The Google Analytics URL Builder is a simple tool that helps you track traffic statistics for specific campaign related links.  The tool works by adding parameters to a link from a page on your site that you then track using Google Analytics.  When running an advertising or social media campaign, this is incredibly handy for tracking your ROI.

I'll walk you through how I used the URL builder for this past Tuesday's Sunlight Live coverage of the State of the Union address.

Below is a screenshot of the URL builder.  In the first field, you enter the main URL you want to track. In this case, I'm watching http://sunlightlive.com. The next few fields determine the "Campaign Source" or the traffic referrer you'd like to watch, the "Campaign Medium," the way in which the traffic referrer is driving to your site, and the "Campaign Name." For Sunlight Live, the source was Facebook, the medium was through an advertisement and the name of the campaign was SOTU-2012.

After entering in this information, click the "Generate URL" button, which will add those parameters to your original link:

http://sunlightlive.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Ads&utm_campaign=SOTU-2012

..Which we then used to direct Facebook ad traffic to the Sunlight Live site. Check out the full entry process below:

To track every medium you use, whether it's Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Delicious or some other site, you'll need to create a unique URL for each.

Once the campaign is over, open your site profile on Google Analytics to access your link statistics.  On the left side navigation, head over to Traffic Sources, then Sources, then Campaigns:

To set the date for the life of the campaign, look in the top right corner. Google Analytics will show you the campaigns for that time period, you'll need to sort them by Source so you can differentiate the sites. Above this list click on Source then Traffic Sources then Source:

Below you'll see the statistics by Source for the Sunlight Live State of the Union campaign over the course of two days. You can see that our Facebook Ads brought in the most traffic by far. (You may also notice I wasn't consistent with my naming conventions for Source -- I need to work on that.) For reference, our Facebook drivers are the Facebook link posted above (top driver) and our fan page (second driver):

Remember, this is only traffic to our Sunlight Live page through tracked links we pushed through social media and advertising. The screenshot below captures all traffic to the page, including both links we promoted and organic links from followers of Sunlight.  The first two links are ads we ran for the campaign, though the Google ads weren't captured in the campaign view (I'm unsure of the reason for that):

While Google Analytics provides plenty of information and site data, using the URL builder makes it much simpler to track the ROI on your campaigns and on your efforts to promote them.  What are your experiences with tracking campaigns? Have any of you used the URL builder tool in the past?

 

In July, I wrote about a recently launched service called "If This Then That", IFTTT.com. This services helps you automate certain aspects of online life, like sending you emails based on Twitter interactions or posting links to your Facebook wall from your LinkedIn account.

Recently, IFTTT added a new feature called Recipes, which allows you to share your automations with everyone else. You can sort the recipes by type as well as by popularity -- how new or how 'hot' it is.

I have added ten Sunlight Foundation related recipes to IFTTT to help you automate and share Sunlight-related content and events. You can see them below:

• Sunlight Foundation news updated to your email
• Get Sunlight Foundation news added as a link to your Facebook wall
• Get Sunlight Foundation news shared to your LinkedIn wall
• Send an IM when there is now Sunlight Foundation news
• New Sunlight Scribd documents will send to your email account
• New Sunlight Foundation Tumblr posts update to your Facebook wall
• Get Political Party Time events added to your Google Calendar
• Get Sunlight Foundation blogposts on Readability
• Get Sunlight Foundation Reporting news on Readability
• Retweet anything from the Sunlight Foundation Twitter account

I don't want to inundate you with Sunlight recipes, so I'll stop at 10. Let me know how these work for you and if you have other ideas for recipes I could create. If you have your own you would like to share, please the recipe with a link in the comments.

Mobile access to Sunlight content -- across our main site and many of our projects -- has grown exponentially year-on-year since 2006. It's safe to assume we'll see this growth trend continue as smart phones, iPads and tablets continue to proliferate.

That being said, I've been a fan of how the Flipboard app for the iPad (and now the iPhone) has made social media and other forms of news accessible and easily digestible. I've gone as far as to contact Flipboard with the thought of creating a Sunlight channel to access an emerging mobile audience, ultimately to no avail. At the moment users are only able to access their own social media feeds and pre-selected partner feeds, with self-service coming in the Spring.

Luckily for Sunlight, Google launched a product called Currents, which allows content creators to publish their own content to mobile devices in a user friendly magazine-style layout, very similar to how Flipboard displays media. This self-serve platform gives Sunlight an accessible mobile venue for content promotion and user engagement.

As the video above shows, Google Currents, which launched yesterday with over a dozen featured media partners, makes it simple to set up your own mobile channel. The process is as easy as adding a few RSS feeds and customizing a handful of options (which are only accessible through Google Chrome for the time being) before publishing.

In another post I'll walk you through setting up your own channel, but in the meantime you can check out The Daily Sunlight here. You'll need to install the Google Currents app on your mobile device, but once you do, you'll be ready to go.

