Session 5: Metrics
Transcript
Robert Hornsby:
So welcome back. Today is March the 12th, 2021. Today is the metrics class for Strategic Communications Planning. I'm your instructor, Robert Hornsby, Associate Vice President of Internal Communications, and I'm joined by Associate Director Cassandra Nathan. Welcome to class, and let's get started. So I'm going to do a screen share, and please shout out and let me know that you can see the screen okay.
[Screen share begins]
[First slide: title slide]
Good?
Brandon Alexander:
Looks good.
Robert:
Okay, great. Okay.
[Second slide: Review of Session 4—Tactics]
So let's begin as we typically begin with our three questions. And I'm going to go back to grid view, and we can talk about these three questions, which are– Cassandra?
Cassandra Nathan:
So we want to know: How did tactics go for you guys? Was there anything that was easy or challenging for you? I'll give you guys a few minutes to see who—or a few seconds to see who—wants to share how tactics, how the process of tactics felt for you before I call on someone.
[Screen share stops]
I'm thinking Carol! Carol, why don't you share?
Carol Cotterill:
For me, the tactics was the easiest bit of all and actually was probably something that I started writing a couple of weeks ago just to try and work out what my strategy and what my communications goals were. I very definitely had to backtrack from my tactics to try and understand the other things. So yeah, this week was really nice.
Robert:
Well done.
Cassandra:
[Laughs.] Okay. Anyone else? Want to share if it was challenging?
Kristina, would you like to share?
I think you're on mute, Kristina.
Kristina Hernandez:
Oh I'm sorry, I couldn't get to the button. I'm a little bit behind in aligning tactics to strategies. Like Carol said, I think sometimes tactics can be easy in terms of big picture, but then when I'm finding to be challenging is thinking about how to, like, refine the tactics to achieve the strategy. I know that I have an email and a video and I have social posts, but, like, how do I need to tailor them to make sure that they're lining back to the strategy is the part that I'm on right now, and then I find, like, doing that detail is a little more challenging.
Robert:
So let's talk about that for a second. This is a logical place to start on any plan, and that's why we start with situation analysis for you to take a look. And that's why I suggested that you do, like, an inventory of your assets. Like what are we doing? What are the, you know, variety of things that we're producing? And then ask the question: how do they fit together? You've got a series of emails and you've got a newsletter and you've got your website, and you have a variety of things that you're producing. So the big question to ask that helps with the strategy part is, what are they designed to do?
And some of you actually wrote that as you were going along. Like “I do this, designed to xyz.” So the xyz—it hits at the strategy part and also at the goals part. So if you can look at your tactics and say, “Okay, why am I producing this?” You ask the question “Why?” and the question “What?”
So why am I doing this newsletter? Because I want to inform my audiences. Okay, informing audiences is a strategy. So why do you want to inform them? I want to inform them to ensure their compliance or increase their participation. They can't participate if they don't know. So you can sort of start drawing—you know, connecting the dots—between tactics, strategy, and goals by asking the two questions: What is it doing? And why are you doing it? And then what do you expect to happen as a result? That can suggest– Like if you expect increased participation, then increased participation is your goal.
Okay? So that's one way to help you through this sort of sorting out what goes in what box. But you know, it's not all a hard and fast thing, and I don't mean to sort of, like, belabor the points about what is a tactic and what isn't a tactic and what is a strategy and what isn’t a strategy. But it helps make the plans better if you understand that yourself. So then when your boss, or you're talking to somebody else and say, “Well, our strategy is to send out a ton of emails.” Well, that's not really a strategy. [Laughs.] That's just a series of tactics that may ultimately, like, lead up to what you want to, or it might defeat the purpose.
I was just on a call earlier today with Global Centers that are struggling with this issue of how much email to send, what should be in a newsletter, how much is too much in a newsletter, what's too much frequency of email for a student population. So everyone struggles with this. So you're not alone, but you've got a better handle on it because you're asking the right questions.
So let's move on. So I have a shorter presentation today.
[Screen share begins]
But I want to get through it so we can leave more time for discussion.
[Third slide: Refresher Elements of a communications Plan]
So today is the metrics class.
[Fourth slide: A philosophical digression about Metrics]
So a bit of philosophical digression about metrics. What we measure defines who we are and what we do. So this leads back to a comment that I made in an earlier class about choosing your metrics wisely because you can end up in a trap where you declare the fulfillment of your goal based upon whatever available metrics you actually have. So you can only track page views or click-throughs: Then you say, “Okay, I've been a success because I've achieved click-throughs.” Okay, you have to ask yourself, is that really fulfillment of a goal, or is that just check off the box because that's the metric you can easily report?
[Fifth slide: Metrics Defined]
So metrics defined. I'll go through this a little bit slower, and then we can talk a little bit. So for the purpose of this course, metrics are the facts derived from measurement. They quantify tactics, but they can also provide qualitative feedback. So I'm going to stop share for a second.
[Screen share stops]
So what would be metrics that deal with quantity? What are some metrics that you currently capture or that you look at that deal with quantity—numbers of things? Go ahead, Robert.
Robert Tulman:
Sure. So we—my unit—helps promote a lot of events, so ticket purchases is a big one: donation/ticket purchases.
Robert:
What about other things? I know other people collect metrics or look at metrics. What do you use?
Ramona King:
We look at our social media metrics a lot, so like how many followers we have, how many reactions to a given post, stuff like that.
Robert:
Seden?
Seden Gürlek:
We do a lot of webinars, so we actually check the attendee reports–
Robert:
Good.
Seden:
–and how many people stay for more than five minutes, for example. These kind of metrics we use.
Robert:
Great. So let me point out: In the last two examples from Ramona and Seden, when you're looking at those metrics, it tells you two things. It tells you the number of things but also—Ramona, you hinted at it—what does it tell you about beyond the numbers?
Ramona:
You get a little bit of, like, qualitative feedback to potentially be based on what kind of reaction people left on the post or, like, if they commented or shared it, stuff like that.
Robert:
So that's what we in the media relations world call “sentiment.” So positive, neutral, negative, complaints, and negative comments would be obviously, you know, something that we want to keep track of.
I was in a discussion with safety coordinators the other day, and someone said, “Well–” Actually, it was a previous workshop on Tuesday where rolling out a CUIT plan, one of their metrics for success is few complaints. So they roll out a plan. If not a lot of people complain, they feel that they've succeeded. And that's how they judge sentiment—by the number of complaint emails that they receive. That's one way.
Seden, you talked about—in your metrics—what does that tell you about the audiences?
Seden:
For example, if they stay more than five minutes—or, let's say, 20 or 30 minutes—it demonstrates the fact that they like the webinar, the content, or also the selection of the speakers. So we kind of assume that they have a good time with the webinar.
