I’ve been working through ideas of how to make this site better, and one of those ideas is working with the editorial calendar and adding or taking away certain elements. In this case, I’m adding a new component; I plan to publish a book review every month. It will keep me on track with my reading, and it possibly could help readers of this blog.
This month, I finished Measuring the Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine. I chose to read it because of my longstanding interest in and desire to work with nonprofits and social good. I decided a way to make myself of more value to clients in those areas was to invest in knowledge. I knew I needed to better understand how nonprofits approach social media and to learn some ways for measuring content efforts.
The book is well-organized; it moves from the overarching perspective of what a networked nonprofit is into ways for measuring that networking. The book is filled with relevant examples, which brings solidity to the information shared. In addition to the examples, Kanter and Paine develop a hypothetical nonprofit, Katie’s Kat Shelter, to illustrate how to incorporate ideas such as measuring crowdsourcing and building a framework for measurement. Each chapter also includes reflection questions, and they do exactly that: they cause the reader to reflect and to ponder one’s networking and measurement activities. Finally, the book includes a number of helpful appendices, including tools for developing surveys as well as internal assessments or audits.
While the book is directed toward nonprofits, I find that much of the information applies to any company. Measuring the connectedness of an organization is not the purview of nonprofits alone; it’s something that’s necessary for and to all businesses. All organizations need to not only gather relevant information – something that’s discussed in the book because of the plethora of available information – but also analyze that information so that correlations and results can be tracked.
And that, my Write Right readers, is what I’ve read this month. What are you reading?
[…] what it means to be a copywriter and content marketer in today’s world. Last month, I wrote about The Networked Nonprofit because nonprofits are organizations with which I would like to work more often. This month brings […]