Metrics, analytics, reporting – whatever you call it in your organisation, it can feel like a mammoth task, particularly for small communications or marketing teams.
However, the time you spend getting to know your organisation’s baseline social media, website and email marketing performance is worth its weight in gold. It allows you to truly get a sense of what is “normal” for your organisation, allowing you to set realistic goals and define the metrics that matter most to you.
I was recently brought on board to undertake a digital audit for SteelWatch, a fantastic nonprofit organisation working to turbo-charge the transformation to a decarbonised steel sector. Their channels had been in operation for around a year, and they were hungry for insights and recommendations for how to fine-tune their digital efforts going forward.
Here are three top-level recommendations I made concerning monitoring that I think could help you make the practice more meaningful going forward:
Regular monitoring = getting to know what’s “normal” for you
In the nonprofit sector we have a tendency to view our digital monitoring as something we “have” to do for funders. But it’s really about setting aside time to cosy up to your channels and online audiences, and get a sense of what’s normal for you. This is known as your “baseline” performance.
Ever had to contribute to a funding proposal on short notice and provide a “ballpark” estimate of how many followers, impressions and engagements you’ll achieve through the work? If you’ve been monitoring regularly, you develop an inherent understanding of what’s a comfortable stretch, downright impossible, and everything in between. No longer are you pulling a number out at random, it is based on data – and you can’t argue with data.
Translate the metrics into something that means something to you
A regular difficulty that comes up in the various trainings I give is that people don’t always understand what the various metrics mean, or what constitutes a “good” performance in a given metric. Or, like me, they feel put-off by numbers and it makes their brain go to jelly.
The game-changer for me as a maths-phobic digital professional was to translate the metrics into something meaningful to me. I like to imagine I am walking down a busy street:
- Lots of people see me, but they let me walk on by (reach)
- People stop and interact with me (engagement)
- One person waves hello (low engagement time)
- Another person stops me to have a ten-minute conversation (high engagement time)
- A third, quite rude person, cuts me off before I’ve finished my sentence (video drop-off rate)
Make it a ritual
Things that are important get dedicated time and a dedicated human – so don’t scrimp. Put it in the diary and make sure the person tasked gets a full day to work in the conditions that are most peaceful and productive for them.
I recommend doing a “quick and dirty” sense check of your metrics once a month if feasible, for the eyes of the communications team only, and a more considered exercise once a quarter. The quarterly exercise gives you a nice amount of data to work with, and a preceding quarter you can compare your performance to. At the end of the year you should also do a review of the whole year, and I like to focus this more on looking ahead and planning for the next year.
