creators are getting what amounts to zilch. – Peter Osnos, “Will Google Save the News?“
Monopoly by Mikael Miettinen on flickr
In order to focus their attention on big institutional content deals, publishers have traditionally relied on third-party service providers (agents and the like) to conduct business with individual end-users. However, with institutional budgets in decline, content providers are turning their attention to consumer markets as a potential source of business growth. Asserting themselves in the consumer space will require a new type of sales and marketing acumen and visibility into consumer behavior, which recognizes and responds to the many new ways that consumers are seeking to interact with vendors and each other in online environments.
The longstanding business equation in B2B publishing has been:
Quality Content + Brand Recognition + Operational Efficiency + Institutional Usage = Market Share/Financial Success
Publishers have negotiated big deals but have largely let consumers fend for themselves. This strategy will not fly in consumer markets, where visibility and demand are the primary drivers of revenue, and where methods for marketing to consumers have changed dramatically. The best approach for publishers wishing to enter the consumer marketplace is to take a step back, free themselves from preconceptions of what their business is about, and take a look at what is really working in the consumer Web. Only through entrepreneurial thinking will they have a shot at success in consumer content markets.
Consumers are constantly inundated with free content but are rapidly flocking to demand-based, interactive services and are making freemium purchases in that context. Content providers can meet this reality head-on by wrapping content in value-added service layers that address consumer needs and support collaboration …
Continue reading this post on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Source: Beth Kanter via flickr
Read my entire post on The Scholarly Kitchen. An excerpt:
While the notion that information wants to be free has driven many movements around government-financed data and research, it pays to remember that covert political maneuvering and paying for influence are as old as civilization. And some of these forces don’t want information to be free.
When some of the most well-funded corporations and interest groups also have a commercial stake in supporting transparency, you have all the ingredients for a real battle.
Advances in networked data technologies in the new media and research sectors have made new kinds of relational analysis possible. Tim Berners-Lee’s 2009 TED Talk centers on the creation of the web of linked data—a shadow layer that will underlie the web of content, the principal vehicle of global information exchange with which we are all familiar today.
Networked data is intrinsic to the semantic web and to data visualization, which propose alternate ways to describe, associate meaning with, and reveal relationships between data entities. Early examples, built from publicly available government data, can be found on project pages from Open PSI (in the UK) and Sunlight Labs (in the US).
The power of analysis that can be derived from the semantic Web and visualizations of linked data relies entirely upon the accuracy and scope of the data itself—which is where the DISCLOSE Act (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections) comes in.
Source: myuibe on flickr
A link to PDF/PPT slides I presented earlier this month at the SSP Annual Meeting in San Francisco:
Includes wireframes from Cultured Code and app examples from Culinate/Wiley, NASA, Zinio, Amazon, the World Bank, and Shazam plus reporting on trends, innovations, and open questions.
"enercities" by centralasian on flickr
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Even for mainstream students, gaming is a ubiquitous, informal learning vehicle. From a January piece in the New York Times, “If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online,” the average time per day spent by people ages 8-18 gaming is one hour and thirteen minutes compared to 38 minutes per day spent using print.
Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat”.
Over the course of the next 15 years, this community of users who experience content versus strictly reading it will comprise the community of scientists, researchers, and society members who are our customers. It may be difficult for traditionalists to make the conceptual leap from journal or book publishing to scientific simulations and instructional gaming. However, as economics and culture align, these will become part of the fabric of the industry.
Not everyone will thrive in a transformed business landscape. For centuries, scientific publishers have been scribes and disseminators of content who have translated the activity of science into a linear, replicable, two-dimensional experience. Sometimes even the most accomplished companies can’t transition outside their core specialties. (Apple, for example, is an exemplary device manufacturer and marketing company that has been comparatively ineffective in the software space. Microsoft, conversely, has excelled in software but failed to make headway in devices.)
Is it better, then, for publishers to focus on the curation and filtering of content, leaving user services development to others? Or should they be cultivating new skills that prepare them for a different future?
Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpt:
A survey of the Web 2.o Next landscape reveals two principal directions in the forthcoming evolutionary cycle — one towards value-added business service and the other supporting more fluid online collaboration by community groups and work teams.
This post provides a quick rundown of emerging businesses (in and adjacent to scholarly publishing), which are gearing up to generate better service and more collaborative utilities based on social platforms [... read more about Ellerdale, Twazzup, Lithium.com, Glue, Copia, Scribd, Google Wave, and Ushahidi].
Source: Damien Basile on flickr
Given the shifting consumer and technology landscapes, traditional practices are costly and non-agile mechanisms for creating and sustaining this type of engagement. Although publishers may not be fluent in Web 2.0 yet, they may have more reason than ever to explore new applications, technological capacities, and vendor services.
Content sharing and direct-to-user communication tools will increasingly replace outmoded services that fail to connect publishers/brands with their ultimate consumers of content.
Web 2.0 services, if used effectively, have the capacity to make content the nucleus of an engaged discussion or work process and to foster two-way communication with key constituents. Publishers who can effectively incorporate Web 2.0 in their programs may be able to reduce their reliance on intermediaries–and will stand apart by harnessing the power of their consumer audiences.
Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpt:
Last Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative (OGI). The occasion was honored with a cupcake and candle on the landing page of the newly re-designed Data.gov site and a widely disseminated announcement from the White House.
Source: Laura Padgett on flickr
For global publishers who have generated a significant portion of revenue building and selling databases, a requirement to make their data freely available is a mixed blessing. Despite the fact that global access and use of the data are expected to rise exponentially, balance sheets will take a hit.
Databases are not just part of a publishers portfolio, if done right they can be the most profitable part and have sometimes carried the less profitable and declining parts of the publishing line up — namely, books. Presses being impacted by this change must quickly seek new ways to recapture publishing expense and reinvent the services they provide.
Conversely, if a business has retooled to conceive of and build data services, it’s a golden egg. For publishers in adjacent spaces — CQ Press, Bloomberg, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, National Journal, CQ-Roll Call, the Washington Post — access to troves of free, authoritative, updated data presents a significant opportunity to create new revenue streams by developing bespoke products and services that monetize free content.
Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpts:
Say goodbye to the days of shipping a hardback in a paper wrapper, cashing a check, and heading to the pub. Today, when content is parsed and customized for dissemination in various formats, to numerous devices, and through disparate partner channels, business analytics, assessment, and competitive analysis are (or should be) the modus operandi.
As a colleague aptly summarized, “once we had readers, now we have users.” The digital publishing business is a quickly becoming a content + tools = service business. This brings with it a new requirement to more completely comprehend end-user behaviors, wants, and needs.
"Article-level metrics at PLoS" by dullhunk on flickr
Given the volume of experimentation in the information industry, it’s prime time to ground your business operations by establishing extensible processes that allow for routine evaluation of trends in information output, input, and throughput — not indiscriminately, but closely tied to the particulars of our content and mission.
If you’re new to the service arena, it’s important to invest in understanding who your customers are (and will be in future), what is essential versus “nice to have,” and how behavior aligns with preferences to establish a use case.
If seeking new ways to monetize your content, it’s not too soon to peer around corners and establish internal and external expectations that foster clarity and reinforce strategic capabilities despite an increase in business complexity.
Having the capacity to centralize information from diverse platforms and channels is of greater value than ever to digital information businesses — and will set the stage for the next phase of growth.
For those interested in joining a live discussion, Ann Michael and I will be conducting a session with Chris Beckett, VP of Business Development at Atypon; Mike Sweet, CEO of Credo Reference; and Marc Segers from iFactory about digital reference monetization, networked data models, device use, and the underpinnings of a 360-degree customer view at the SSP Annual Meeting, June 2-4 in San Francisco.
"The Shadow Knows" by GregStruction on Google Images
Read my complete post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Excerpt:
Everywhere we turn, we encounter debates over the risks and legality of uses of “private” data by social media mega-businesses like Facebook and Twitter.
Google is the latest culprit to be caught in the spotlight.
The lead technology piece in Saturday’s New York Times zeroed in on Google’s violation of German privacy laws, in connection with the company’s admission that it had systematically harvested private data from households in Europe and the US since 2006 — including email content and websites visited — in the course of capturing drive-by images for Google’s Street View photo archive.
There are already books to teach Internet privacy “survival skills” and software downloads to “erase” your data footprint. It won’t be surprising to find that some are willing to pay generously for services that sanitize their information shadows with virtual lye and steel wool. Privacy will be a scare commodity, and its market value will rise. When privacy becomes monetized, we may assign relative values to our own private information according to the type of information that is protected or made available.
While papers have touched on the potentially inverse relationship that exists between user privacy and the efficacy of Web 2.0 social ranking and recommendation engines, social media engines are only the beginning of what is to come …
Source: Petr Kratochovil www.publicdomainpictures.net
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There is active debate on the Web about the potential for Web 3.0 technologies and the standards that will be adopted to support them. Writing for O’Reilly Community, Kurt Cagle has remarked:
My central problem with RDF is that it is a brilliant technology that tried to solve too big a problem too early on by establishing itself as a way of building “dynamic” ontologies. Most ontologies are ultimately dynamic, changing and shifting as the requirements for their use change, but at the same time such ontologies change relatively slowly over time.
As of January 2009, when Cagle wrote this, RDF had failed to garner widespread support from the Web community — but it has gained significant traction during the past year, including incorporation in the Drupal 7 Core.
The promise within this alphabet soup of technologies is that semantic Web standards will support the development of utilities that:
- Provide access to large repositories of information that would otherwise be unwieldy to search quickly
- Surface relationships within complex data sets that would otherwise be obscured
- Are highly transferable
- Deliver democratized access to research information
But there are risks. Building sites that depend on semantic technologies and RDF XML can take longer and be more costly initially. In a stalled economy, long-term financial vision is harder to come by, but those with it may truly leapfrog. In addition, there are concerns about accuracy, authority, and security within these systems, ones the architects must address in order for them to reach the mainstream.
… [O]ne may wonder whether this is an all-or-nothing proposition. Without speed and consistent delivery of reliable results, projects such as these may fail to meet user expectations and be dead in the water. On the flip side, if RDF XML and its successors can accomplish what they purport to, they will drive significant advances in research by providing the capacity to dynamically derive rich meaning from relationships as well as content.
