Measuring Impact

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One of the questions that I have the most difficult time answering is how do we measure the impact of the Rising Voices projects. Of course, there are so many stories I can tell about all of the bloggers that have been trained all over the world and what they have done for people like Suso and Baby Kamba. But it is very difficult to quantify the impact of Rising Voices.

We could count all the posts and words written by Rising Voices bloggers. Or we could count the number of comments left on those posts. But would that really give a meaningful measurement of ‘impact'?

There will never be a perfect science to evaluating and comparing the relative “success” of each project and Rising Voices in general, but I do think that I could do a much better job analyzing and sharing the web stats of the major Rising Voices websites.

There are four major site statistic services: Site Meter, WordPress Stats, Woopra, and Google Analytics. I know that Nari Jibon uses Site Meter. Are any of the rest of the projects using another service to keep track of site visits, referring pages, and used search words?

I think it would be helpful if we all used the same service to measure our site statistics. Then, every two weeks I could take a look at all of the stats and distribute reports. My recommendation is that we all use Site Meter since it is the most transparent service. What do you think?

15 Months Later: A Self-Evaluation

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Looking back at the first proposed timeline [PDF] I submitted to the Knight Foundation all the way back in May of last year, we're mostly on track for everything I had envisioned. There are two notable exceptions: 1.) we have yet to officially fund any localizations of WordPress into other languages (though we were instrumental in facilitating the translation of WordPress into Khmer) and the “curriculum of guides and tutorials” has not been developed as fully as I would like.

One of the difficulties with the localization on WordPress into more languages is that there are two separate localization processes for WordPress.com (the commercial service which many Rising Voices participants use) and WordPress.org the open-source version that anyone can download. There is no easy way, for example, to translate both WordPress.com and WordPress.org into Aymara. I have asked Jeremy (our Global Voices tech guru) to ask the WordPress people for a better solution when he goes to WordPress Camp in a week. I will also show someone from the Foko community how to use PO Edit to localize WordPress into Malagasy while I'm in Madagascar. (Actually, I see that people are already working on the Malagasy localization of WordPress … this is another thing – WordPress has been translated into more languages in the past year than anyone could have ever expected.)

Regarding the guides and tutorials, I think I could do a much better job of delegating some of this work to other members of our community. We have a total of $15,000 budgeted for the creation and translation of these guides. Because I had a specific vision for what the guides should look like, I have foolishly held onto the idea that I should be the one writing all the guides and then have them translated into other languages by Rising Voices participants. Since I would not invoice for the guides, I figured I could save Rising Voices money that could be used to get more participants to more conferences and events. In hindsight, I haven't had enough time finish all of the tutorials and guides. I should do a better job delegating this work. Are any of the Rising Voices coordinators interested in being the authors of wiki-based guides on WordPress, Flickr, and Video Blogging? I have asked Jer to upgrade our wiki so that it can be the definitive place for these types of documents and tutorials.

Finally, I feel that I could be doing better in my communication with all of the grantees. I would like to start scheduling skype calls with two project coordinators each week. That way I am able to talk to someone from each of the projects every two months. This has been difficult for me with my recent travel schedule, but hopefully Rezwan and Juhie can help me with this.