These days it seems there’s another mountain of data landing on your desk every day. You’d love to ignore it, but you probably have this nagging feeling that I get all the time, that somewhere in that mountain is something I need to know — either a slow-burning fire, a potential threat, or maybe an opportunity to make a radical improvement in your program. The question is where?
Part of the problem is that well-intentioned people who are throwing all this data at you probably don’t understand what actual numbers you need to run your department or program more efficiently. And between all the fires you’re putting out and the requests that you’re fielding, you don’t have the time to dig into the data to find those nuggets of information that might actually make your job easier.
That’s why you need a measurement Sherpa. Someone who:
- Understands that data without insight is just trivia
- Loves stats
- Fears dirty data
- Hates vanity metrics
- Discards stats that don’t matter
- Understands and supports industry standards
- Can explain results to a teenager (not that an eighth grader needs to know your results but that’s a good proxy for the attention span of your CEO
So where do you find such a magical creature? (other than https://painepublishing.com/products-services/advisory-services/ of course.. )
Start with the students of any number of PR research professors – I’m guessing that there a several dozen graduating as we speak from Boston University, Virginia Commonwealth, University of Miami, Appalachian State and Quinnipiac, Brigham Young, and San Diego State would all be good places to look.
Then there are the ex-Delahaysians – people who grew up with me in the Measurement industry. People like Lisa Binzel https://www.edelmanberland.com/lisa-binzel/ and Barbara Coons https://www.edelmanberland.com/barbara-coons/ Michelle Vangel http://www.linkedin.com/in/michevangel. In Latin America there’s Gabriela Carrau, uy.linkedin.com/in/gcarrau, in Germany Nanette Bresson http://measurementadvisor.painepublishing.com/author/nanettebesson/. The Twitterverse also provided the following suggestion: Annie Cushing: http://www.annielytics.com/
