December 2010

Dec 2010

14

Give the gift of entrepreneurship this holiday season with Kiva!

by Lani Voivod

Q: What do Kenya, Mongolia, Colombia, and The Philippines have in common?

A: They are each home to one community-minded entrepreneur supported by our Epiphanies, Inc. Kiva Lending Team.  

kivaentrepreneursOur Kiva Lending Team is quite small right now – only four people, to be exact. That includes Allen, me, our son Joe, and one anonymous member. We have wonderful aspirations for building this Team in the months ahead, and would LOVE for you join our Kiva Lending Team and invite your friends to do the same.

In fact, you’re one of the reasons I’m writing this blog post. If you’ve never heard of Kiva, I want to tell you how cool this ambitious organization is, and how easy it is for each one of us to have a positive impact on a person’s life, and on the world at large. If you’ve heard of Kiva but have yet to take the next step, I want to encourage you to take action TODAY.

The loan amount doesn’t matter. (A $25 loan is a great and wonderful start!) What matters is you extend the spirit of holiday giving outside of your immediate circle and send your kindness, blessings, and generosity across borders, oceans, continents, and right into a stranger’s daily life and circumstances. That’s a well-spent 25 bucks, any way you slice and dice it.

kivafacethings1As of November 2009, Kiva.org - a microfinancing company that offers small loans to low-income entrepreneurs around the world - has facilitated over $100 million in loans.

($178,197,825 as of today, to be exact!)

Last month Oprah Winfrey chose the Kiva Gift Card as one of her Favorite Things, inspiring thousands of new social entrepreneurs to take a whack at poverty on a global scale.

More than 512,000 Kiva Users have funded a loan (!!!), and these Lenders are spread across 209 countries.

More than 468,000 entrepreneurs in 57 countries have received a loan through Kiva, and the current repayment rate on these loans is 98.88%. (!!!!!)

On a personal note, this morning we received an update for Verginia Tapaya, a 46-year-old wife and mother who owns a retail shop in the Philippines. Verginia has already used her loan money to buy raw ingredients for her food stall business, as well as new designs to bolster the inventory of her clothing store. The update mentioned Verginia expects to see a nice surge of income, thanks to these modest investments in her business. We are truly happy for Verginia, and this news of her success makes us feel GOOD. If there was a price tag on FEELING GOOD, I am absolutely sure it would cost way, way more than 25 dollars.

If you’ve got 90 seconds to learn a little more about the power, reach, and impact of Kiva, watch this:

 

 

How Kiva Works from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.

 

As French poet Victor Hugo once said, “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Named as one of the top ideas in 2006 by the New York Times Magazine ( just one year after it was launched in October 2005!), Kiva.org is definitely one of those world-shifting, game-changing ideas.

Please, take a bold step today, join our Epiphanies, Inc. Kiva Lending Team, find a hard-working mother, father, shop owner, and/or far-away friend on Kiva.org, and GIVE the gift of entrepreneurship this holiday season.

In the immortal words of Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” 

 

Dec 2010

8

3 big questions forging the fate of your local economy

by Allen Voivod

Before we begin, imagine someone coming up to you and saying, “Hey, I know what’d be fun and exciting! Let’s go see a demonstration of an economic scenario-modeling tool, and how you could evaluate different economic development strategies by the ways they diversify a regional economy in terms of GDP percentages and economic output. Wouldn’t that be a blast?”

You wouldn’t think it’d be a blast, would you?

Yet I’m here to tell you it was. I just had the pleasure of attending a presentation and demo of the Connect NNE Economic Scenario Model™. Its creation was sponsored by FairPoint Communications, and created through its economic development arm, Connect NNE (Northern New England), in partnership with the consulting firm ViTal Economy (VE).

And wow, that’s a lot of big words and corporate elevator pitch material, but it had to be said! Hang in there, kitty – the good stuff’s coming.

Stan HalleThe duo presenting today, VE’s CEO Frank Knott and VE Alliance partner Stan Halle (that’s Stan with the map), are both passionate, wicked smart, creative and committed people who, along with their team, have spent a decade unearthing data that’s been otherwise buried and ignored inside monolithic federal agencies.

