Trying to figure out how to better engage your communities online? Wondering why people don’t seem to be finding or participating in the action items on your website? Good web design and engaging content are obviously key. But if people are getting lost before they reach your action, Google Analytics can help, with their Goals and Funnels features. It sounds wonky, but they’re actually easy to set up, and can be invaluable for helping your organization’s website direct visitors to take a substantive action.

So what are Goals and Funnels? more

How much did your elementary education cost? The clever folks at Building Tomorrow have found a great way to use that simple question to drive an innovative campaign that connects the costs of a primary school education in the United States to the work they do building schools in Uganda.  more

On November 2nd, 2010 at 5:26pm EDT, Politico's Tony Romm posted a rather scathing article. The article focuses on the claim that Google's Election Center, which is a service intended to match a voter's address with the location of their ballot box, had potentially misdirected "more than 700,000 households" in twelve battleground states. more

There’s an obvious appeal to having a large email list: you have the ability to reach many people with one click. But recently I’ve begun questioning the value of large email lists, and the effectiveness of bulk email in general, specifically for the types of clients EchoDitto works with – non-profits, progressives, NGO’s, etc. more

A friend pointed me to this great post by Danah Boyd on Alternet discussing the implications of the race and class demographic divides between Facebook and Myspace:  more

http://www.alternet.org/media/142356

When you're doing online engagement, it's not always easy to know what's working or what you should be doing better. With limited time and resources, its not good enough to have a gut feeling about what you should doing, if you don't have numbers to back it up, you're effectively flying blindfolded. more