37 Signals is a supersmart little company known for creating easy-to-use web-based project management tools (namely the Basecamp suite), and they have just announced the latest in their product family: Campfire. 
According to their website, “Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it’s miserable for 3 or 4 or 7 or 15+ people at once. Campfire solves that problem and plenty more. ”
With the release of this simple chatroom platform, I think they’ve just taken one major item off of my personal to-do list.
- Do the dishes
- Fix the front gate
Find a simple, stable, cheap platform for online nonprofit focus groups- Save the world
A little background: By day I work at a university with a nonprofit evaluation team. We work for other nonprofits that are trying (…or are being forced to by their funders) to discover and amplify the best aspects of their program. A major part of our job is finding out what people think works well — so we are typically creating surveys and conducting focus groups or our clients.
Focus groups are a great way to bring together a lot of good people and get a lot of good advice about a program. Among all the fun things we do with nonprofits, they’re my favorite. But in-person focus groups are expensive and difficult to arrange, especially when you are working with busy people. Who has time to sit around and talk about making a program better? You’ve too busy working on the program, dammit!
This problem is what first attracted me to the idea of conducting focus groups online. At the American Evaluation Association’s conference last year in Toronto, I was fortunate to sit in on a session that discussed the existing methods for doing this type of work. All of the evaluators in the room seemed to really get excited about it: online focus groups solve so many of of the distance/time/money problems evaluators face, especially in the nonprofit sector. Some people have already been doing this with telephone surveys, but in many cases (depending on your phone company and country) this can be really expensive — and it’s unlikely to give you a transcript.
And, unfortunately for most of us at the evaluator’s conference, the presenters were from the for-profit world, and their solutions were ridiculously expensive — about $1500 per focus group administration. These are basically managed chat rooms in which invited participants are egged on with questions from a well-trained facilitator. This is why online focus groups have been largely a marketing research arena — big pharma et al don’t need no stinkin’ open source solution.
After the session I raised the issue of reconfiguring WordPress or a more robust CMS (Joomla or Drupal) with a chat feature. If you could just manage to get all of your participants together online at the same time (or over a 3-day period), you could easily solicit lots of feedback. (And you wouldn’t have to transcribe the results). Folks (including focus group guru Richard Kreuger) were excited about the possibility of finding a cheap way to do this: there is a serious need for something way below the $1500 range.
Unfortunately, in my research, I that most server-side free/open source chat software is buggy, poorly designed, and horrible with server resources. I found that people were using hosted solutions like Yahoo discussion groups in a pinch, and having limited success. So, not really able or willing to create a program from scratch, I put the project on hold. The recent release of Campfire brings a number of awesome features to the under-$20 table. Here are my notes on the best features for focus groups with Campfire:
- It’s simple, clean, easy, elegant (all synonyms for “37 signals product”)
- Real time image previewing (for getting reactions, for example, to a chart)
- You get a unique url for your chat, unlike an IM chat, so you can invite people to a web page
- It tracks previous conversations
- It keeps a record of who said what when (the timestamps are just killer)
- You can have secure chats (essential, I would think, for IRB approval …)
- No software other than a web browser is needed.
- Repeat: automatic transcriptions!
So I’m really excited about Campfire and I look forward to trying it out, hopefully with a longer post in the near future about the existing options for online research of this nature. Until then, check it out for yourself if you need to do some group instant messaging, I think the possibilities are amazing if you just have a talented coordinator and some people that have valuable things to say.
I am currently researching a field of design known as “Participatory Design” that has a fascinating history (dealing with Scandinavian labor unions) and a very promising future. In short, PD is about incorporating the user in the design process from day one. The resulting ideas and workflows are, in my mind, incredibly powerful tools for working on any project. My focus is web development.
Most of my interest in this concept comes from my day job at a nonprofit evaluation firm — we do “collaborative evaluation” to help programs develop. The concepts are largely the same, and I’m just trying to apply them to web design and the development of usable, useful online tools.
This process is intimately involved with many of the same user-centered concerns that preoccupy other ICT-development folks, such as the advocates of free and open-source software.
The center of the world for PD is the organization Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. They have a site dedicated to PD resources.
Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles for a fee. It’s easy — they’re delivered electronically, but they aren’t cheap — about $5.00 per article.)
Here’s the link to the Google article:
Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus
Evaluation is an important, albeit rarefied, science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program — or your entire organization? Well, there’s an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.
