You are on page 1of 11

Use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to show growth of networks focused on common purpose.

Movements succeed when founders and catalysts are able to increase the number of people who take roles in the work and network-building required for a movement to succeed. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how SNA tools can map networks and show their growth over time. The President of the USA started as a community organizer. If he were using SNA tools he might have been able to demonstrate his impact on bringing people together, focusing them on issues, and solving community problems. By demonstration the success an organizer has in bringing people together and expanding the network over a period of years we hope to convince financial supporters to invest in development of SNA tools to enable others to demonstrate their impact, while also increasing the number of donors and investors who support the on-going work of network-building and community organizing.

This graphic illustrates how an idea can start with one person and spread throughout the world over a period of years. Read full article at

http://tinyurl.com/TMI-Network-growth
Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012 Page 1

Background:
The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) was launched in 1993 by Dan Bassill and six other volunteers, at the same time as they were launching a Cabrini Connections one-on-one tutor/mentor program in Chicago. The organization has never had much money to support the goals of the T/MC and thus has depended on volunteers and interns to fuel its growth. With limited financial support and a lack of commitment from the philanthropic community to the type of community organizing T/MC was doing, growth has been slow, yet consistent. Since 1994 T/MC has been using maps to show where tutor/mentor programs are needed and to show the distribution of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in the Chicago region. T/MCs goal has been to compare maps from year-to-year to show a change in the distribution and availability of programs over time. Funds to support this mapping of programs has been limited and funds to do this type of analysis have not been available. Read more about uses of maps: http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/mapping-the-programs

Social Network Analysis (SNA) Since 2000 T/MC has been looking at a different type of maps, which are visualizations of social networks. In 1999 Valdis Krebs of Orgnet.com donated software and provided a training so that interns working with T/MC could begin to do work in this area. While the group was able to begin to map participation in the May and November conferences, inconsistent time commitments and lack of funding limited work that could be done. http://kalyanimisra.blogspot.com/2010/10/socialnetwork-analysis-of-may-09.html A workspace for this project is open for others to join. http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com/group/technologyinternswithtutormentorconnection

Mapping growth of TutorMentorConnection.ning.com from 2007 to 2012 Interns from Illinois Institute of Technology have worked with T/MC for six week periods every Jan-Feb and May-June since 2007. In May 2012 Chul Won Park devoted his internship to learning to use a free SNA software called Gephi (http://gephi.org ) and mapping the growth of the group at h ttp://tutormentorconnection.ning.com. The work is on the following pages.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 2

Change of social network since 2007~May. 2012


NING started as a free platform for social networking and Dan Bassill, President of the Tutor/Mentor Connection established a group page in July 2007. When people joined a Ning group they were able to set up a personal space/profile and become part of groups. They could also become friends with others. Initially NING groups were highly interactive, and people could be part of several different groups. In 2010 NING went to a fee based service and many of the original users migrated to other platforms. In addition, the features that encouraged people to be part of groups hosted by others were weakened and traffic to sites became more dependent on advertising and network-building. Tutor/Mentor Connection originally hosted a discussion forum at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org when that site was built in 2005. However, as Facebook and other social networking platforms were launched, individuals seemed to want more identity in their social spaces. Thus, the T/MC set up the Tutor/Mentor Connection Ning site. It later added other Ning sites at NUtutormentor.ning.com (to bring together volunteers from Northwestern) and Cabriniconnectionsalumni.ning.com (to bring together people who have been part of tutoring programs at Wards and Cabrini Connections since 1965). In each of these sites RSS feeds to blogs written by Bassill and others gave visitors a wide range of places to go to learn more about ways to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs reach more kids. To do this SNA analysis Chul Wan Park created an excel spreadsheet showing what year each member joined the Tutor/Mentor Connection.ning.com site as well as what city and country they came from. This chart shows the growth from 2007-2012

A total of 417 people joined the site between 2007 and June 2012. (There may have been more but some people who joined have left the site). 63% of those who joined came from the US while 13.4% came from Africa. The majority of the 7.7% from Asia were part of intern programs that connected students from Korea, China and India with the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 3

2007 Network Launched. The graphic below shows that two people joined social network in tutor-mentoring website in 2007. One was from Boston and the other from Kent, Ohio.

