Activity in: Focus
The authors of The Dragonfly Effect, Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, have since created an online resource for people interested in learning more about the power of social media to drive social change. They have many resources available, including a Powerpoint presentation that summarizes the many “wings” of the movement. Each one has an exercise, which I am going to discuss in terms of the organization at which I currently work. These exercises provide a great base for exploring each wing in terms of your organization and what you are currently employing/not employing to drive people to your cause.
Looking at the Humanistic aspect of focusing your goal, they ask you to think about your supporters and humanize your audience so you can focus your goal to them. I personally find this concept a bit more challenging, as not all organizations collect demographic information so the following is a bit of an assumption of our audience.
To start with, our supporters are empathetic and caring people who want to make a difference internationally (hence their support of an international disaster relief charity). They are kept up at night by the idea of people being made homeless by natural disaster or conflict. We want our supports to become engaged with our cause and either volunteer their time, share our message or donate so that we can ensure no family is without shelter. Our supporters might resist if they do not know how to help us. Do we have the proper resources to guide them through a proper journey with our organization? That is a very important aspect to consider, the resistance that might be faced.
Next is the Actionable aspect of focus: what are our goals that we want to achieve? There are both large and small-scale goals, the smaller or micro goals leading into the larger or macro goals. Our macro goal is, as an international organization, to help one million people and provide them with shelter and essential tools to recover and rebuild after disaster. That is quite a lofty goal and we desperately need the help of our supports to make this happen. A smaller goal to achieve this is annually increase our donor and volunteer base which will feed into a larger supporter base, thus allowing us to help more families in need.
To test the success of our focused goal, they suggest we pick three key metrics to focus on and then make one week, 30 day and 90 day goals for each. For my organization, this is not a realistic approach. We do not have the people-power to analyze our goals that frequently, nor do we want to look in such a short term. For us, we would look at our active donor base, our active volunteers and our newsletters subscribers as key metrics. I personally am not responsible for these metrics, but we have a concrete fundraising plan that outlines how each metric will be measured and tracked.
I think breaking it down as in the above photo is simplify goals a bit too much — this might have been a good strategy seven years ago when our organization was just starting off, but as a relatively established charity that method of tracking metrics is not very applicable.
