Measuring Impact

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?

3 thoughts on “Measuring Impact

  1. Wow! That was fast. Thanks for implementing it so quickly. Also, I’ve found a very useful post by Beth Kanter about “how to measure the value of your blog.”

    It still doesn’t take into consideration many of the ways that Rising Voices projects are having a positive impact, but I think it is a useful framework to think abut our blogs.

  2. Yes, we also use Site Meter, in fact, it is prominently displayed on our site…although I suspect people get caught up with number of visits (usually not enough).

    We also, for our multi-month projects, implemented a pre and post tests in order to measure participants’ attitudes and amount of knowledge of the subject matter. During our closing program, we asked the participants to say a few words of reflection and then used those quotes for some of our informational material.

    I think each project is different with what they want to accomplish with their work, for example – allowing participants to feel more empowered to be able to express themselves or communicating about their communities, etc.

    However, I do think that inventories like this can help provide some measurable and quantifiable data.

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