Robert:
Yes, absolutely. So the duration of attendance, the amount of time somebody spends on a website as opposed to just sort of flashing in and flashing out. You know, those are all quantitative but also qualitative. And that's important because you need to be able to have some sort of yardstick to determine whether your programs are succeeding or not. And we talked about this in earlier classes: drive-by visitors don't count for much if you have no way to determine whether they're, you know, engaged or liking or disliking what you're presenting to them.
So I'm gonna go back to screen share for a bit. Hi, Angela. Welcome back.
[Screen share begins]
[Fifth slide: Metrics Defined]
So moving on. Metrics can document the success of your call to action. And Robert talked about that in his example where number of people that are attending events, signing up for things, or donating money, they're participating in a more active way instead of just viewing. They're taking a next step.
Metrics also allow for testing and readjustment. So in the two examples that Ramona and Seden gave, you could look at the metrics and say, “Okay, we have a lot of complaints about this content or this event.” Or “We had, you know, very short amount of time spent watching our program. That would suggest to us that there was something that didn't work with this.” Either the content was not good or it was presented in a way that wasn't received well, and then you can readjust. You can use metrics to change what you do in the future if you understand and do a little bit of analysis about the metrics.
Similarly, metrics are a tool to judge engagement. We'll talk more about engagement in a minute, but engagement is something beyond merely absorbing the content. It's beyond what we would call “exposure.” So metrics can tell you if your strategy is working and if you're achieving your goals.
But you have to know what your strategy is and understand your goals in order to determine whether your metrics are serving that or not. I mean, you may be counting the wrong thing. And the metrics that you are capturing don't tell you whether your goals are being achieved or not.
For example, if you are trying to persuade people to rank you more highly in reputation, you do all this work and then your reputational rank goes down. And you're saying, “Oh, we have a lot of page views. People must like us.” But then your reputation rank goes down in some national survey. Your page views don't really reflect your reputation. Okay? So that's not always a one-to-one correlation between some sort of quantitative metric and some sort of outcome that you're seeking.
Really simple last two points are: metrics need a timeline. So when you're going to begin to collect some data, check it out in the middle and then do some analysis at an end point. So if you're looking at web analytics, what would be a good time to analyze it? Do you do that quarterly? Do you do it once a year? Do you do it over a project where an event begins? You launch it with an announcement of your event, and then the event happens four weeks later, and then two weeks after that you capture all the metrics, and you analyze it and then make a determination about whether that was a success or not. So beginning, middle, and end.
And there is no one-size-fits-all metric. Depending on your tactics, you may need a combination of metrics to fully capture and judge effectiveness.
[Sixth slide: What are you Measuring?]
So here's some thoughts that are adapted from this great author—very smart guy, Neil Patel—about measurements. So think about exposure and how you capture metrics that express that.
So I'm using exposure to stand in for the all-purpose “awareness” because awareness suggests that maybe people are liking you but it doesn't really. “Exposure” is a more neutral term.
If you want to measure engagement, then you look for something that has a connected call to action or shows or demonstrates some participation like a retweet, comment, a reply. That's very different than just someone who read a website; they're actually doing something. And the kind of questions you want to ask: How many people are participating? How often? And what are the forms they're using?
[Seventh slide: What are you measuring? Cont.]
So there's other things you can measure too. You can measure your traffic. And this is a very common, you know, web analytics type thing, but if you want to find advocates, then you need to track contributors and influence. So this is more about qualitatively judging your audience. So you don't have to have a mass audience to be a success. If you're reaching the right twelve people and one of them is Beyoncé and she retweets you, then that's a win. Right? You don't have to have 12 million followers if you can get an influencer who does have 12 million followers to give voice to your content.
And then if you want to increase your brand share of voice, you can track your volume relative to competitors. We don't really talk about this much at the university. But at the highest level, we are looking at, what's Harvard doing? What's Yale doing? What's Princeton doing? What are our peers doing? What's Stanford doing? And if they're getting all the air time, we want to understand why that is. Because that all is wrapped into reputation, our standing versus their standing in any of our core disciplines, and even in our minor disciplines.
So, you know, we have a fair amount of rock star faculty who are in School of the Arts, but Columbia is not considered a great visual arts school compared to others, for example. But different programs within the School of the Arts are more high profile. Like the film program is very high profile compared to other programs.
So let me stop share for a minute.
[Screen share stops]
So do those concepts make sense? Questions about them? Are any of you actively sort of pursuing analytics in those areas?
Angela, you have your hand raised.
Angela Slagle:
Yeah, I actually wanted to ask a question.
Robert:
Sure.
Angela:
This is something I feel like we run into. You brought up the point of comparing to your kind of competitors, comparing to your colleagues, to see what tactics, metrics they use, how you're doing, how they're doing. I find that one tricky thing that our group, our organization, falls into is comparing ourselves to organizations that aren't really equivalent. So we keep making this comparison–
Robert:
They're not peers.
Angela:
They're not peers. We wish they were. So we are the U.S. Science Support Program, an ocean drilling program. We are international. There are lots of– I mean, both Carol and I could sing the praises of the program and try and convince you how fantastic it is, but it is not NASA.
Carol:
[Laughs]
Angela:
We find that a lot of our community members as well as a lot of our leadership keep saying, like, well NASA does it this way. NASA also has–
Robert:
[Indiscernible]
Angela:
–3,000 times more funding than we have.
Robert:
Yeah.
Angela:
You know, we want to be aspirational, and some of those lessons are helpful to us. We really do run into this challenge especially in talking amongst ourselves with why we can't do what NASA does. And if that is a hard thing to communicate–
Robert:
Okay.
Angela:
What's an appropriate comparison? And where we really shouldn't be trying to reach the NASA level. [Laughs]
Robert:
So we have a dozen smart people here. So what do you guys think? What would be a possible solution to Angela's dilemma? Anyone?
Kristina:
I don't know if this would be helpful, but is there something, like, super specific that you could ask your stakeholders to help you drill down to about NASA? Like, you know, is it a particular piece of coverage or something that they would like to see a comparable, like, measure achieved? And say like, “We can't be NASA, but we could be this little piece of this little part.” And try to understand from them what success on your level might look like comparably speaking.
Robert:
It's a good idea. Anybody else?
So I would suggest that maybe one of the ways to approach this, Angela, is to identify maybe three peers that are truly peers. So organizations that are similar in size, are similar in scope. And is there an association that you belong to? So in our realm, I mean, we know who our peers are: the “Ivy League” and the Ivy Plus schools. But those schools aren't all parallel to one another.
For example, Princeton is a much smaller school than us. Although it's a research university, it is not the same scale and doesn't have the same program profile as NYU or MIT or Stanford. But it would be considered a peer school. But Princeton is principally an undergraduate college. Right? So you can't compare– When Princeton's doing something well, particularly at the undergraduate level, that's great. Well that's their entire focus. Right? We have sixteen grad schools. Though Princeton is a peer, we don't compare ourselves to Princeton all the time and say, “Well, look what Princeton's doing.”