Unfortunately, as with most rarefied, important sciences, the “discipline” part tends to mean something more like “punishment,” rather than “a codified mode of study.”
At any rate, doing a real, formal evaluation of a program is still better than wasting your time doing something that’s useless, fruitless, a waste of energy or just a sham. So here’s a buch of resources from the internet to help you get going for free. Thanks for this post go to Joyce B. Morris and David Colton, Ph.D., from the EvalTALK Listserv.
Evaluation Resources:
The Program Manager’s Guide to Evaluation
Taking Stock: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Your Own Programs
Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs
The 2002 User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation
User-Friendly Handbook for Mixed Method Evaluations
Tools for Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation
“Also, there are some good, free resources on the Internet and from state and federal government agencies. For example, you can order “Introduction to Program Evaluation for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs” (2001) from the CDC (www.cdc.gov/tobacco). Don’t be turned off by the reference to tobacco control as that is used for context. The “W.K. Kellogg Foundation Evaluation Handbook” can be ordered from the foundation or is available as a free download in pdf format
.”
When Nonprofit X goes to county Y and begins handing out seeds and fertilizer to farmers as part of an agricultural intervention during a famine, how does Nonprofit X know that they aren’t causing a greater problem or ignoring a better solution? Perhaps it turns out the fertilizer is more valuable when it is sold on the nearby market than it is in the ground. Perhaps microloans or digging new wells are better solutions that the population is looking for.
At any rate, even in this very simple hypothetical situation, it is clear that you have to go there. You have to ask and investigate. You should, in short, behave in a manner very similar to that of a market researcher. In fact, if we undertook all of our development decisions with a rigorous marketing mindset, we’d be going in far fewer circles with misused money.
This is the gist of a thought-provoking article from the Harvard Business School on the concept of marketing being used in human development situations involving poverty. I think it is especially pertinent for folks involved with technology and communications because of the heavy (though often overlooked) influence of advertising and marketing in all media.
I would call this a process of evaluation, but the “marketing” concept works well.
In many poverty-reduction programs, be they governmental, philanthropic or academic, the decision making about method — how to alleviate poverty — comes from the top down. This makes sense in many ways, and I’m certainly thankful for the developed world’s research institutions, mulling and muttering in their thinktanks about how to best deal with poor farmers and streetworkers around the world.
But programs have to take all of their stakeholders into account when it comes to crafting policy — and that should mean subjecting proposed solutions to the “market” of consumers — the population in poverty. In traditional markets, this process is essential, because bad ideas don’t make money and are necessarily reformed or removed from the market. But in many governmental and philanthropic situations, bad ideas can thrive.
This is a concept of including the population you are serving the in the program decisions that you are making. It’s that simple.
Here’s a bit:
“We’re making the important distinction of replacing the exchange paradigm with an intervention paradigm, where we say we’re intervening to change lives, not to change consumer choices.
… Four billion people are outside the exchange network. But it’s not as though these folks have nothing to do with marketing. Somebody is approaching them. Somebody might approach a poor subsistence farmer in Uganda to say, ‘We want to give you some agricultural aid. We want to give you a loan.’
There again, why is advocacy important? Because even in that case, what we find is that they have already decided what’s good for the farmer. They already decided that what’s good for the farmer is these kinds of implements, these kinds of equipment, this kind of loan. In fact, the farmer may say, ‘Given everything else, that’s not exactly the kind of output that is going to enhance my life. I want security and food for the family first, before I become this terrific entrepreneur.’”
Read the entire article at the Harvard Business School website.
Here’s a chart of evaluation software packages form the Evaluator’s exchange. The list is untested by yours truly, but the Evaluation Exchange (From the Harvard Family Research Project) is an excellent resource for folks working with children.
Here’s a bit from the article, the chart is about a 60K PDF.
A wide variety of software packages are available to help nonprofit organizations track program management data and outcome measures for evaluation. One advantage of an “off-the-shelf” package is that these packages are often “tried and true.” Another is that the software makers often supply training and technical assistance to users. On the other hand, organizations should carefully consider whether the available packages are appropriate for their needs. In some cases, organizations may find it more useful to design their own tracking systems, although the process can be time-consuming and may require extensive technical training.
The Evaluation Exchange Harnessing Technology for Evaluation: Promising Practices - at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP)