Flickr Photo: ralphhogaboomIf you're an NTEN member, you got to sit in on a great Ask the Expert session with Avinash Kaushik last month. (If you missed, it you should definitely check out the recording.)

Anyone who's had the pleasure of listening to Avinash talk about metrics knows he's the real deal. He's not just measuring for the sake of measuring: this guy is out to measure REAL IMPACT. He knows that measuring bounce rates or click throughs is meaningless unless you can explain what those statistics mean to the mission of your organization.

The latest post on his blog blows the lid off traditional analytics and explores a side of your website you may not have known about before: its offline impact.

We all know that, to some degree, our websites drive offline action as well as online action. Our sites encourage people to pick up their phone and call us. They drive people to come into our offices and volunteer. They compel people to change the lightbulbs in their houses to CFLs.

But how can you use web analytics to track what people aren't doing on your site?

We've gathered the 2008 session materials provided to us by the presenters and posted them for your perusal.  Instead of last year's method, we've linked to them from the NTC session pages themselves, which you can sort by session, presenter, and track.  There will be links to all available materials under the session's description.

We think this should make it easier for you to find what you want, but please let us know, in comments, below.

> View 2008 NTC Session Materials 

The results of our session evaluations are also available, linked to from the main NTC pages.  C'mon -- you know you're curious.

Evaluation is clearly a sticky wicket. Now that we're smack dab in the middle of the information age, it's easier than ever for nonprofits to track all kinds of data that help them measure and evaluate their performance. We know down to the minute how many people are downloading reports, signing up to volunteer, sending emails to decision makers, visiting our clinics, etc. Pervasive Internet access and ever-shrinking hardware mean that we can collect and store more data than ever before. And we can publish that data more easily than ever before, increasing our transparency as we increase our measurements.

No one will argue that this is a bad thing. But are we really measuring what matters? Do all these numbers really tell us if we are meeting our missions? Take this number. Tell me what you think this number says about NTEN:

• 7158: September site visits to date at http://nten.org.

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A report has just been released on how organizers are using technology to bring about social change and how they could be using it better. After getting input from more than 400 social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, dotOrganize pulled their findings together into the report Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy.

In something that I'm sure is no surprise to many in the field, the