Flickr Photo: Felix IdanLast week, I got some evaluation results back from a social media training I did last month in DC. My favorite comments was:

Holly talks too fast.

That came up at least a half a dozen times. Point taken: in the future, no coffee before my session. But my second favorite comment was this:

Holly said we have to demonstrate the value of social media tools to our bosses. But how do you show that blogging leads to donations, or volunteers?

Flickr Photo: matuko_aminiRaise your hand if getting funding for your tech projects takes longer than implementing the projects themselves.

Halfway through the year, most organizations are starting to think about budgets for the next year. The lobbying, pleading, persuading, and cajoling begin early, as every one of your departments vie for a piece of the budget pie.

How do you get yours?

Flickr Photo: NCBrianChris Brogan is one of my social media heroes. I really respect his approach to the power of these tools and how we should use them.  (And you can learn more from him at our Ask the Expert session on May 5th -- free for NTEN Members!)

Chris has a great post today about Online Community Management in which he shares how he would measure a community manager's performance:

Ali Levine, NTEN Fellow for Special Projects

Working "on the bleeding edge" is exhilarating, but it can be nerve wracking too. Staff time and money are in perpetually short supply and ensuring the most efficient and effective use of resources is one of the most important tasks a nonprofit manager must undertake. Deciding to put those scarce resources into a new idea or tool can be a tough call. New ideas are, by their nature, largely unproven, and there is usually little data to go on.

Even when data does exist, it rarely tells you what you want to know. Most available data is captured by a single organization and tends to stay within that organization, where it's useful but doesn't offer a big picture look at the trends. And just because several organizations are using the same tool doesn't mean that they have the same goal.