It's been a while since I've posted a round-up of the latest Tools for Transparency posts. Take a look at the posts you may have missed over the past few months:

Google+ Pages - November 10th, 2011

Fundraising with Square - November 3rd, 2011

Chat With Your Audience on Google Hangouts - October 21st, 2011

Use Topsy to Track Your Content - October 14th, 2011

Use A Cell Phone to Collect Campaign Signatures - October 6th, 2011

Finding Uses for SoundCloud - September 29th, 2011

Monitor Your Site with Chartbeat - September 23rd, 2011

Managing Contacts with Rapportive - September 15th, 2011

Digest Content in Minutes with Topicmarks - August 18th, 2011

Track the People Tracking You with Ghostery - August 11th, 2011

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, do you have any thoughts on topics I should write about?

Though Google+ launched this past June, they only just this week launched Google+ Pages for groups, nonprofits and businesses. You can find out a bit more below:

Google+ Pages is similar in functionality to what's already available to individual users, with features like circles, sharing links, status updates and posting photos and videos.  At the moment, the service is limited to one admin per page.

We were quick to set up a Sunlight page when the service opened up this week and I've had fun posting even in its current limited capacity.  At the moment I don't foresee our usage of Facebook Fan Pages diminishing, but rather Google+ Pages complementing our overall social media presence.

To see some example pages, take a look at these partners that were  available at launch:

Anderson Cooper 360 Good Morning America Save the Children Special Report with Bret Baier

Are you interested in creating your own page?

It's a fairly straight forward process; you'll need a personal Google+ account and then click through here.  Select the category of page you want to create, whether for a group, a business, a nonprofit or for something else.

Once you've selected the category, Google will ask you for some basic information related to your page, like the name, a related web site url, the page administrator and other info depending on the page type.  When you finish, your page is created and you can begin posting text, photos, videos, links or your location.

To access your page again, you'll need to go to your personal Google+ home screen and click on the drop-down next to your name:

You can also add Google+ Page buttons and badges to your website by going here.

How does Google+ Pages compare to Facebook Fan Pages? Do you find the interface easy to use? Any tips or tricks you've learned this week?

 

Google Hangouts is an excellent free tool that lets you video chat anyone with an internet connection and a web cam.  You can connect with up to 12 different people to video chat, IM or watch YouTube videos together.

Two Hangout features I think are incredibly useful are the ability to make conversations public and to add various types of content to the conversation via Google Docs and screen sharing. This way, you can work on ideas collaboratively and review documents in sync with another person no matter where you are. You could even potentially run your own version of Sunlight Live.

So how would you do this?

When you start a Hangout, you can add additional content to your conversation by clicking Hangouts with extras:

Google will take you to the extras page where you can name your Hangout, see its URL and choose to add specific guests or make your conversation public. If you choose to make your Hangout public, you can still invite up to 11 individuals of your own choosing:

Once your Hangout has started, you can collaboratively edit documents...

Open documents and presentations from your Google Docs account...

Screen share other open applications or screens...

And chat with other participants...

You can see the potential for interacting, collaborating and communicating with small groups and large audiences. All you'd need to make your own Sunlight Live, for example, is a video stream. You could feed that into a Google Hangout, add prepared content and host a few people to answer questions and add facts and commentary.

What do you think? Have you used Google Hangouts? Do you have any ideas or tips on ways to use it?

Topsy is a real-time search engine that pulls links from Twitter and Google+ to help you gauge popular content and trending topics.

A quick search for tweets over the past 24 hours from the Sunlight Foundation reveals related posts and direct links to our content, as well as sites that mention Sunlight by name. Digging a little deeper, we see how related content is faring through the number of tweets, the influence of a link and its momentum, velocity and peak.

This Washington Examiner piece, which mentions a post by Sunlight's Bill Allison,  has garnered 60 tweets and, as you can tell in the screenshot of Topsy analytics below, appears to be picking up momentum.

Topsy also allows you to sort by time frame, content type, language, date and relevance. Although you can filter through Twitter or Google+, you can't do both simultaneously. The advanced search gives you a few more options -- like search by referencing site -- which I find to be highly useful. (To get a good sense of this feature, click to take a look at the results for Sunlight posts related specifically to Huffington Post.) Another useful feature of Topsy is the alert tool: You can subscribe to keyword alerts by email and RSS feed, which will help you stay on top of trending content.

Other uses?

• Monitor the popularity of a specific keyword over the past so many days.
• Track popular images and videos related to your terms of interest.
• Determine authoritative sources related to a hashtag or keyword.
• Push the conversation forward by sharing your search results.

What do you find useful about Topsy? Do you have any tips you can share?

 

While helping out on a recent campaign, I was handed a clipboard to gather sign-ins for an event. Little did I realize how messy the signatures would be when I went to go enter the names into a spreadsheet. It struck me that I could skip a couple of steps and keep the contact info legible by creating a simple Google Form, which automatically creates a corresponding spreadsheet. Once created, all I'd have to do is ask supporters to enter their names on any mobile phone with the link to the Form. Not only does this eliminate the need for paper sign-ins and manual entry, but it also allows us to recruit multiple helpers, to use the data as it's collected for outreach and to share the form link on social media for increased participation.