In 2008 58 additional people joined the social network in tutor-mentoring website. For this analysis Chul looked at the people each member connected to as friends. The more friends you have the more connected you are to others in your network. There are a number of articles to reach about the importance of formal networks and the way knowing your network can help you find people who can help you find information and connect with others who can help you in your work. See articles in this section: http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com/group/technologyinternswithtutormentorconnection/forum/topic s/articles-to-read-about-social While all of those who joined the Ning site are part of Dan Bassills network, as owner of the site, you can see how many of these are also linked as friends. Keep in mind that the Tutor/Mentor Connection had almost no money to devote to marketing the Tutormentorconnection.ning.com forum and that this is just one of several different web sites hosted by the T/MC.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 4

148 new members joined the Tutor/Mentor Connection forum in 2009. This graphic shows that Bassills friend network continued to expand and that a few others were also building friend networks. There are many ways this information could be looked at. The maps could color code for countries or continents. The analysis could have looked at the different sub groups hosted on the site, to see how many people joined these and how they grew over time. By the end of 2009 the forum had a total of 209 members. Thus, from July 2007 to December 31, 2009 Bassill added 209 new potential information users and potential partners to the Tutor/Mentor Connection by way of this Ning.com site.

Other types of network analysis tools are available. This graphic shows the people Tutor/Mentor Connection interacts with on Twitter at a point in time. Its created using Mention Map http://mentionmapp.com/ . When you scroll over a node on the map you can see who the contact is, and you can see who that contact is connecting to. SNA tools are becoming more and more interactive and can be a valuable way to understand the impact individuals and organizations have in bringing people together to focus on solving social problems.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 5

From this view of the map we can see that the number of people Dan Bassill is connected to is the largest group. However, there are at least four other groups with growing numbers of members.

Many of the people who joined the network were interns from IIT and other colleges. They are the blue dots shown at the left side of the graphic.

112 members joined the http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com in 2010, bringing total membership up to 321. Purple dots on this graphic are Dan Bassill and the two others who joined in 2007. Red dots are people connected as friends with Dan. Light Green dots people who are connected with the other two people who joined in 2007. Yellow dots are people who are connected people in Dans friend network. Light Blue dots are individual members who have not connected with others.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 6

The social network in tutor-mentoring website added 72 more people in 2011 and grew to 393 total people.

Using the Gephi.com application the data can be shown as nodes with different color coding. Names can also be applied to the map.

Two interns from IIT worked with T/MC in May-June, 2012. This graphic is from a presentation done by Mina Song. This shows how we can look at networks built around individual members of a community.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 7

By the middle of 2012 the network had gown to 417 total members.

This graphic shows one of the sub groups within the 2012 network map. Our goal is to host an interactive platform on the internet where the maps would be interactive and people could click on nodes to know who the person was and who the members of their network are.

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 8

This is another of the sub groups that can be seen within the T/MC Ning group by May 31, 2012.

Why is this important? If we can demonstrate how networks grow as the result of intentional actions by intermediaries, community organizers and/or backbone organizations, we hope to be able to attract more consistent leadership, volunteer and financial support for the work involved in this type of network building. In articles on Collective Impact published on the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) the importance of backbone organizations who can bring people together and focus on common agendas is highlighted. See http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact In the article the author writes: Creating a successful collective impact initiative requires a significant financial investment: the time participating organizations must dedicate to the work, the development and monitoring of shared measurement systems, and the staff of the backbone organization needed to lead and support the as Strive has been, it has struggled to raise money, confronting funders reluctance to pay for infrastructure and preference for short-term solutions. Collective impact requires instead that funders support a long-term process of social change without identifying any particular solution in advance. They must be willing to let grantees steer the work and have the patience to stay with an initiative for years, recognizing that social change can come from the gradual improvement of an entire system over time, not just from a single breakthrough by an individual organization. Tutor/Mentor Connection has not had nearly the level of public support that Strive has gathered yet as these maps show, the network of people coming together in a shared space has grown from year to year. The T/MC started with seven volunteers and no money in 1993. Its first print newsletter in 1993 went to 350 people. However, by 1999 the organization had more than 13,000 people on its database who were receiving a printed newsletter every four months. While the first conference in May 1994 was attended by 70 people, the second in November 1994 was attended by 200. These conferences have been hosted every six months since then with peak attendance in 1999 at 350 people. In the years since 2000 as funds have been even harder to find the T/MC moved more to the internet. Its web sites have recorded more than 800,000 unique visitors and more than 6 million page views since 1998. While the Ning site is one meeting place the organization hosts similar platforms on Facebook, Linked in and Twitter and is active in many groups hosted by others.
Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012 Page 9

