Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 1: Why Listening Is Valuable

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

A Simple Definition: Listening

Listening is knowing what is being said online about your nonprofit organization, field or issue area. Listening uses monitoring and tracking tools to identify conversations that are taking place on the social web.  It is a prelude to engaging with your audience. At its very basic, listening is simply naturalistic research, although more like a focus group or observation than a survey.

 

Listening is not simply scanning a river of noise. The process involves sifting through online conversations, from social networks to blogs – many voices talking in many places. The value of listening comes from making sense of the data and using it to inform your social media strategy.

 

Understanding the Value of Listening and Engaging

The value of listening is more than “free market research,” although listening through social media channels is priceless because you can hear what people are saying in their natural environment. Listening is typically used by nonprofits to help improve programs and identify misconceptions. As one nonprofit social media strategist pointed out, “Paying attention to trends on the various networks and what people are saying is beneficial because it makes it easier for your organization to be relevant. Listening helps you be less of a spammer and more of a service provider.”

Network for Good has some terrific stories about noisy, angry people becoming champions for their services with active listening and then open engagement on social networks or in the comments of  blogs. Kate Bladow who works for LawHelp, a legal services nonprofit, says that listening has become a best practice for all program management staff. She says, “I found out this week that a colleague and I both use the same keywords on “legal aid” and “pro bono” to listen because we want to know if anyone is reaching out and looking for legal aid.” She directs people to the specific place on the organization’s web site to find legal information. Kate also listens to identify people who express an interest in taking on pro bono legal work and recruits them as pro bono lawyers.

Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center  is listening by searching for discussions about blood donations in their local area. Courtney Martin, social media manager,  points out, “We’ve been able to answer questions for people who want to donate blood but don’t know the rules, or who have misconceptions. Most importantly, the initial listening and engaging step is not as time consuming after you establish a routine.”

Becoming A Listening Organization

Is listening time consuming? It depends on how your organization structures  the listening tasks and work flow. Will one staff person (or volunteer) in the organization do all the work or will it be many? Who will respond to what and how? Finally, it isn’t a matter of just collecting the data,  someone will need to transform it from a river of noise into insights – and this takes a particular skill, pattern analysis.

Nonprofit use different approaches depending on their size, the scope of their listening, and skill/experience of staff.

• Social Media Strategist As Professional Listener: One person becomes the organization’s ears and monitors the web, does the tracking and reporting.   This works well when there is less volume, but the organization wants to scale its engagement strategy listening will require more than one set of ears.
• Listening Team: Some organizations use this approach when they do not have a one person on staff posses both the technical skills and social media communications savvy.    Or they form a cross-department team comprised of individuals from programming, fundraising, and marketing to shared the task, thus helping to break down silos.
• The Listening Organization: This is a bold step and not many nonprofits have taken it. A listening organization encourages everyone within the organization, both staff and stakeholders to listen and participate on the social web. This requires a policy and operation guidelines.

Now that your organization appreciates the value of listening and understands how to organization the work flow, it’s time to understand the listening skills and techniques.

How does your nonprofit organize its listening activities?  How does your organization get value from listening?

Look for Part 2 of this series, Listening Literacy Skills, to be published here, Wednesday, December 2nd.