Similarly, like on the finance side, we get lumped in with the Big 5 schools, but there are public universities whose endowments far outstrip ours. I mean the University of Texas, my alma mater, its endowment dwarfs Columbia's endowment. But we get constantly compared to Yale and Harvard, and those endowments are five and ten times larger than us. Our students, you know, are always throwing up “Well, you got 10 billion dollars. Why don’t you spend all of it?” Well yeah, that's the going out of business model.
So we have to pick and choose our peers. So what we try to look for is schools that are the same size as us, that have the same profile as us, and that's who we look to as “competitors,” and that's who we compare ourselves to. There are, you know, the Ivy League schools, and then there's also the Association of American Universities of which we are part, and that's 70 research institutes across the country.
Is there something like that in your world? Or are there three other organizations that you could compare yourself to, like the Earth Institute, for example? In your world, what's a comparable group? And maybe it's outside, you know, the sciences; maybe it's a humanitarian effort that's similar in size or similar in scope. So there's a different way to think about that. Does that help?
Carol:
Could I just ask—following on from Angela's question—if you work in an organization that your role is basically to support another program, do you look for peers who are like you playing a supporting role? Or do you look for peers who are the big program that you are supporting and seeing what people do? I just don't know what level to start looking at peers or trying to find peers for.
Robert:
Well, it's a twofold question. So on the one hand, you're trying to promote this other entity, this larger entity, so you want to see how that's working. You yourself have to determine who you want to compare yourself to.
The only corollary that I can think of offhand is in the professional services firm world where I come from before I came to Columbia—I was a PR Executive at several of the larger PR firms focused mostly on tech, but I also did a couple of other fortune 100 companies—so we would look at not only General Motors, but we would also look at the PR agencies that service other car companies. So we service General Motors. How is Ford doing? Who's their PR company? How is Nissan doing? Who's their PR company? So we would look at both.
So we look at ourselves relative to someone else. So I worked at a couple places, sort of the more scrappy up-and-coming strivers, smaller but we had big accounts, and we'd be comparing ourselves to, like, Edelman or some other gargantuan organizations that were part of these multi-layered, multinational, international corporations with 10 times as much resources as us. But we were holding our own against much larger competitor service firms. So in some ways, you have to do a little bit of both.
Let's move on a little bit. I want to devote a significant amount of time to breakout and give you guys have a chance to talk more about your individual plan. So I'm gonna go back to screen share, and I'm gonna wrap up that part, and then we'll have some more talk.
[Screen share begins]
[Eighth slide: About Metrics: What is “Engagement”?]
So let's talk about engagement for a bit. So I've said a couple of times before in earlier classes, passive reception of your communications is not really strategic. So that's the, you know, eyeballs model equals success. Well maybe yeah, and maybe not. For metrics to be really effective, audiences need to take action. They can support your organization. At least maybe they don't trash you in comments and, you know, run change.org petitions against you. Engagement is really an action taken by your audiences, and Robert had a good example of that when he talked about, you know, ticket sales and fundraising.
So here's a couple of discussion questions, and this is going to lead to the breakout. What metrics reflect passive audiences? And what metrics reflect engaged audiences? And in your target audiences, is there a difference between exposure and understanding? So let's unpack that a bit.
[Screen share stops]
Of the things that you're doing now, if you're going to divide your metrics into sort of passive and active, what would be some of the passive metrics that you're collecting right now?
Go ahead, Jamie.
Jamie Nash:
Like follower count or likes—or maybe not likes because I guess that counts as engagement—but I still think things like sharing and commenting are better engagement metrics. Or like on an email, it could be open rate.
Robert:
Yeah.
Jamie:
Or even just like a web session versus digging deeper into how many pages they clicked in that session, for example, or like how long they spent on the page.
Robert:
I've used page views as a sort of a common metric that people throw about all the time. You know, “Big success, a lot of page views!” Are page views, are they more passive than active? Where do page views come–
Jamie:
I would say so.
Robert:
Where do page views come from? Where do visitors come from? In any of your worlds, any of you that work in the web, where do your page views come from? Where do your users or your viewers come from?
Come on, you know this. They come from Google. Right? Is that true for–? Let me see a show of hands of people that are managing web stuff. Like, you're looking at your Google Analytics? Do you do search engine optimization of any kind? Anyone? No one.
Kristina:
I mean, I think even when students know a URL—I mean, like Jamie and Katie, you know this—but like even in all our departments like housing.columbia.edu, they still just go to the, like, the Google bar and just write “Columbia housing.” You know?
Robert:
Do they start at columbia.edu and then they find you? Or they just start at Google?
Jamie:
They start at Google.
Robert:
Your web analytics will tell you that in a minute. Not even a minute. So I mean, this is a human behavior thing. So where are people coming from? They're not coming from your home page, which would be a “click-through” from the home page. We'd be like, “Oh!” You know? They clicked on “Sustainability” from the homepage, and there were a bajillion clicks. But we know that that's not really what happens. Right?
So tracking your web analytics can help you understand, you know, where your traffic is coming from, but it isn't indicative of whether people are finding what they want. When they hit you, they're maybe just clicking on the top result of a search. Right? They may actually be searching for you, but they might be searching for something else. So if they click through and they land on your page, and then they bail out in one and a half seconds, that's telling you they didn't find what they wanted. Right? So that's the distinction I'm trying to make between active and passive.
So what would be some more—Jamie talked about a couple of them—what would be some more [a phone chime goes off] like activity- or participatory-related metrics?
Brandon:
Comments and, well we do like livestreams on YouTube, so live chat. Right?
Robert:
Right. Anyone else?
Seden:
I can say one more. After the webinars, we've started to send out a feedback survey.
Robert:
Oh!
Seden:
And this is also good to check the active audience as well.
Robert:
Sure. Surveys and polling of audiences is a great way. You can also connect up those kind of things to Mailchimp, for example, where you send something out and you give people an opportunity to participate in a poll or a survey or something.
Be forewarned that apparently—based upon an earlier conversation that I had this morning—students particularly are feeling surveyed out. Student reaction to some surveys has recently been “You ought to know this stuff, Columbia. You shouldn't have to keep asking me what I want. You should know what I want.” Well, we do or don't know what you want. But students are feeling that the university is constantly surveying them, so surveys are being overused apparently. Little things–
Jamie:
That being said, is there another good way to, like, figure that stuff out without just, like, stalking students’ social media accounts? Because I want to know what people think about Sustainable Columbia and I thought of doing a survey, but then I also had the same thought. Like are they gonna even fill it out, or are they just gonna let it sit in their inbox?
Robert:
Good point. What do you guys think? What are some other options?
Katie McCluskey:
I mean, a more time-consuming way is to do a focus group. And of course that, like, really drastically limits your sample size because, you know, it's a pretty in-depth conversation, and you can really only host a couple of them unless you're, like, willing to commit the next month of your life to learning about what students want.
