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Appendices

Appendix A: Methodology & Terminology

Methodology

To provide meaningful metrics no matter the size of the organization, we provide benchmark metrics "per supporter" where possible. For example, we calculated the Facebook fan action rate in our sample by dividing total fan actions by the number of fans (2.5% average). This is similar to the benchmark calculation for email response rate (number of actions divided by total number of recipients).

Glossary of Terms

Monthly fan growth rate – Number of fans at the end of a month, minus the number of fans at the beginning of the month, divided by the number of fans at the beginning of the month.

Fan churn – The rate at which fans either 1) remove themselves as a fan; or 2) hide an organization's news feed from their Facebook profile. The study calculated a fan churn rate by adding together fans who clicked the "hide news feed" button or "remove me," then dividing that number by the total number of fans.

Hide news feed rate – The number of fans who hid an organizations news feed divided by the total number of fans.

Fan removal rate – The number of fans who clicked "Remove me from fans" divided by the total number of fans.

Page view – Same as for web page metrics; one page view means an individual viewed an organization's Facebook Page one time. "Total page views" includes multiple page views by a single person. "Unique page views" strips out repeat page views by the same individual. Pages are visible to non-fans and people without a Facebook profile, so Page view totals includes those people as well, not just fans.

Page view rate – Total unique page views divided by number of posts, divided by number of fans.

Organization post – A post by an organization to the organization's wall on its Page (text, link, video, picture, audio, etc).

Fan post – A post by a fan to the organization's wall on its Page (text, link, video, picture, audio etc).

Fan like – A fan who clicks "like" in response to a wall post on a Page.

Fan comment – A comment added by a fan to a wall post on a Page.

Fan action – Any action by a fan on a Page, including wall posts, comments, and "likes."

Fan action rate – Total Fan Actions divided by total number of fans. We should note that the weekly fan action rate of 2.5% includes repeat actions by one fan, not just unique actions. So if a single fan registers a "like" and also makes two comments in the same week, three actions are counted.

Appendix B: Participating Organizations

Facebook sample:

M+R collected Facebook Page activity, fan growth and fan unsubscribe data from each organization for three months: July through September, 2009.

For Facebook Causes, M+R collected data for the top five Causes by total dollars donated, including Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, The Nature Conservancy, The Prem Rawat Foundation, Overseas China Education Foundation (OCEF), and the Tibetan Freedom Movement.

Twitter Sample:

Twitter Name Followers Joined Twitter
@CharityWater 1,220,978 March-09
@CARE 222,935 October-08
@AcumenFund 219,060 February-09
@LiveEarth 98,833 May-07
@RedCross 29,342 June-07
@Greenpeace 26,110 April-07
@Brainline 21,560 January-09
@Oxfam 11,434 December-07
@HRCBackstory 6,812 January-09
@NARAL 3,874 October-08

The Twitter analysis used publicly available data for the organizations listed; they did not collaborate with M+R on this study. Twittercounter.com was used to calculate tweet and follower totals for October through December, 2009. Retweet data was tracked during December 2009 using twitteranalyzer.com. Oxfam America, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and NARAL are M+R clients.

Appendix C: Sources

Hart, Kim & Greenwell, Megan. "To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green: Though Popular, 'Causes' Ineffective for Fundraising." The Washington Post. 22 Apr 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html.

Haydon, John. "How to use Facebook for business (and nonprofits)." Socialbrite.org. 9 Jun 2009. http://www.socialbrite.org/2009/06/09/free-ebook-from-hubspot-how-to-use-facebook-for-business-and-non-profits/.

Facebook Press Room Statistics: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics#/press/info.php?statistics.

Facebook Developer Statistics (Causes): http://statistics.allfacebook.com/developers/single/causes/2929/.

Schonfield, Eric. "It's Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent of Facebook Fan Pages have Under 1,000 Fans." TechCrunch. 28 Nov 2009. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/facebook-fan-pages-77-percent/.

Rao, Leena. "No Pick-Up in Twitter's U.S. Traffic in November." The Washington Post. 15 Dec 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121503365.html.

Appendix D: A Word About Facebook's Built-In Metrics

Facebook gives Page administrators an Insight metrics dashboard. In many ways, it's a one-stop shop for all your analytics needs as far as your Page is concerned – fan base growth and churn, fan engagement counts, and even geographic and demographic information about your fans is all displayed here...and it's all downloadable for additional analysis. But the Insights dashboard will also introduce you to a "Post Quality" metric, which provides you with both a number score and some number of stars, out of five. We tested this proprietary metric and found no relationship between an organization's weekly "Post Quality" and other key metrics identified in this study, like unsubscribe rates or fan base growth.

Our advice here is similar to what we have to say about "Twitter Rank" (see page 12) – be wary of comparative metrics built from proprietary algorithms. Track the basics, set your own goals and objectives, and strive to improve your relationship with your fans on your own terms – not Facebook's.

Acknowledgments

This report was written by Arielle Holland, Karen Matheson, Marc Ruben, and Andrea Wood.

Mike Amoruso, Sarah DiJulio, Toby Fallsgraff, Eve Fox, and Jeremy Hatter provided invaluable assistance with writing, editing, data collection, and data coding. Karen Matheson aggregated and analyzed the datasets. Eric Lukoff and Meghan Rutherford prepared the publication for print.

Special thanks to all of our nonprofit study partners for sharing their data and making this study possible.

About M+R Strategic Services

M+R is dedicated to helping our clients advance their missions in order to bring about positive change. We do this by helping organizations and campaigns we believe in develop smart and effective strategies, hone their messages, mobilize their members, build grassroots support, raise money, and communicate effectively with the media, the public, and decision makers, both online and offline.

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“Our goal is to help organizations – no matter their size – develop meaningful metrics for their social network outreach.”