They’ve taken this data and used it to help underserved communities – namely, anyone not in America’s 300 largest metropolitan areas – find ways to improve the well-being of their residents and businesses.

Whether you’re talking about an Excel-based tool driven by hundreds of equations and thousands of data points that’s actually easy to use, or about a social networking platform like Facebook, one principle remains the same. It’s not about the technology – it’s what technology makes possible.

These are just three ideas that drove the discussion today with Stan, Frank, and the attendees from a number of agencies, non-profits, and businesses packing a big economic punch in the region:

1. How do you retain wealth?

As Stan analogized in his presentation, think of your community like a pool, and its collective money as the water. When you have to send money outside the community, it’s like the water level drops. When you bring money in, the level rises. The Connect NNE modeling tool is designed to, among other things, help business development champions keep the water in their pool, and add more to it.

Recent “buy local” initiatives, and independent business alliances which encourage people to spend their money in the community, are ways to keep the metaphorical water in the pool that we can all understand in our daily lives. An economic modeling tool like the Connect NNE one can help professionals figure out large-scale ways to prevent the “evaporation,” if you will, of that water out of the pool.

2. Which way are you looking?

Frank pointed out that too many people use data to look backward instead of forward. In the current economic situation we’re all in, there are lost jobs that need to be replaced. But replacing a lost manufacturing job with another manufacturing job, for example, isn’t always the best answer for a community. With a tool like the Connect NNE model, the agencies and organizations driving growth in a region can look at the data to see what kinds of jobs would have a more positive impact in their region.

Then, they can create strategies to attract the kinds of businesses creating those high-impact jobs, and deliver more targeted help to businesses in the area which already provide those kinds of jobs, to help them grow and add even more jobs to the region because of their success.

3. What’s broadband got to do with it?

Here in New Hampshire, broadband Internet access throughout the state is getting better. It’s the adoption, or the “take rate,” where the next big steps need to happen. It’s not just about getting more people online to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. It’s about things like hotels enabling out-of-state guests to stay remotely connected with their work, so the guests will extend their stays and thus spend more money in the area.

One of ViTAL Economy’s white papers talks about rural broadband strategy, and Frank and Stan noted that study after study supports the idea that increased broadband adoption is tied to economic improvements in rural areas.

The bottom line…

As our company is called upon more and more to help economic development agencies, mission-driven organizations, and businesses of all shapes and sizes serving at the heart of communities and regional economies, discovering new tools that help us analyze, assess, and quantify what’s possible is nothing short of thrilling to me. Of course, no projection tools are perfect, and even the best ones still need innovative and passionate people to apply their own perspectives, expertise, and common sense to get the best results.

Frank summed it up very neatly – it’s all about creating measurable tools, setting measurable goals, and taking measurable action.

What do YOU think? How do you see your own community changing in terms of its wealth, job base, or Internet access? Please share a comment and let us know!

Dec 2010

2

5 Things You Need to Know About Facebook’s New Per-Post Insights for Pages

by Allen Voivod

If you’re the administrator of a Facebook Page with less than 10,000 fans, you started seeing something exciting last week – new metrics, “Impressions” and “Feedback,” for every post created after June 25th, 2010.

Facebook PagesNow that you have this new tool for measuring the performance of your Facebook Page, what do you do with it? In this post, we’ll bring you up to speed quickly on what these new metrics actually mean for you and your Facebook presence with these five key points.

1. These Are the Same Impressions and Feedback Released in January 2010

Facebook announced on January 21, 2010 that “authenticated pages” – which required a minimum of 10,000 Fans – would have access to these impression counts and feedback percentages. These statistics were discussed during some of the presentations at the Facebook Success Summit in October, but it wasn’t until November 23 that they became available to all Page administrators, regardless of the number of Likers or the age of the Page.

2. Impressions Don’t Tell the Whole Story

As Facebook defines it, an Impression means your status update, link, photo, or other post has been either:

•    Rendered in a user’s browser in their News Feed
•    Rendered in their browser when they come directly to your Page
•    Shown in a social plug-in (like the Facebook Like Box)

That doesn’t mean a given user actually saw your post! It gets trickier, too – Facebook notes that your Active Users count in Facebook Insights may increase with this change. So take your Impressions number with a grain of salt.

3. Feedback is Based on Likes and Comments ONLY

The percentage you see for Feedback is simply the number of comments plus the number of likes for a given post, divided by the number of Impressions. Facebook takes pains to say that no other actions affect this percentage. No video/photo/audio views, no link clicks, no shares, no nothing.

As with Impressions, though, you have to take the Feedback percentage with a grain of salt. All the times that people didn’t see your post, even though you were credited with an Impression, never had a chance to Like or Comment because they never saw the post.

So your true Feedback percentage – how many people Like and Comment on the things they’ve actually seen, or in other words, part of your audience’s engagement - remains a mystery.

4. The Likes and Comments of Admins Count Toward Feedback Percentage

Facebool Per-Post InsightsHere’s a screen shot of a client of ours who put her Page live three days ago. It’s a great example because the Impressions and Feedback metrics are so close to round numbers that the math is easy and obvious.

Three likes plus two comments = 5 Feedback touches. Divided by the 99 Impressions, you get that 5.05%. The Comment from the Page itself counts in there, as does my Like of the post (that’s the “You” in the list of Likers you see). If Admins didn’t count, the Feedback percentage would be 3.03%.

The upshot? Like your own posts, and feel free to add a thought or two in a comment to anything you post on your Page. Though you may be the only one who can see the boost in your Feedback percentage as a result, you’ll likely also be helping your EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm for determining what posts actually make it into users’ News Feeds.

5. Pay More Attention to the Trend Than the Raw Number

None of us know how many people are really seeing our Page’s posts, and no one really knows how accurate the Feedback percentage is. When you can’t trust the raw numbers themselves, the best you can do is look at the trends over time.

So as you’re trying to figure out what your Impressions and Feedback metrics mean, go ahead and get excited about the one post that got 5% Feedback when the rest are hovering around 1%!

Any time a post fares well above average, ask yourself what’s special, unique, or engaging about that high-performing post, and see whether there’s something to learn to help you improve future posts.

In addition to seeing the Impressions and Feedback directly on your Page, you can also see your Impressions and Feedback on the “Interactions” page of your Facebook Insights for the 10 most recent posts. That’s a great way to start looking at the trend of how your posts are performing. Just be sure to give each post 1-2 days of life before you add it to the trend line – after that point, because Facebook starts removing posts from News Feeds as they get older, the metrics should stay relatively stable.

The $64,000 Question: What Numbers are Good Targets for Impressions and Feedback Percentage?

There aren’t any benchmark numbers out there yet, and since the metrics were just available to admins with less than 10,000 Likers on their Pages in the last week, anything you might have heard in the past would’ve come from a sample of Pages with more than 10,000 Likers. So it’d be like comparing apples to Sasquatches.

Additionally, not everyone’s goals for their Pages are the same. But having a highly engaged Liker base is desirable regardless of your goals. Brand equity, sales, charitable donations, customer support, and many other Pages goals are achieved with a more intently engaged audience.

On the pages we admin – 15, split between government, non-profit, and for-profit clients, with only a couple of weeks’ worth of data – we’re seeing an average about a 0.7% Feedback percentage so far for posts more than 24 hours old.

Again, though, that number can be misleading – remember, higher Impressions don’t necessarily mean higher numbers of actual views, which means the true Feedback percentage is higher, And because the admins’ participation boosts the percentage, the true Feedback percentage would go down if you removed admin Likes and Comments from the number Facebook reports.

At most, we can say that “more” tends to be better than “less.”  Ultimately, it comes down to the one clear mantra about social media content: Post content that is authentic, human, and valuable, in a variety of formats.

If you do that … and if you show that you’ll respond and participate in conversations when people like and comment on your posts … and you watch the trend line to see what’s working and what isn’t … then you’ll see your Impressions and Feedback numbers heading in the right direction.

How about you? What kind of metrics are you seeing so far? Now that you have access to them, do you think they’ll be useful for you? Please leave a comment and let us know!