Measuring the Networked Nonprofit hits bookshelves in October | Social Signal

Every once in a while, titans team up. Sometimes the results are catastrophic (Lex Luthor, meet Brainiac) — but once in a while, you get something so wonderful ("You got chocolate in my peanut butter!") it's almost enough to rehabilitate the word "synergy".

Here's a team-up that falls squarely into the peanut-butter-cup category: Beth Kanter, nonprofit social media visionary and pioneer, and Katie Delahaye Paine, the reigning monarch of measurement for organizational communications. Together, they've written Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World.

It's the natural followup to The Networked Nonprofit, which Beth cowrote with Allison Fine, and Katie's Measure What Matters. And it's a terrific book, aiming to enable the kind of accountability that organizations have a right to expect from their communications efforts, online and offline.

That they're tackling the challenge of measuring outcomes in the distributed, often loosely-organized world of networked nonprofits is especially ambitious... but they deliver, with concrete advice and real-world examples. I can say that with first-hand knowledge, because Beth kindly commissioned me to draw a series of original cartoons for the book. And I got to read the manuscript as it evolved and sharpened.

It was a privilege, because I believe Measuring the Networked Nonprofit will make a huge difference for organizations and the causes they support. (It's also daunting, because I'm pretty sure KD will be able to calculate the ROI on each cartoon to three decimal places.) I'll have more to say closer to the release date. But for now, you can get a taste of their approach in Katie's cover article for the latest issue of NTEN: Change and — if you haven't already — the networked nonprofit wiki, Beth's blog and Katie's blog.