Here’s a recipe for a tasty communications dashboard (tested and approved by yours truly):
Ingredients
- 5-10 department heads
- 1 white board
- 3 flip charts
- 1 roll of masking tape
- 4 different colored markers
- 80 colored dots
- 1 moderator
- 1 person who can make a decision
- 1 note taker
Plan Ahead
14 days ahead of time:
Prepare memo describing the meeting purpose. Enclose all existing measurement reports and research.
2 days ahead of time:
Send out email with meeting agenda and ask participants the following questions:
- In what ways do you most influence the success of [YOUR ORGANIZATION NAME HERE]?
- If your department/function/job were eliminated how would [YOUR ORGANIZATION NAME HERE] be affected?
- If you were celebrating 100% success in all of your goals for 2016, what would you have accomplished?
1 day ahead of time:
Repeat instructions above.
Day of meeting:
Mix all ingredients, stir thoroughly, and allow ideas to rise without interruption.
Start with Only the Freshest Ingredients
As with any recipe, the key to cooking up a successful dashboard is to start out with the right ingredients. Everything must be fresh, and of the highest quality money can buy. So pick your best and your brightest out-of-the-box thinkers to participate. And of course, you need the staples – people in charge of highly measured disciplines like digital content and email who understand and have used measurement for a long time. Also, you want a range of flavors and spices, so include people from a variety of departments and interests, including a couple of creative outsiders if possible.
Add a Dash of Paranoia
Your first task is to get everyone past their fundamental fear of measurement. More visceral than fear of flying or public speaking, fear of measurement probably dates back to our early childhood days of associating rulers with spanking devices or raps across the knuckles. It is necessary to move all participants beyond these fears before further discussions can take place.
So, right up front, ask participants how they know when they’ve flopped. Typical responses will be: “I measure my failure by how frequently the boss yells at me,” or “I measure my failure by how long it takes for people to stop talking about it.” Obviously, a successful dashboard will provide much better objective measures (and far more). Getting people to talk up front about what they live in fear of becomes a great way to get people to fantasize about how they’d really like to be measured.
Two Shakes of Fairy Dust
Which leads us to your next task: Inventing “fantasy measurement devices.” Here’s an example: At one dashboard development session we developed a “Tear-O-Meter” device. This was designed to measure the effectiveness of the videos designed to solicit emotional support for a nonprofit, and therefore increase donations and encourage volunteerism. This “fantasy gauge” would measure “Cost Per Tear Shed” (CPTS), by taking the cost of the video production and dividing it by the number of tears shed by the viewers. The smaller the CPTS, the more effective the video: CPTS = C/T
Ultimately we agreed that “marketing cost per dollar raised” was a more concrete and practical measure. But the process of developing the “fantasy gauge” enabled us to explore all the things that were important to the video department, as well as important to the whole organization.
After failure and fantasy, everything else should be a piece of cake, so to speak.
Make Sure You Know Who’s Going to Swallow This Stuff
Any good chef knows up front who’s coming to dinner, and cooks accordingly. Similarly, a successful dashboard will measure relationships with all of an organization’s publics. So, the next step is to get people to define the various audiences they are communicating with. Beyond the obvious ones, like the media and Wall Street, you need to get as specific as possible. That means, for instance, not just “customers and prospects,” but “prospects in the automotive industry,” or “prospects in the food industry,” “long-term customers,” “first-time buyers,” etc. Don’t forget employees and potential employees.
Once you’ve got a list of a dozen or so audiences, pose the question of how people will know they are successful in reaching those audiences. If you’ve got all the right ingredients, good ideas will rise to the surface. And by good ideas, I mean ones that reflect business objectives, not just departmental issues (those will come later). Once you’ve got a solid business measure for each audience, take a break and let the ingredients simmer for a bit.
Don’t Worry About Using Lots of Different Dishes
In the next session, translate those business measures into specific departmental measures. These are measures that will help individuals make better decisions. You should come up with at least a dozen different metrics before this session is done—far more measures than you actually want to implement. Setting priorities is critical.
Give everyone a strip of ten colored dots, and tell them that each dot represents $100,000 fictional budget dollars. Each participant can put all ten on one measure, or spread them out depending on how they view the priorities. After everyone’s done, the five or six measures that got the most votes are the ones that should be on your dashboard.
Assign the Cleanup Duties
As with any gourmet meal, there will be plenty of cleaning up to do. And to get your kitchen clean you need to assign everyone a task. As part of implementing your dashboard you need to assign the following duties:
- Collecting the requisite data
Whoever gets this task needs to know your organization well and needs friends (or the ability to make them) in every department. It’s possible that the data you need is in hidden in the files or computers of the marketing department, in the hands of digital department, or within competitive research. Tracking down the data takes time, and a fair amount of hounding, so make sure the person assigned to this task has patience and determination.
- Adding validity to your data and/or index
If you decide to create a Media Quality Index (MQI) or an Engagement Index as part of your dashboard, you need to involve your marketing and sales department. Any index should be based on elements that actually drive customer or prospect behavior. Marketing should have data that will inform the weighting to of your index, and sales can provide the verbatim information on what customers and prospects react to.
- Designing the look of the dashboard
Do NOT turn this over to your graphics department and say “have fun”… a successful dashboard is one that conveys information in a clear and easy to understood way. It’s good if it’s “pretty” but not required. A simple PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet may be all that’s needed.
- Technology
If you decide to integrate data into an online, real-time dashboard you’ll need to bring in your IT department. They may have in-house tools like Tableau that they can adapt for your needs, or you might need to do a request for proposal (RFP) to find a vendor that solves the problem. Use this chart to help you select a vendor.
- Purchasing
Getting purchasing on your side can be helpful as you search for a vendor to provide data. They will help you develop selection criteria and make sure you’re not duplicating efforts.
Publish the Cookbook
Assuming your meal was so wonderful that you’d like to make it again, you need to write down the recipe. So in order to get your dashboard to work every single time, you need a detailed methodology document (DMD). This is where all the formulas are written down, and the instructions and definitions reside. A hearty cookbook should include:
- A definition of the universe being measured – are you looking at earned, paid, and owned media or just earned? Are you measuring all media or just top tier?
- A list of all metrics and how each one is calculated.
- Definitions of all qualitative elements, such as:
- Key messages
- Positive, negative, and neutral
- Prominence/dominance
- Spokespeople to be tracked
- Definitions of time frames.
- A list of what should NOT be included in the dashboard — i.e. marriage announcements, duplicates, etc.
Now you’re good to go…bon appétit! ∞