So how do you set up a Google Form?  It's pretty simple, actually.  Log in to your Google Docs account and click on the Create button in the top left corner. Then, click Form.

Fill out the fields you want to track and then save your form.  Once you've saved it, go back into Google Docs and open up your document. Head to Form and click on Go to live form.

Copy the url at the top of the live form and send it to everyone who will help sign-in/sign-up supporters at your event.  They'll be able to open up the form on the mobile phone or tablet.

Do you have any mobile tricks for use during a live event? I'd love to hear more ideas of what works!

This coming Tuesday, President Obama will deliver a speech alongside the UN General Assembly, coinciding with the unveiling of the National Action Plan describing its new open government commitments. This is the result of the Open Government Partnership, which formally debuted in July.

Next week's speech will kick off another round of government announcements about open government policies both here and abroad. Sunlight and other NGOs around the world will be asked to explain the meaning of what our respective heads of state have committed to do.

Ambitious Undertaking

The National Action Plans can have significant value, so long as governments take the opportunity to commit to meaningful reform and learn from each others' strengths. If they don't, the project could waste time and detract from important domestic transparency work that still needs to be addressed. The US should also recognize the transparency issues where they're clearly behind other countries, such as tracking government spending, or contractor misconduct (where Indonesia, Brazil, and the UK have all been leaders).

For Sunlight's part, we've participated in a number of the administration's consultations on their Action Plan, attended meetings with administration officials, and submitted our suggestions for what their plan might do best to address. We've also talked with other groups and worked with OpentheGovernment.org, who assembled a deep roster of important ideas waiting to be implemented.

We're anxious to hear what President Obama discusses in his remarks on Tuesday, and to see the details of the National Action Plan. When Obama first entered office, his administration's Open Government Initiative made significant strides in creating a more open executive branch. But their work has also stalled significantly. The President's dedicated senior transparency staffer was never replaced, and administration officials have started referring to transparency as something they've already achieved, and as something they didn't get enough credit for, instead of a complex, ongoing effort that takes dedicated effort and attention.

Domestic Transparency 

The administration shouldn't be starved for transparency issues they could address. A number important decisions faced by the country have been made in secret, and now a small group of 12 Members of Congress are replacing the work of the rest of the Congress, all while being lobbied and accepting campaign checks that won't be disclosed until their work is done (or not at all, in the case of lobbying contacts).

The financial reporting systems the government uses offer abysmally bad data, and Members of Congress often evade a fake earmark ban by strong-arming agencies into serving their districts, despite an Executive Order designed to prevent it. The government still relies on an expensive, proprietary system for tracking corporate identities, locking them into an unhealthy reliance on a system that limits public tracking of corporate influence and limits corporate accountability. (These and other concerns, and remedies to address them, can be found in the list compiled by OpentheGovernment.org.)

We hope that the Open Government Partnership creates an opportunity to fix these and other related issues. Perhaps some of them will be addressed in President Obama's speech on Tuesday.

Role of NGOs

When we're all asked to evaluate our respective governments' National Action Plans, we'll face a few options in evaluating their work.

If we compare the administration's National Action Plan against what came before it, there's really no contest. Nothing like this has been done before (at least on an international level), and the Open Government Partnership is certain to push governments around the world to enact better policies and strengthen democratic norms around transparency. Countries' best impulses are validated, international relationships are strengthened and public expectations are raised.

If we compare the National Action Plan against the governance issues countries face, and against what the plans could be, then it's a very different evaluation. Based on our experience thus far, the process sometimes looks more about the US advancing foreign policy goals than it is about empowering domestic reform. The vehicle of the National Action Plans may end up looking similar to the Open Government Directive, which similarly caused an enormous amount of good to happen, while also exposing the limitations of such aspirational government declarations.

If the governments involved in the Open Government Partnership are trying to demonstrate what it means to commit to accountability and transparency on the world stage, then NGOs face a similar responsibility. We're tasked with helping to cause change, while also being objective judges of the performance of political actors and their imperfect incentives. As Sunlight approaches next week's announcements, we'll have both roles in mind, as the US helps start a national movement for transparency, and we continue to face serious accountability issues domestically.

Global Integrity's Nathaniel Heller brings up a similar point in his post earlier this week, writing about the tension between data-based reforms and other complex structural issues:

Instead of fetishizing open data portals for the sake of having open data portals, I’d rather see governments incorporating open data as a way to address more fundamental structural challenges around extractives (through maps and budget data), the political process (through real-time disclosure of campaign contributions), or budget priorities (through online publication of budget line-items).

This is a very familiar tension for us at Sunlight, especially as we have a foot firmly planted on both sides of his frame -- advocating for broad, aspirational data policies, while at the same time fighting tooth-and-nail for meaningful reforms for how influence and procedure are disclosed to the public.

In the end, these approaches reflect the dual roles we play as NGOs -- working with governments, while also judging them, and responding to the failures and shortcomings we see, while also building new systems based on the things we envision.

 

Update: This post was edited to reflect that the Open Government Partnership only formally debuted in July 2011.