Outcomes is where "ITS" at! Or is it?

Metrics and outcomes are all the rage! 

Big data, improved systems, infographics, return on investment, grant reporting and more trends have pushed us to focus on the outcomes and metrics. Which as a Finance major, I love!

However, this weekend I was with my son at a swim clinic at the Y with Rebecca Soni and she got me thinking. She said something like (not an exact quote, paraphrased):

Know the outcome you want. But in the moment, focus on what you are doing, not the outcome.

This really made me appreciate my work at The Cara Program even more. We have an intense focus on outcomes and metrics. The numbers surround us each day. They are posted, they are talked about, they are emailed and everyone knows their part to make the number goals.

But at the same time, we are consistently living in the moment. Each morning we have motivations with our students, in which we celebrate the small achievements. 

I could ramble on with this thought, but I will just leave you to finish the thoughts in your own way on this one. 

Metrics are just numbers without context! (Give staff a voice! Part 3 of 10)

Metrics, here, metrics there. Metrics everywhere. Everywhere you look everyone is talking metrics.

But does these numbers even matter or mean anything?

Example: Our website had 11,000 visits last month.

What does that even mean? Is that high? Was that unique or total? Is that better than last month? What did they do while they were there? So many questions.

You need to provide context to your numbers.  Try to answer these questions to help people understand the numbers:

1. What do these numbers mean? (define the label of the metric)
2. How do these numbers impact our goals?
3. How does this compare to our history?
4. Is there a benchmark that we can compare this to?
5. How does this compare to peers?

Beyond providing a simple definition and some comparables though you also need to demonstrate how these metrics impact your organization's ability to meet the mission, operating goals and strategic plans. To do that you need to tie the metrics to the:

Business Objectives - Identify business objectives in your org that are impacted by your digital effors.

Engagement Goals - Set some goals for your reach and engagement in your digital channels based on those business objectives. This is an easy way to identify trends and set priorities.

Outcomes - Set up mechanisms and tools to track the objectives and goals above. Be sure to find a way to share these outcomes in a meaningful way with context.

Overall Marketing Strategy - Use your metrics to judge the outcomes of campaigns. But be sure to interpret them and apply those learnings. Help the business owners understand what worked and what didn't.

Example: We would like to increase online donations. We will use emails containing individual stories to drive traffic to our website. We hope to have an email open rate of 20%, which is 3% higher than past performance. However, our email open rate dropped for this campaign. That impacted our website visits because email is out top way to attract traffic. So our next plan should have a stronger email presence.


Anyway, if you only remember one thing, a metric is just a number until you know what question you are answering. 42.

What Gets Measured, Gets Done (Give staff a voice! Part 2 of 10)

"What gets measured, gets done." I have heard that said many times from a number of different people. It is so simple and true. HOWEVER, numbers and data are not as useful without a tie to goals and without context.

The first step in our process to enable digital editors was to create a set of metrics. We decided we wanted to keep the number of metrics fairly simple, balance reach vs. engagement and allow for comparison. We also set a goal for each of the metrics based on nonprofit benchmark reports, similar org stats and some simple math.

So our spreadsheet ended up with a row for each location, one section of columns for reach (size of audience) and one section of columns for engagement (audience interaction). The numbers do not paint a comprehensive picture for a detailed analysis, but they do provide enough insight to identify trends and gage performance.

And recently we have added a new section for Post Frequency. We are showing the # of blog posts on the website, date of last blog post, # of posts by admin on Facebook page and date of last admin post on Facebook. A key to our strategy is consistent and current content. The addition of these columns allows our leadership to easily review progress.

So we are measuring the work. So now what? stay tuned...

The metrics of fishing

How much did you catch? That is the first question people ask when you go fishing. And they expect you to have counted. But you cant just say how many you caught, you also are expected to know their weight, length, type and what bait you used. That is all so obvious and straight forward, but let me tell you a short story.

I am in my late 30's, ok fine really close to 40. And my two oldest sons are 17 and 18. These are years of big change for them. I dont seem to get enough time with them. All I have enough time to do is talk to them about being responsible, making the right choices and what did they do now...  I talked to Grandpa and we arranged to stay out fishing with just the older boys. We had the gear, the weather was great (a lot dark though, which doesn't mix well with sharp hooks), we had our bait and we had a fishing plan.  When the fishing trip was all over, everyone asked the obvious questions stated above.

