ED Blogging, Impact and the Power of Storytelling

Ok...I'm tooting my own horn here a bit, such is the fate of a blogger.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, CERF's Executive Director, Cornelia Carey, was traveling to hurricane effected areas of the gulf coast and planned to blog about it. She returned a couple days ago after a week in Louisiana and Mississippi, and in that time posted three incredibly powerful blog entries about her experiences. If you are interested, please visit her blog and see her Flickr photo album. (CERF board member and TACA Interim ED, Craig Nutt, traveled with Cornelia on part of her trip and has commented on the blog to beautifully capture the situation there.)

As a metrics guy, I'm interested in what, if any, organizational impact this new communication venue has had and/or will have on CERF.  It's too soon to know the long term impact; much depends on if Cornelia continues to blog, as planned, to facilitate a dialogue with the broader community on the role of the arts in rebuilding the gulf coast. Nonetheless here are some interesting statistics in the 7 days since the first posting:

• Sent 5100 email alerts announcing the blog. 30% open rate and 50% click through rate of those that opened the email (the highest click through rate we've ever had). At the same time we had the highest rate of unsubscribes that we've ever had.
  
• 900 unique page hits
• 25 direct replies
• 5 blog comments (I find it interesting that readers are more apt to reply via email than post a public comment)
  
• 130 FeedBlitz email subscribers (I'm blown away by this!!!)
  
• 2 RSS aggregator subscribers (Did someone say RSS had gone mainstream? Not here!)
• Increase in Blog referrals
• Increased site hits by 5 fold compared to average daily/weekly statistics.
• No online donations can be attributed to traffic generated by the blog

Beyond the numbers, is the effect that Cornelia's presence and willingness to share her experience to the broader public is having on the people she met there.  She said that everywhere she went, people told her that they were reading her blog and thanked her for CERF's work.  It is my aim to leverage the information and stories that Cornelia has returned with to sharpen our response and have a greater impact on the lives of those we serve in these affected areas.  Stay tuned...


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