Drowning in data

This post tackles one of the questions I get asked most often about communications monitoring. How do you choose what to measure when the possibilities seem overwhelming?

For small organisations, keeping an eye on some key metrics (things you can measure) is a really useful way of helping you to see whether you’re using your limited time wisely and finding the most effective ways to spread your messages. However, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in statistics when evaluating how well digital content is doing, whether it’s looking at a wealth of website data or sifting through each social media platform’s insights. So what should you measure and why?

Here I’ll suggest some possible starting points. They are illustrated with examples from three different organisations that I’ve worked with, explaining how we chose what to measure and what the outcomes were.

Be strategic

Some of the best things to measure are those that can help you see whether you’re making progress with your strategic goals. These might have been explicitly identified in your communications strategy, ideally as SMART goals with something measurable built in, but more generally they are about how your comms will support the mission of your charity or the aims of your project.

A small charity wanted to increase the click through rate (i.e. the number of people who click on the link in the post to find out more from the charity’s website) on LinkedIn for posts relating to a particular project. The strategic goal behind this was increasing sign-ups for the project. Monitoring the click through rate allowed us to test different ways of communicating the same message to see what was most effective, this included using different types of media, testing ways of framing of the core messages, and changing the level of detail in the posts. This work led to a better understanding of LinkedIn and its algorithms, as well as which posts connected best with the charity’s audience there.

Be selective

You don’t need to measure everything at once, even on your priority platforms. Taking a more step by step approach can allow you to develop a deeper understanding of the information you’re gathering.

After creating a new website, including developing a fresh content strategy, a local charity wanted to see how different types of content were performing. In particular they wanted to understand the impact of the newly introduced kinds of post. To do this we decided to focus on page hits and read time, which would help us understand what kinds of content were engaging people enough to get them to visit the site, and then once they were there, actually staying to read the post. Having found the new content types were proving consistently popular, we could then justify the time to look more closely at where people were coming to the website from – for example, Facebook posts, email newsletters, internet searches and so on. This work helped guide a new posting strategy that better understood where the content was most likely to do well, and also led to increased understanding of the interests of audiences on different platforms.

Be specific

Analytics can be used to help you answer a specific question.

I was working with a church who wanted to know if their Eco Church work was resonating with the local community. Looking at the Facebook posts that had been shared into community groups, we were able to see that content on projects like swift boxes, hedgerow planting and toilet twinning performed not just better, but significantly better than other kinds of posts that they had put into these groups. To judge performance we looked at both reach and engagement to see both how many people were seeing the posts, and most importantly for thinking about resonance, what the engagement rate was like. In the course of the research, we were also able to see that posts about practical action related to the environment did much better than those relating to worship or spirituality. The result was more confidence in posting this kind of content into community groups, and a more selective approach to sharing.

Some final thoughts

Remember that statistics are not the be all and end all (despite the focus of this post!) A comment on a blog post that shows you’ve really connected with someone, or the person who comes along to an event because of a post they saw on Facebook, even if they didn’t interact with it there, are things worth capturing and celebrating too.

Don’t get sucked into making comparisons with other organisations, especially if their context is vastly different.

Most of all, use the data you gather to make your comms as effective as they can be. Use what you learn to inform what you do in the future.