Integrating paid, earned, owned, and shared (PESO) communications efforts with marketing is a trend whose time has come. (See this report from The Conference Board and SNCR.) As organizations increasingly focus on outcomes rather than activities, more and more organizations are integrating the metrics for their communications and marketing teams into a single measurement dashboard. Here’s how it’s done:
Step 1. Define your goals: What does leadership expect your integrated communications and marketing team to achieve?
When you set out to measure any communications program, tactic, or campaign, the first thing you need to do is ask: To what end? What is the desired return? What’s the goal? What problem will this program solve?
When you’re doing a major measurement program to integrate various communications functions under a single set of metrics, it’s even more important to answer this question as broadly as possible. What you are trying to ascertain is the expectations that senior leadership has from the integrated communications function. There are generally several, but try to keep them to no more than five.
While the specific answers will vary depending on your organization’s mission, programs, intent for social media, and maturity of practice, the outcomes that you will be measuring will probably fall into one or more of three categories:
Category 1) Changing perceptions of your brand or reputation
- Changes in perceptions or awareness of your brand or mission
- Changes in positioning of your brand or mission
- Communication of key messages about your brand or mission
Category 2) Improving relationships with your stakeholders
- Improvement in or establishment of relationships
- Changes in the health and strength of your relationships with stakeholders
- Increase the size and frequency of the relationships with key stakeholders
Category 3) Increasing desired behaviors of customers or members
- Increases in requests for information
- Increases in qualified leads
- Increases in donations/volunteers/participation
- Increases in engagement
Step 2. Determine the goals and audiences for your results
The purpose of any measurement system is to provide data to decision makers so you can continuously improve your programs. And yes, there is the secondary goal of justifying your budget, but that is seldom enough of a reason to spend the time, effort, and energy necessary to set up an integrated measurement dashboard.
Before you go any further, you’ll need to have conversations with folks in marketing, sales, research, and maybe even finance to make sure you have consensus on the answers to these questions:
- What decisions will be made with the data?
- How often will reports and metrics need to be produced?
- Who will see and/or use your report?
Frequently there are two key audiences that need data, and the data and reporting will be very different for each one:
- The first is your staff and peers. Managers and/or leaders in the various communications functions require detailed reports and drill-down. Presumably they need to know which campaign or initiative was most effective, which efforts aren’t paying off, and which may need more resources. They’ll want to see back up data behind the numbers and will need to thoroughly understand the metrics.
- Then there’s reporting up, i.e., the report you send to your boss, VP, or the board. The data and level of detail required at the leadership level will be simple—they typically want one page of data that quickly informs them of how things are going, and where they may need to focus more resources. Remember, they see dozens of reports, and they really just want to know what needs fixing. (Never mind having the attention span of a two-year-old.) Just make sure you have your elevator speech prepared for a very short elevator ride.
Regardless of who is seeing your report, it must answer the three basic questions of reporting:
- What happened?
- So what? (i.e. What were the business or market implications?)
- Now what? (i.e. What will you do differently next time to improve the process?)
Make sure you design your integrated dashboard to answer those questions.
Step 3. Identify your data sources
Regardless of what metrics end up on your dashboard, to get the insight you need you’ll need a variety of tools to capture all the requisite data. Chances are good that most of the data you need is somewhere in your organization, you just need to go hunting for it. It’s a bit like a scavenger hunt, you may have to dig pretty deep to find it. Your “scavenger list” should include:
- Web analytics data from a platform like Google Analytics, Web Trends, or Adobe Omniture.
- Data on what is being said or written about you. Typically this will involve a media monitoring or social listening platform. What’s important is that you have the data to tell you what conversations are taking place about you and where. Ideally you would also be tracking competitors.
- Data from sales or product marketing on what or who motivates people to buy your product or support your cause. Typically this will be survey research data, but if that doesn’t exist, just sit down with your most successful salespeople. If you have a CRM system in place (such as Salesforce) you should be able to get good data out of it. You especially want to track the source of any increases in leads or inquiries.
- Reputational and attitudinal data on how people perceive your brand or products.
- Financial data, such as monthly or quarterly budget figures.
Step 4. Define your metrics
Once you’ve figured out what data you have available, what motivates people to act, and how you need to report results, you’re ready to start thinking about specific metrics that will show up on your dashboard. As always, go back to your goals. This table illustrates typical goals and associated metrics:
| Type of Nonprofit Organization | Metrics Typically Used |
|---|---|
| Foundations a.k.a. Grantors | -- Measures of the societal change they promised their funders |
| Grantees | -- Awareness of the problem -- Attracting donors -- Attendees for fundraising events -- Traffic to the fundraising parts of website |
| NGOs and Advocacy Groups | -- Does an item of content leave a reader more or less likely to support the cause? -- Does an item of content contain key messages? -- Number of people who sign a petition or write a letter to local elected officials -- Number of people who show up at a rally or an event |
| Associations | -- Key messages -- Positioning statements -- Quotes about their members |
| Fundraising vs. Fundraisers | --(Reread #5) |
Step 5. Define your benchmarks
Measurement is, by its nature, a comparative tool. You don’t know what is a good result or a bad result until you put it into context.
Typically that context is: Did we do better than we did last month, last week, or last quarter? But it’s far more valuable to put it into the context of your market. In other words: Did we do better or worse than the competition?
If your budget doesn’t allow competitive analysis, we recommend looking at a 13-18 months’ worth of data. There is sufficient seasonality to marketing, thus understanding how you did compared to the same time last year is far more informative than comparing how you did to last month.
Step 6. Design a prototype dashboard
Once you have your goals, metrics, and benchmark defined, you can design a prototype dashboard. I typically do this in PowerPoint because it’s easy to create dummy charts and graphs. Here are two samples of what it might look like:
Take your prototype dashboard around to everyone who will be using it or seeing reports from it and make sure they buy into both the design and the metrics. Make sure they understand what data lies behind each chart or graph, and that they agree with your calculations. If you are using any custom indexes (see our article on creating custom indexes) make sure they buy into the logic behind them.
Step 7. Implement your measurement dashboard
Once you have everyone’s approval it’s time to implement your dashboard. There are numerous platforms that are designed to collect data from a variety of sources and update and display it regularly. Check with your IT folks to see if your organization has standardized on a platform. Tableau, DOMO, and Qlik are some of the more popular platforms, and there are others offered by IBM, Oracle, and SAP.
If you don’t have an existing platform in place, both CyberAlert and PROOF dashboards have been designed around the needs of communications professionals.
- The legacy of CyberAlert is on the earned media side, but in their latest dashboard they’ve made it easy to integrate any other data (e.g., from Google Alerts, social media engagement tools, CRM systems, etc.) They’re also very helpful in getting it set up exactly the way you want it.
- PROOF is a new product that facilitates comparing data of different types to look for correlations.
And finally, now that you’ve slogged through all the hurdles of setup, the most important element is yet to come, gleaning insight from your data. But that’s another story, see our article “How to Write a Fabulous Media Measurement Report in Four Hours or Less” ∞
