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Allison H. Fine is a senior fellow at Demos, a network of action and ideas based in New York City. She writes and speaks on increasing civic participation by harnessing the power of digital technology. In 2006, she published her latest book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. What is your new book about, and why did you write it? My book offers a fresh way of thinking about advocacy and social change work. It discusses how social media tools—email, the Internet, cell phones, personal digital assistants, smart phones, even iPods—promote interactivity and connectedness, which are at the very core of social change efforts. I had been working with Web-based social change efforts for a while, but in 2005, something really caught my attention. The women of Kuwait for years had been struggling to get full suffrage to no avail. Suddenly, the legislature voted overwhelmingly for women's suffrage. Why? We think in part because many Kuwaiti women were emailing the legislature, and the bottom line was that their emails didn't wear skirts or communicate through burkas. We're in a new age of connected activism in which social media are democratizing and transforming social change efforts. Social media offer the opportunity for people to be more meaningfully engaged in social change. New, inexpensive, and wireless hand-held gadgets give us the ability to interact with thousands or even millions of people. They don't replace the need to meet face to face and aren't a substitute for solid advocacy strategies, but they can augment and deepen that experience. My book is a road map for advocates, their board members, and funders who want to use new digital technology to improve their efforts to solve social problems. The book doesn't prescribe solutions for specific social problems; it offers ideas on advocating more effectively in the new “Connected Age.” Why did you devote a whole chapter to evaluation? Evaluation is so important to the success of any advocacy effort, including those that use social media. If we don't know how well we've done something, we can't get better at doing it. But in many ways, evaluation hasn't taken hold in the advocacy sector. Advocates fear their results won't meet people's expectations and they'll be punished as a result. Often, this is because those expectations are either too long-term or too far outside advocates' control. I worked with advocates for universal child health care. Since, in most states, universal health care legislation and funding will not happen anytime soon, it was a mistake for those organizations to hinge their success entirely on that legislation's passing. They needed to hinge it on what they did on a daily basis—who they connected to, what information they shared, and how that information was used. Their evaluation efforts needed to give a meaningful short-term picture of their advocacy work and how it laid the foundation for their longer term policy goal. Another reason evaluation hasn't taken hold in this sector is that we're not paying enough attention to what advocates, given their size and resources, are capable of doing. For 99.9% of them, evaluation has to include some form of self-assessment rather than external evaluation. My book has a chapter on the importance of self-determination—the ability of advocates to articulate, for themselves, what their work is about and how success will look. This is critical because we need the people actually doing the work to define success and how it will be measured. For the most part, evaluation that's been pushed by outsiders has not been that helpful to advocates. Too often, it promotes a return-on-investment model that gets organizations focused on measures that are not helpful day to day in their organizations. So, advocates feel evaluation is a burden rather than something they can integrate into their work to make it better. You talk about “measuring progress in new ways.” What do you mean? Most measures are too narrow to capture the robust bouillabaisse of social change. We need to focus on how we work, because when we work well internally and play well with others, good things happen. In the Connected Age and with social media, this means asking whether we are successful in at least three areas—connectedness, meaningful participation, and use of information. With connectedness, advocates are in the business of trying to influence the way people think about an issue and how they behave as a result. The essence of that work is connecting with people and generating a broad base of support. But evaluation efforts need to measure more than just the number of people advocates connect with; they need to look at who they're connecting with and how. Are they talking at people or engaging in two-way conversations? Meaningful participation means monitoring and measuring whether people are participating in ways that they enjoy and think have value. Social change efforts will die an early death if they assume that volunteers or partners enjoy what they are doing when they really don't. Is a balanced mix of participation opportunities available that fits a wide audience and creates a strong and engaged network of participants? Use of information means assessing the usability and accessibility of the information that is part of social change efforts. Is the information actually needed? Is it in a format and framed in a way that is useful? Does it inspire action? We need to remember that thoughtful evaluation is difficult. We have to build a culture that rewards learning and improvement over time because that's the only way we can get evaluation to happen at scale. Also, I recommend advocates do evaluation in smaller, bite-sized pieces that they can integrate into their work and use to honestly assess what is working and what isn't. This will make evaluation energizing rather than burdensome. HFRP Staff ^ Back to top |
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