Robert:
Right.
Katie:
But the nice thing about focus groups is they do give you a lot more in-depth responses and understanding of students. And of course the takeaway or the downside is that you have to accept that it's maybe only the attitude of like a subset of your population as opposed to a survey, which could be like thousands of responses.
Robert:
Right. One of the things that we do in the COVID world when we're preparing messages, particularly, and signage and other graphics that are going to be presented broadly, we—it's not really a focus group—but we have affinity groups that we do testing with. So we do sort of AB test messaging tests or AB graphic tests with people. So we work with University Life with the COVID student ambassadors.
So before we put out something that you all see that becomes posters or digital graphics, we will share that with a group of 20 people. It's not a very, like, labor intensive thing, but we basically just want to get some quick feedback from them. So it isn't a broad survey, and it's with an affinity group, but it's also with an affinity group that feels comfortable criticizing us. So we get the honesty from them that we want.
Is this too harsh? Is it too soft? Did you understand this? What's your takeaway? And often just open-ended. We'll present it to them and say, “What do you think?” And then they'll come back to us and tell us, “I didn't understand it,” or “Too many words,” or “Didn't like the colors,” or whatever it is. So you get some feedback.
So you can search for affinity groups or in different spheres that can help you with testing, Jamie, so you might be able to, you know, get beyond the Sustainable, you know, allies to another student group that can give you some feedback.
Kristina:
What about polling?
Robert:
Polling is another good one.
Kristina:
Jamie, I wonder if this is something you could explore for Sustainable Columbia. Like, I don't know in what channel. I don't know if it would be done through like a social plug-in or if you could do it through like a Drupal plug-in, but maybe you could do it to, like, site visitors. You know, like the pop-ups that's like, “Tell us about your experience.” I know CUIT has done that sometimes when they, like, have launched a new site. They have like a little pop-up widget.
And so, like, maybe you could explore putting something like that on the page where the plan is posted. Because then that's, like, survey light. Right? Like if you're already there, like maybe in that moment you'd be willing to take it.
Robert:
And there's also—so related to that—some people do polling in a way that's clever and they make a contest out of it. So they offer a reward of some kind for, like, test your knowledge. And if you, you know, achieve a certain level then you get, you know, a gift card or whatever it is. So sometimes that can be a clever way to approach it. It’s a sort of polling under a different label, but it's basically polling. Those are some–
Jamie:
Thanks, guys. That was great.
Robert:
Okay. I'm going to try to get to the last couple of slides, and then I want to give you guys some chance to talk amongst yourselves.
[Screen share begins]
[Eighth slide: About Metrics: What is “Engagement”?
Okay, we talked about that.
[Ninth slide: Name some common metrics for communications]
So I think we've gone through this pretty well. These are some common metrics that people use. So what's missing from this list? We've talked about some of them.
Katie:
Sales numbers or registrations for things.
Robert:
Anything else?
Seden:
Feedback. No?
Robert:
Okay.
[Tenth slide: Common metrics systems & types of data]
Here's some common metrics and types of data. There's stuff out of the old analog world: circulation, impressions, like nielsen ratings and TV. Digital media. Social media, you've covered this fairly well.
[Eleventh slide: Introducing…Alternative metrics]
But then there's also alternative metrics, and a couple of these were mentioned. So event attendance, opting in to something, surveys, polls, focus groups, random samplings, participation rates in volunteer programs, fundraising, and there are others.
So don't get caught into the trap where you only look at your web analytics or some email traffic or that kind of thing as the only metrics that matter. Because all these other metrics are equally valuable and can tell you more about the participation in your programs than page views.
[Twelfth slide: Metrics—Discussion questions]
So I'm not going to go through all of these. You'll be able to see this PowerPoint, you know, at the end of class. So these are some just, you know, questions to ponder and things to think about as you're writing a metric section, or you're just thinking about your plan in general.
The last question is probably most important one: What metrics provide the most value? So you may be able to collect all kind of different metrics, but which ones are valuable? Which ones demonstrate success of programs or failure of programs? Which ones tell you how well you're doing?
[Thirteenth slide: Open discussion]
So for the last part, we're going to do breakout. I would like you to take a minute and think about this. Cassandra, you want to talk about this a little bit? This is Cassandra's idea.
Cassandra:
Sure. Can you guys hear me?
Robert:
Yeah.
Cassandra:
Okay. great. So yes, this is an opportunity for you guys to really flesh out and work on your papers because we know that you guys get bogged down with your regular nine-to-five responsibilities. But what this will allow you to do is to think of the metrics that you guys currently have. You already really know what they are. And you want to kind of bounce them back off of each other. You may even find yourself borrowing from one another. So you may be missing out on the metric that you guys are currently using or might make sense to use.
So use this as an opportunity to flesh out your paper. And talk to your group and see if it’s making sense. Do you guys need to dig deeper? Is it too surface level? Can you make more sense of it?
[Screen share stops]
This is just an opportunity for you to see where you are with your paper. Robert and I will be bouncing around between the groups to answer any questions, to listen in, and to also give you feedback.
Robert:
Okay.
Cassandra:
So my goal—I'll use this opportunity to say my goal—being here and supporting you guys is to ensure that you have a finished product. That's a personal goal that I have for you guys. So this is my tactic to make sure that it gets to completion, if that makes sense.
Robert:
Okay, so I'm going to open up the breakout rooms now. I think we're just going to do two, and it'll take a minute or so to get everyone sorted into rooms. But we'll do that right now, and then we'll come back for just a really brief contact bit after breakout rooms.
Cassandra:
I put them in three groups. They're each three in three groups.
Robert:
Okay, here we go. Let's hope it works.
Cassandra:
Yeah.
[Time jump in video]
Robert:
Hey, guys. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time– I hope you had productive breakout sessions. We're not going to have a review of that. I just want to show you what the other parts of our slide deck are because there's some [a dog starts barking in the background] helpful links. So hopefully you'll be able to use these resources as you move ahead. And do check out the Google folders and the LabArchive folders because all this stuff will be in there.
Kristina:
Rixie! [referring to the barking dog]
[Screen share begins]
Robert:
Okay.
[Fourteenth slide: Homework]
Okay, next week you're going to continue with your master plan and make some comments on the tactics. You're going to write your metrics.
[Fifteenth slide: Supplement—Tools for metrics]
And then here's some supplements. And like I said before, this PowerPoint will be available to you. These are the basic places to find some analytics. Most of you know these already.
[Fifteenth slide: References]
And here's some references that I used to build this presentation.
[Sixteenth slide: References cont.]
And here's a few more.
[Slide show ends]
And that's it for today. So thanks again.
[Screen share stops]
And be brave. Continue on. And we will see you next week for the last class.
Cassandra:
Already.
Robert:
Do contact Cassandra if you want to set up a separate chat for office hours, and we'll look forward to seeing you next Friday. Take care.
