Kony 2012 hits the airwaves, and millions are drawn to it. To do what, I wonder? Share it, talk about it, love it - or hate it, to be sure - but to change the situation? And what is it they would do? Is it clear? Is it right? Is Invisible Children the vehicle to do it? How do we know? I have been fascinated watching the saga, and keep wondering: what will be the outcome? And will it be the outcome intended by the nonprofit Invisible Children? How will we know?

All nonprofits have been affected by “the new normal,” a post-great-recession term used to depict record levels of increasing need with decreasing levels of public and other support.  Now more than ever, nonprofits are pressed to show the results of their work.  However, without random assignment, the greatest “theory of change” and “logic model” in the universe cannot offer a causal link between program activities, outputs, and social change.  At best, nonprofits can only depict how their program moves along an expected path toward social change, depict how participants are responding in expected ways, and make a reasonable claim of success (or use lessons learned to improve).  In my opinion, to effectively communicate this claim, nonprofits must integrate storytelling with quantitative results.  Below are a few thoughts about ways to communicate results to donors, funders, advocates, and others with storytelling.

Back in the 1990s, when the Virtual Volunteering Project was documenting best practices in involving and supporting volunteers via the Internet, one of the methods for involving online volunteers was creating what I called byte-sized volunteering assignments.

1.0: Introduction