This is a map showing some of the places where Dan Bassill connects with others to share ideas and information that can be used to support the growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs. This is a map showing part of Dan Bassills Facebook network.

Mapping these networks with Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools can build a richer understanding of how some people are effective in building networks focused on common purpose. Creating interactive platforms to share this information can help people with common goals connect more easily with others who share the same goals. While many in the non profit world are trying to understand Mentoring as an education solution Tutor/Mentor Connection sees it as a strategy to expand social capital for young people and families who live in areas of highly concentrated poverty. This set of articles can be used to expand your understanding of social capital and how it is important to how people thrive in work and life. http://tinyurl.com/TMI-Research-SocialCapital Thus, as Tutor/Mentor Connection finds partners to help develop GIS and Social Network Analysis mapping capacity we will demonstrate how our network has grown as an example of how others can become leaders and network-builders who work to solve problems important to them. We can also develop tools that others can use to demonstrate their own effectiveness in building networks of purpose. Finally, we can build a tool to enable mentoring programs to show how the network of youth and volunteers grows as they stay involved in organized tutor/mentor programs for multiple years. If we can build these tools and help people use them we can build new reasons for leaders in business, government and philanthropy to support intermediaries and community organizers who bring people together to solve problems while also providing new reasons for this same group to provide general operating support, volunteer talent and technology to support constantly improving, mentor-rich programs reaching young people in more poverty neighborhoods of America. The maps in this article were created by interns from Illinois Institute of Technology who go to college in Korea. They did not know anything about the Tutor/Mentor Institute or Tutor/Mentor Connection when they joined us on May 16, 2012. They had no experience with Gephi. Thus, these maps are just skimming the potential of what could be done to map and understand networks and how they grow over time. If we can find investors, partners, additional interns and/or research students, we can do more to expand our use of mapping and visualizations. We hope youll will want to get involved with this work.
Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012 Page 10

Build your own understanding of the value of Social Network Analysis. Read more:
Creativity, Innovation, Knowledge Mgt Section of Tutor/Mentor Connection Library has many articles that explain the power of networks - http://tinyurl.com/TMI-Creativity-KM Social Capital Articles and Research section points to reading that shows the value of enriching the networks of young people - http://tinyurl.com/TMI-Research-SocialCapital Managing the 21st Century Organization, by Valdis Krebs, shows the value of expanding informal networks for workers and demonstrates use of SNA to better understand these connections. http://orgnet.com/Managing21CenturyOrganization.pdf Read Tutor/Mentor Institute blog articles on * Learning - http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/learning * Social Capital - http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/social%20capital * Network building - http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/network%20building Network Analysis - http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/network%20analysis This presentation was created by Chul Wan Park during a six-week internship with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in Chicago. A second presentation showing this information was created by Mina Song, a second intern working with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC during May-June 2012. This can be seen at http://www.scribd.com/daniel-f-bassill-7291/d/98368513-Social-Network-Analysis-Mapping-growthof-a-Network

Become a partner, intern, investor, volunteer and help us build this platform. Email tutormentor2@earthlink.net to schedule a discussion Join the SNA group on Ning and get involved http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com/group/technolog yinternswithtutormentorconnection

Tutor/Mentor Connection Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC


Merchandise Mart PO Box 3303 Chicago, Il. 60654

Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC Demonstration of Social Network Analysis potential. 6/26/2012

Page 11

You might also like