Cassandra:
Bye, guys.
So welcome back. Today is March the 12th, 2021. Today is the metrics class for Strategic Communications Planning. I'm your instructor, Robert Hornsby, Associate Vice President of Internal Communications, and I'm joined by Associate Director Cassandra Nathan. Welcome to class, and let's get started. So I'm going to do a screen share, and please shout out and let me know that you can see the screen okay.
[Screen share begins]
[First slide: title slide]
Good?
Brandon Alexander:
Looks good.
Robert:
Okay, great. Okay.
[Second slide: Review of Session 4—Tactics]
So let's begin as we typically begin with our three questions. And I'm going to go back to grid view, and we can talk about these three questions, which are– Cassandra?
Cassandra Nathan:
So we want to know: How did tactics go for you guys? Was there anything that was easy or challenging for you? I'll give you guys a few minutes to see who—or a few seconds to see who—wants to share how tactics, how the process of tactics felt for you before I call on someone.
[Screen share stops]
I'm thinking Carol! Carol, why don't you share?
Carol Cotterill:
For me, the tactics was the easiest bit of all and actually was probably something that I started writing a couple of weeks ago just to try and work out what my strategy and what my communications goals were. I very definitely had to backtrack from my tactics to try and understand the other things. So yeah, this week was really nice.
Robert:
Well done.
Cassandra:
[Laughs.] Okay. Anyone else? Want to share if it was challenging?
Kristina, would you like to share?
I think you're on mute, Kristina.
Kristina Hernandez:
Oh I'm sorry, I couldn't get to the button. I'm a little bit behind in aligning tactics to strategies. Like Carol said, I think sometimes tactics can be easy in terms of big picture, but then when I'm finding to be challenging is thinking about how to, like, refine the tactics to achieve the strategy. I know that I have an email and a video and I have social posts, but, like, how do I need to tailor them to make sure that they're lining back to the strategy is the part that I'm on right now, and then I find, like, doing that detail is a little more challenging.
Robert:
So let's talk about that for a second. This is a logical place to start on any plan, and that's why we start with situation analysis for you to take a look. And that's why I suggested that you do, like, an inventory of your assets. Like what are we doing? What are the, you know, variety of things that we're producing? And then ask the question: how do they fit together? You've got a series of emails and you've got a newsletter and you've got your website, and you have a variety of things that you're producing. So the big question to ask that helps with the strategy part is, what are they designed to do?
And some of you actually wrote that as you were going along. Like “I do this, designed to xyz.” So the xyz—it hits at the strategy part and also at the goals part. So if you can look at your tactics and say, “Okay, why am I producing this?” You ask the question “Why?” and the question “What?”
So why am I doing this newsletter? Because I want to inform my audiences. Okay, informing audiences is a strategy. So why do you want to inform them? I want to inform them to ensure their compliance or increase their participation. They can't participate if they don't know. So you can sort of start drawing—you know, connecting the dots—between tactics, strategy, and goals by asking the two questions: What is it doing? And why are you doing it? And then what do you expect to happen as a result? That can suggest– Like if you expect increased participation, then increased participation is your goal.
Okay? So that's one way to help you through this sort of sorting out what goes in what box. But you know, it's not all a hard and fast thing, and I don't mean to sort of, like, belabor the points about what is a tactic and what isn't a tactic and what is a strategy and what isn’t a strategy. But it helps make the plans better if you understand that yourself. So then when your boss, or you're talking to somebody else and say, “Well, our strategy is to send out a ton of emails.” Well, that's not really a strategy. [Laughs.] That's just a series of tactics that may ultimately, like, lead up to what you want to, or it might defeat the purpose.
I was just on a call earlier today with Global Centers that are struggling with this issue of how much email to send, what should be in a newsletter, how much is too much in a newsletter, what's too much frequency of email for a student population. So everyone struggles with this. So you're not alone, but you've got a better handle on it because you're asking the right questions.
So let's move on. So I have a shorter presentation today.
[Screen share begins]
But I want to get through it so we can leave more time for discussion.
[Third slide: Refresher Elements of a communications Plan]
So today is the metrics class.
[Fourth slide: A philosophical digression about Metrics]
So a bit of philosophical digression about metrics. What we measure defines who we are and what we do. So this leads back to a comment that I made in an earlier class about choosing your metrics wisely because you can end up in a trap where you declare the fulfillment of your goal based upon whatever available metrics you actually have. So you can only track page views or click-throughs: Then you say, “Okay, I've been a success because I've achieved click-throughs.” Okay, you have to ask yourself, is that really fulfillment of a goal, or is that just check off the box because that's the metric you can easily report?
[Fifth slide: Metrics Defined]
So metrics defined. I'll go through this a little bit slower, and then we can talk a little bit. So for the purpose of this course, metrics are the facts derived from measurement. They quantify tactics, but they can also provide qualitative feedback. So I'm going to stop share for a second.
[Screen share stops]
So what would be metrics that deal with quantity? What are some metrics that you currently capture or that you look at that deal with quantity—numbers of things? Go ahead, Robert.
Robert Tulman:
Sure. So we—my unit—helps promote a lot of events, so ticket purchases is a big one: donation/ticket purchases.
Robert:
What about other things? I know other people collect metrics or look at metrics. What do you use?
Ramona King:
We look at our social media metrics a lot, so like how many followers we have, how many reactions to a given post, stuff like that.
Robert:
Seden?
Seden Gürlek:
We do a lot of webinars, so we actually check the attendee reports–
Robert:
Good.
Seden:
–and how many people stay for more than five minutes, for example. These kind of metrics we use.
Robert:
Great. So let me point out: In the last two examples from Ramona and Seden, when you're looking at those metrics, it tells you two things. It tells you the number of things but also—Ramona, you hinted at it—what does it tell you about beyond the numbers?
Ramona:
You get a little bit of, like, qualitative feedback to potentially be based on what kind of reaction people left on the post or, like, if they commented or shared it, stuff like that.
Robert:
So that's what we in the media relations world call “sentiment.” So positive, neutral, negative, complaints, and negative comments would be obviously, you know, something that we want to keep track of.
I was in a discussion with safety coordinators the other day, and someone said, “Well–” Actually, it was a previous workshop on Tuesday where rolling out a CUIT plan, one of their metrics for success is few complaints. So they roll out a plan. If not a lot of people complain, they feel that they've succeeded. And that's how they judge sentiment—by the number of complaint emails that they receive. That's one way.
Seden, you talked about—in your metrics—what does that tell you about the audiences?
Seden:
For example, if they stay more than five minutes—or, let's say, 20 or 30 minutes—it demonstrates the fact that they like the webinar, the content, or also the selection of the speakers. So we kind of assume that they have a good time with the webinar.