Now if you hadnt heard that very short synopsis of my story, you would think that the measure of success is how many fish we caught, right? But I hope you see that my measurement of success in this scenario was me spending time with my sons and whether we connected. Did they see that I am more than a mean face that says "no" and pushes them to be who they could be?

Dont you think we should be measuring our social media activity with this type of lens? Yes, you need to be able to report on where you fished, number caught, size, type and what bait you used. However, maybe it is time to stop focusing on the fish and look at what made the trip special and the connections you made while fishing?

Facebook Metrics! Measure from the start

August 23, 2010 is the planned date that the YMCA of Metro Chicago will be launching about 20 Facebook pages, one for each of our membership centers.  In about 2 months time we have created a process to build the pages, train the authors, drive the strategy and make it happen.  But we recognize that we will need to measure our progress. So this is when I turned to Beth Kanter for advice, well her blog, not her personally.

Spreadsheet aerobics is a blog post from Beth that talks about how to measure your Facebook work and experiments. I took her advice, but I am doing it one step at a time. 

We have created a set of trainings, materials and steps to rapidly deploy our social media sites.  Our first effort is Facebook for our membership centers. Our first goal is to establish our presence and provide the foundation to begin to connect with our members.  We want to be where our communities are and communicate with them they want to.

Once we have the basics working, authors trained and a presence established we will work to equip our YMCA staff as authors to begin to create engagement with purpose. But we have to start somewhere, which for us will be creating the presence, training our staff and just getting it rolling!

In that effort, we will just be tracking the basic stats straight from Facebook Insights.  Each our Facebook page administrators will download the interactions stats into Excel and send it to us.  We will then copy those numbers straight into this report format.  Our hope is to be able to show the correlation between those actively interacting on their page with the increase in participation of fans.

Anyway, here is spreadsheet report, based on concepts from Beth Kanter.

Facebook metrics

View more documents from Steve Heye.

Tool Trends or People Trends? (Part 8 of 11 on Managing Tech 2 Meet Mission)

"Where should you focus your efforts to find out where your stakeholders are and what they are doing online with and for your organization."

"What data is meaningful?"

"What is trend, and what is simply trendy?"






I was reading this book to get answers not more questions. But Michael Cervino decides to start his Chapter in the NTEN with questions. And not just questions, but questions that I dont hear my organization asking themselves.  It is like Dr Seuss once said "One Tweet, two tweet, red tweet, blue tweet." Oh no that isnt the right quote. Sorry, it is like Dr Seuss once said "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."

I am not exactly sure what the quote from Dr. Seuss means, but here is my interpretation. Sometimes it is harder to find the right question to be asking than to find the answer.  The question isnt "should we have a facebook page?", it could be "what is our goal in communicating online?" The question isnt "how do we fundraise on Twitter?", it could be is "where are our potential donors online?"

RFPs (Requests for Proposals) are a great example of making sure to ask the right question. If you ask a vendor, "can your product handle multiple integrations?" They will answer yes. But what does that question even mean? And of course they say yes, because anything can be done with extra customization, you didnt ask if it exists now, you just said can it...

I learned a lot in this chapter. Michael does a great job of outlining how to create SMART objectives, gather data, analyze data and identifying trends in order to understand your constituents better. Michael keeps all of this online activity in perspective by focusing on the organizations goals and then find the correct audience match.  This should not be about the tools or the trends in technology, rather it is tracking your audience and their engagement with you.

But the questions and the tracking cant just happen at the beginning of the online presence rollout. Back to the RFP example, how many times do we actually go back a year later after we select the vendor and compare the progress to what the vendor said we would have in the RFP? Or do we simply forget the questions we asked and only examine the current reality? You dont have to continually ask new questions, sometimes it is best to go back and ask the same question again to see if you did answer it or if it was the right question.

I have picked up on one thing from Judith here at work as a part of our online registration system rollout.  And that is to document the questions and decisions that have to be made, then include the answer (with the reasoning). Because inevitably someone will ask the question again or will change their mind.  This isnt about just saying, told you so or saying we already did that. It is to avoid asking the wrong questions and making the same mistakes.

Anyway, nicely done chapter Michael!

Over 11 weeks I am doing a themed series of blog posts. Each week I will write about a chapter of the book called Managing Technology to meet your Mission. This week is on the 8th chapter by By Michael Cervino called Where are your stakeholders and what are they doing online? You should totally buy the book. (In case you are wondering, I am volunteering to do this, I am not getting paid or in any other way reimbursed for this. I just love NTEN and their events.)

Flickr photos by Travelin' Librarian and by Thomas Hawk