Nancy Schwartz, president of Nancy Schwartz & Company and blogger at Getting Attention, has just finished analyzing data from a nonprofit marketing survey of more than 900 nonprofit leaders, revealing that they are doing a poor job connecting with their audience and community.  Nancy explains:

When starting new partnerships or new programs, it's common to do an inventory of the personnel, skills, knowledge, capacity, budget and other factors that can influence the ease of getting started and the obstacles to success.  A similar inventory, or health check, is often done when groups want to get started with social media.  This health check looks to see what kind of experience people already have with the tools, what the organization or group's current position is towards using new technologies, and so on.  Many consultants or third parties conduct health checks like this before diving into a project with an organization so they know how much to prepare and where to start.  These surveys are the topic of this month's Net2 Think Tank topic!

NFPSynergy, the only specialist research consultantcy for nonprofit organizations in the UK, wants to hear from your organization for the next Virtual Promise report.  Over the last seven years, Virtual Promise has provided a unique insight into the use of the internet by charities in the UK.

With growing numbers of participants every year and readers from around the globe, we're told it's the only way charity professionals can compare and benchmark their new media activity, priorities and investment.

Thanks to a grant from the Packard Foundation, NetSquared is in the process of developing curriculum to help nonprofits use social media effectively.

Before we can create the curriculum, we need to know what you need to know so we're not developing the curriculum blindly, or making assumptions about what you want to learn.

We've put together a brief, 6-question Nonprofit Social Media Survey that will take about 5 minutes to complete.  We'd really appreciate it if you took a few minutes to take the survey, and to pass it on to other interested folks.

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

Looking for recommendations for web-based polling and survey tools. What are you favorites?

Flickr Photo Credit: Family Feud Video Game uploaded by omiksemaj

Brett Meyer, NTEN's Communications and Web Manager, asked me to ask all of you to take a moment to fill out their CMS Satisfaction Survey. The survey has 14 questions and will take about 5-10 minutes to complete.

Wondering what CMS is, or if the one you are using is on the survey? Here's what NTEN says:

" CMS Defined

Over the next year (or so), the Civil Society Project will be studying the culture of online communities. We are seeking participants willing to take a short survey and contribute their thoughts and experiences with online communities. We are looking for participants from every age group and from a wide cross-section of the metaverse. If you are willing to take a few minutes and help contribute to this study, please visit: http://www.civilsocietyproject.blogspot.com.

In July 2006, Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network launched the first global survey of healthcare bloggers. They launched the survey because the healthcare blogosphere is rapidly growing in size and importance.

The results of the survey are now available and you can view the full report at http://www.envisionsolutionsnow.com/survey.html.

Here are the findings of the survey that I thought were interesting:

• 3.3% of the respondents classified their blog as an advocacy org/nonprofit
• When asked about the most important reason they started blogging, 19.2% of the respondents stated that they blog to educate others and 8.5% of the respondents blog to advocate for a cause
• When asked about the second most important reason they started blogging, 24.9% of the respondents (the majority of the respondents) said they blog to educate others and 11.9% blog to advocate for a cause
• 55.7% blog about health news, 60.9% blog about personal experiences, and
  47.1% blog about disease information

Since not many of the bloggers that participated in this survey blog for a nonprofit, I started thinking about the blogs I have come across that are for health related organizations and the content health organizations could blog about.

Thanks to a tip from Tim (thank you, Tim!) who went back and tried the links, we all know now the articles were finally made public. Andreas Kluth, the writer, told me that he pushed for changing the rules as well. Glad we all succeeded! Now go and read!

Congratulations to Amanda Atkins, who answered our Social Web Survey and won an iPod Nano! Amanda works for Metropolitan Affordable Housing , an entrepreneurial non-profit organization committed to improving the quality of life for people living on limited incomes.

Like many of our 700+ survey respondents, she came to the survey through TechSoup.org, the technology portal for nonprofits that is the home of the NetSquared project.

Amanda uses social networking sites as one stop shops to blog and share photos. Though she enjoys using them personally, she doesn't use them at work, and sees her main challenge as being public perception of the professionalism of these tools.