Robert:
Yes, absolutely. So the duration of attendance, the amount of time somebody spends on a website as opposed to just sort of flashing in and flashing out. You know, those are all quantitative but also qualitative. And that's important because you need to be able to have some sort of yardstick to determine whether your programs are succeeding or not. And we talked about this in earlier classes: drive-by visitors don't count for much if you have no way to determine whether they're, you know, engaged or liking or disliking what you're presenting to them.
So I'm gonna go back to screen share for a bit. Hi, Angela. Welcome back.
[Screen share begins]
[Fifth slide: Metrics Defined]
So moving on. Metrics can document the success of your call to action. And Robert talked about that in his example where number of people that are attending events, signing up for things, or donating money, they're participating in a more active way instead of just viewing. They're taking a next step.
Metrics also allow for testing and readjustment. So in the two examples that Ramona and Seden gave, you could look at the metrics and say, “Okay, we have a lot of complaints about this content or this event.” Or “We had, you know, very short amount of time spent watching our program. That would suggest to us that there was something that didn't work with this.” Either the content was not good or it was presented in a way that wasn't received well, and then you can readjust. You can use metrics to change what you do in the future if you understand and do a little bit of analysis about the metrics.
Similarly, metrics are a tool to judge engagement. We'll talk more about engagement in a minute, but engagement is something beyond merely absorbing the content. It's beyond what we would call “exposure.” So metrics can tell you if your strategy is working and if you're achieving your goals.
But you have to know what your strategy is and understand your goals in order to determine whether your metrics are serving that or not. I mean, you may be counting the wrong thing. And the metrics that you are capturing don't tell you whether your goals are being achieved or not.
For example, if you are trying to persuade people to rank you more highly in reputation, you do all this work and then your reputational rank goes down. And you're saying, “Oh, we have a lot of page views. People must like us.” But then your reputation rank goes down in some national survey. Your page views don't really reflect your reputation. Okay? So that's not always a one-to-one correlation between some sort of quantitative metric and some sort of outcome that you're seeking.
Really simple last two points are: metrics need a timeline. So when you're going to begin to collect some data, check it out in the middle and then do some analysis at an end point. So if you're looking at web analytics, what would be a good time to analyze it? Do you do that quarterly? Do you do it once a year? Do you do it over a project where an event begins? You launch it with an announcement of your event, and then the event happens four weeks later, and then two weeks after that you capture all the metrics, and you analyze it and then make a determination about whether that was a success or not. So beginning, middle, and end.
And there is no one-size-fits-all metric. Depending on your tactics, you may need a combination of metrics to fully capture and judge effectiveness.
[Sixth slide: What are you Measuring?]
So here's some thoughts that are adapted from this great author—very smart guy, Neil Patel—about measurements. So think about exposure and how you capture metrics that express that.
So I'm using exposure to stand in for the all-purpose “awareness” because awareness suggests that maybe people are liking you but it doesn't really. “Exposure” is a more neutral term.
If you want to measure engagement, then you look for something that has a connected call to action or shows or demonstrates some participation like a retweet, comment, a reply. That's very different than just someone who read a website; they're actually doing something. And the kind of questions you want to ask: How many people are participating? How often? And what are the forms they're using?
[Seventh slide: What are you measuring? Cont.]
So there's other things you can measure too. You can measure your traffic. And this is a very common, you know, web analytics type thing, but if you want to find advocates, then you need to track contributors and influence. So this is more about qualitatively judging your audience. So you don't have to have a mass audience to be a success. If you're reaching the right twelve people and one of them is Beyoncé and she retweets you, then that's a win. Right? You don't have to have 12 million followers if you can get an influencer who does have 12 million followers to give voice to your content.
And then if you want to increase your brand share of voice, you can track your volume relative to competitors. We don't really talk about this much at the university. But at the highest level, we are looking at, what's Harvard doing? What's Yale doing? What's Princeton doing? What are our peers doing? What's Stanford doing? And if they're getting all the air time, we want to understand why that is. Because that all is wrapped into reputation, our standing versus their standing in any of our core disciplines, and even in our minor disciplines.
So, you know, we have a fair amount of rock star faculty who are in School of the Arts, but Columbia is not considered a great visual arts school compared to others, for example. But different programs within the School of the Arts are more high profile. Like the film program is very high profile compared to other programs.
So let me stop share for a minute.
[Screen share stops]
So do those concepts make sense? Questions about them? Are any of you actively sort of pursuing analytics in those areas?
Angela, you have your hand raised.
Angela Slagle:
Yeah, I actually wanted to ask a question.
Robert:
Sure.
Angela:
This is something I feel like we run into. You brought up the point of comparing to your kind of competitors, comparing to your colleagues, to see what tactics, metrics they use, how you're doing, how they're doing. I find that one tricky thing that our group, our organization, falls into is comparing ourselves to organizations that aren't really equivalent. So we keep making this comparison–
Robert:
They're not peers.
Angela:
They're not peers. We wish they were. So we are the U.S. Science Support Program, an ocean drilling program. We are international. There are lots of– I mean, both Carol and I could sing the praises of the program and try and convince you how fantastic it is, but it is not NASA.
Carol:
[Laughs]
Angela:
We find that a lot of our community members as well as a lot of our leadership keep saying, like, well NASA does it this way. NASA also has–
Robert:
[Indiscernible]
Angela:
–3,000 times more funding than we have.
Robert:
Yeah.
Angela:
You know, we want to be aspirational, and some of those lessons are helpful to us. We really do run into this challenge especially in talking amongst ourselves with why we can't do what NASA does. And if that is a hard thing to communicate–
Robert:
Okay.
Angela:
What's an appropriate comparison? And where we really shouldn't be trying to reach the NASA level. [Laughs]
Robert:
So we have a dozen smart people here. So what do you guys think? What would be a possible solution to Angela's dilemma? Anyone?
Kristina:
I don't know if this would be helpful, but is there something, like, super specific that you could ask your stakeholders to help you drill down to about NASA? Like, you know, is it a particular piece of coverage or something that they would like to see a comparable, like, measure achieved? And say like, “We can't be NASA, but we could be this little piece of this little part.” And try to understand from them what success on your level might look like comparably speaking.
Robert:
It's a good idea. Anybody else?
So I would suggest that maybe one of the ways to approach this, Angela, is to identify maybe three peers that are truly peers. So organizations that are similar in size, are similar in scope. And is there an association that you belong to? So in our realm, I mean, we know who our peers are: the “Ivy League” and the Ivy Plus schools. But those schools aren't all parallel to one another.
For example, Princeton is a much smaller school than us. Although it's a research university, it is not the same scale and doesn't have the same program profile as NYU or MIT or Stanford. But it would be considered a peer school. But Princeton is principally an undergraduate college. Right? So you can't compare– When Princeton's doing something well, particularly at the undergraduate level, that's great. Well that's their entire focus. Right? We have sixteen grad schools. Though Princeton is a peer, we don't compare ourselves to Princeton all the time and say, “Well, look what Princeton's doing.”
Similarly, like on the finance side, we get lumped in with the Big 5 schools, but there are public universities whose endowments far outstrip ours. I mean the University of Texas, my alma mater, its endowment dwarfs Columbia's endowment. But we get constantly compared to Yale and Harvard, and those endowments are five and ten times larger than us. Our students, you know, are always throwing up “Well, you got 10 billion dollars. Why don’t you spend all of it?” Well yeah, that's the going out of business model.
So we have to pick and choose our peers. So what we try to look for is schools that are the same size as us, that have the same profile as us, and that's who we look to as “competitors,” and that's who we compare ourselves to. There are, you know, the Ivy League schools, and then there's also the Association of American Universities of which we are part, and that's 70 research institutes across the country.
Is there something like that in your world? Or are there three other organizations that you could compare yourself to, like the Earth Institute, for example? In your world, what's a comparable group? And maybe it's outside, you know, the sciences; maybe it's a humanitarian effort that's similar in size or similar in scope. So there's a different way to think about that. Does that help?
Carol:
Could I just ask—following on from Angela's question—if you work in an organization that your role is basically to support another program, do you look for peers who are like you playing a supporting role? Or do you look for peers who are the big program that you are supporting and seeing what people do? I just don't know what level to start looking at peers or trying to find peers for.
Robert:
Well, it's a twofold question. So on the one hand, you're trying to promote this other entity, this larger entity, so you want to see how that's working. You yourself have to determine who you want to compare yourself to.
The only corollary that I can think of offhand is in the professional services firm world where I come from before I came to Columbia—I was a PR Executive at several of the larger PR firms focused mostly on tech, but I also did a couple of other fortune 100 companies—so we would look at not only General Motors, but we would also look at the PR agencies that service other car companies. So we service General Motors. How is Ford doing? Who's their PR company? How is Nissan doing? Who's their PR company? So we would look at both.
So we look at ourselves relative to someone else. So I worked at a couple places, sort of the more scrappy up-and-coming strivers, smaller but we had big accounts, and we'd be comparing ourselves to, like, Edelman or some other gargantuan organizations that were part of these multi-layered, multinational, international corporations with 10 times as much resources as us. But we were holding our own against much larger competitor service firms. So in some ways, you have to do a little bit of both.
Let's move on a little bit. I want to devote a significant amount of time to breakout and give you guys have a chance to talk more about your individual plan. So I'm gonna go back to screen share, and I'm gonna wrap up that part, and then we'll have some more talk.
[Screen share begins]
[Eighth slide: About Metrics: What is “Engagement”?]
So let's talk about engagement for a bit. So I've said a couple of times before in earlier classes, passive reception of your communications is not really strategic. So that's the, you know, eyeballs model equals success. Well maybe yeah, and maybe not. For metrics to be really effective, audiences need to take action. They can support your organization. At least maybe they don't trash you in comments and, you know, run change.org petitions against you. Engagement is really an action taken by your audiences, and Robert had a good example of that when he talked about, you know, ticket sales and fundraising.
So here's a couple of discussion questions, and this is going to lead to the breakout. What metrics reflect passive audiences? And what metrics reflect engaged audiences? And in your target audiences, is there a difference between exposure and understanding? So let's unpack that a bit.
[Screen share stops]
Of the things that you're doing now, if you're going to divide your metrics into sort of passive and active, what would be some of the passive metrics that you're collecting right now?
Go ahead, Jamie.
Jamie Nash:
Like follower count or likes—or maybe not likes because I guess that counts as engagement—but I still think things like sharing and commenting are better engagement metrics. Or like on an email, it could be open rate.
Robert:
Yeah.
Jamie:
Or even just like a web session versus digging deeper into how many pages they clicked in that session, for example, or like how long they spent on the page.
Robert:
I've used page views as a sort of a common metric that people throw about all the time. You know, “Big success, a lot of page views!” Are page views, are they more passive than active? Where do page views come–
Jamie:
I would say so.
Robert:
Where do page views come from? Where do visitors come from? In any of your worlds, any of you that work in the web, where do your page views come from? Where do your users or your viewers come from?
Come on, you know this. They come from Google. Right? Is that true for–? Let me see a show of hands of people that are managing web stuff. Like, you're looking at your Google Analytics? Do you do search engine optimization of any kind? Anyone? No one.
Kristina:
I mean, I think even when students know a URL—I mean, like Jamie and Katie, you know this—but like even in all our departments like housing.columbia.edu, they still just go to the, like, the Google bar and just write “Columbia housing.” You know?
Robert:
Do they start at columbia.edu and then they find you? Or they just start at Google?
Jamie:
They start at Google.
Robert:
Your web analytics will tell you that in a minute. Not even a minute. So I mean, this is a human behavior thing. So where are people coming from? They're not coming from your home page, which would be a “click-through” from the home page. We'd be like, “Oh!” You know? They clicked on “Sustainability” from the homepage, and there were a bajillion clicks. But we know that that's not really what happens. Right?
So tracking your web analytics can help you understand, you know, where your traffic is coming from, but it isn't indicative of whether people are finding what they want. When they hit you, they're maybe just clicking on the top result of a search. Right? They may actually be searching for you, but they might be searching for something else. So if they click through and they land on your page, and then they bail out in one and a half seconds, that's telling you they didn't find what they wanted. Right? So that's the distinction I'm trying to make between active and passive.
So what would be some more—Jamie talked about a couple of them—what would be some more [a phone chime goes off] like activity- or participatory-related metrics?
Brandon:
Comments and, well we do like livestreams on YouTube, so live chat. Right?
Robert:
Right. Anyone else?
Seden:
I can say one more. After the webinars, we've started to send out a feedback survey.
Robert:
Oh!
Seden:
And this is also good to check the active audience as well.
Robert:
Sure. Surveys and polling of audiences is a great way. You can also connect up those kind of things to Mailchimp, for example, where you send something out and you give people an opportunity to participate in a poll or a survey or something.
Be forewarned that apparently—based upon an earlier conversation that I had this morning—students particularly are feeling surveyed out. Student reaction to some surveys has recently been “You ought to know this stuff, Columbia. You shouldn't have to keep asking me what I want. You should know what I want.” Well, we do or don't know what you want. But students are feeling that the university is constantly surveying them, so surveys are being overused apparently. Little things–
Jamie:
That being said, is there another good way to, like, figure that stuff out without just, like, stalking students’ social media accounts? Because I want to know what people think about Sustainable Columbia and I thought of doing a survey, but then I also had the same thought. Like are they gonna even fill it out, or are they just gonna let it sit in their inbox?
Robert:
Good point. What do you guys think? What are some other options?
Katie McCluskey:
I mean, a more time-consuming way is to do a focus group. And of course that, like, really drastically limits your sample size because, you know, it's a pretty in-depth conversation, and you can really only host a couple of them unless you're, like, willing to commit the next month of your life to learning about what students want.
Robert:
Right.
Katie:
But the nice thing about focus groups is they do give you a lot more in-depth responses and understanding of students. And of course the takeaway or the downside is that you have to accept that it's maybe only the attitude of like a subset of your population as opposed to a survey, which could be like thousands of responses.
Robert:
Right. One of the things that we do in the COVID world when we're preparing messages, particularly, and signage and other graphics that are going to be presented broadly, we—it's not really a focus group—but we have affinity groups that we do testing with. So we do sort of AB test messaging tests or AB graphic tests with people. So we work with University Life with the COVID student ambassadors.
So before we put out something that you all see that becomes posters or digital graphics, we will share that with a group of 20 people. It's not a very, like, labor intensive thing, but we basically just want to get some quick feedback from them. So it isn't a broad survey, and it's with an affinity group, but it's also with an affinity group that feels comfortable criticizing us. So we get the honesty from them that we want.
Is this too harsh? Is it too soft? Did you understand this? What's your takeaway? And often just open-ended. We'll present it to them and say, “What do you think?” And then they'll come back to us and tell us, “I didn't understand it,” or “Too many words,” or “Didn't like the colors,” or whatever it is. So you get some feedback.
So you can search for affinity groups or in different spheres that can help you with testing, Jamie, so you might be able to, you know, get beyond the Sustainable, you know, allies to another student group that can give you some feedback.
Kristina:
What about polling?
Robert:
Polling is another good one.
Kristina:
Jamie, I wonder if this is something you could explore for Sustainable Columbia. Like, I don't know in what channel. I don't know if it would be done through like a social plug-in or if you could do it through like a Drupal plug-in, but maybe you could do it to, like, site visitors. You know, like the pop-ups that's like, “Tell us about your experience.” I know CUIT has done that sometimes when they, like, have launched a new site. They have like a little pop-up widget.
And so, like, maybe you could explore putting something like that on the page where the plan is posted. Because then that's, like, survey light. Right? Like if you're already there, like maybe in that moment you'd be willing to take it.
Robert:
And there's also—so related to that—some people do polling in a way that's clever and they make a contest out of it. So they offer a reward of some kind for, like, test your knowledge. And if you, you know, achieve a certain level then you get, you know, a gift card or whatever it is. So sometimes that can be a clever way to approach it. It’s a sort of polling under a different label, but it's basically polling. Those are some–
Jamie:
Thanks, guys. That was great.
Robert:
Okay. I'm going to try to get to the last couple of slides, and then I want to give you guys some chance to talk amongst yourselves.
[Screen share begins]
[Eighth slide: About Metrics: What is “Engagement”?
Okay, we talked about that.
[Ninth slide: Name some common metrics for communications]
So I think we've gone through this pretty well. These are some common metrics that people use. So what's missing from this list? We've talked about some of them.
Katie:
Sales numbers or registrations for things.
Robert:
Anything else?
Seden:
Feedback. No?
Robert:
Okay.
[Tenth slide: Common metrics systems & types of data]
Here's some common metrics and types of data. There's stuff out of the old analog world: circulation, impressions, like nielsen ratings and TV. Digital media. Social media, you've covered this fairly well.
[Eleventh slide: Introducing…Alternative metrics]
But then there's also alternative metrics, and a couple of these were mentioned. So event attendance, opting in to something, surveys, polls, focus groups, random samplings, participation rates in volunteer programs, fundraising, and there are others.
So don't get caught into the trap where you only look at your web analytics or some email traffic or that kind of thing as the only metrics that matter. Because all these other metrics are equally valuable and can tell you more about the participation in your programs than page views.
[Twelfth slide: Metrics—Discussion questions]
So I'm not going to go through all of these. You'll be able to see this PowerPoint, you know, at the end of class. So these are some just, you know, questions to ponder and things to think about as you're writing a metric section, or you're just thinking about your plan in general.
The last question is probably most important one: What metrics provide the most value? So you may be able to collect all kind of different metrics, but which ones are valuable? Which ones demonstrate success of programs or failure of programs? Which ones tell you how well you're doing?
[Thirteenth slide: Open discussion]
So for the last part, we're going to do breakout. I would like you to take a minute and think about this. Cassandra, you want to talk about this a little bit? This is Cassandra's idea.
Cassandra:
Sure. Can you guys hear me?
Robert:
Yeah.
Cassandra:
Okay. great. So yes, this is an opportunity for you guys to really flesh out and work on your papers because we know that you guys get bogged down with your regular nine-to-five responsibilities. But what this will allow you to do is to think of the metrics that you guys currently have. You already really know what they are. And you want to kind of bounce them back off of each other. You may even find yourself borrowing from one another. So you may be missing out on the metric that you guys are currently using or might make sense to use.
So use this as an opportunity to flesh out your paper. And talk to your group and see if it’s making sense. Do you guys need to dig deeper? Is it too surface level? Can you make more sense of it?
[Screen share stops]
This is just an opportunity for you to see where you are with your paper. Robert and I will be bouncing around between the groups to answer any questions, to listen in, and to also give you feedback.
Robert:
Okay.
Cassandra:
So my goal—I'll use this opportunity to say my goal—being here and supporting you guys is to ensure that you have a finished product. That's a personal goal that I have for you guys. So this is my tactic to make sure that it gets to completion, if that makes sense.
Robert:
Okay, so I'm going to open up the breakout rooms now. I think we're just going to do two, and it'll take a minute or so to get everyone sorted into rooms. But we'll do that right now, and then we'll come back for just a really brief contact bit after breakout rooms.
Cassandra:
I put them in three groups. They're each three in three groups.
Robert:
Okay, here we go. Let's hope it works.
Cassandra:
Yeah.
[Time jump in video]
Robert:
Hey, guys. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time– I hope you had productive breakout sessions. We're not going to have a review of that. I just want to show you what the other parts of our slide deck are because there's some [a dog starts barking in the background] helpful links. So hopefully you'll be able to use these resources as you move ahead. And do check out the Google folders and the LabArchive folders because all this stuff will be in there.
Kristina:
Rixie! [referring to the barking dog]
[Screen share begins]
Robert:
Okay.
[Fourteenth slide: Homework]
Okay, next week you're going to continue with your master plan and make some comments on the tactics. You're going to write your metrics.
[Fifteenth slide: Supplement—Tools for metrics]
And then here's some supplements. And like I said before, this PowerPoint will be available to you. These are the basic places to find some analytics. Most of you know these already.
[Fifteenth slide: References]
And here's some references that I used to build this presentation.
[Sixteenth slide: References cont.]
And here's a few more.
[Slide show ends]
And that's it for today. So thanks again.
[Screen share stops]
And be brave. Continue on. And we will see you next week for the last class.
Cassandra:
Already.
Robert:
Do contact Cassandra if you want to set up a separate chat for office hours, and we'll look forward to seeing you next Friday. Take care.
Cassandra:
Bye, guys.