Posted by Rosie Powers on November 11th, 2020
Posted in Blog, Digital, Nonprofit Web, Social Media
There’s no shortage of data available for you to pull about engagement with your website, e-newsletter, or social media platforms. Yet making sense of this data can be a challenge. Numbers-heavy analytics reports can fall flat when shared with upper level leadership and those not as familiar with your digital marketing efforts. Your reports, which may tell a tale of marketing wins, can risk just looking like a sea of numbers to your colleagues.
Not only are generic, growth-focused analytics reports confusing; they’re also not serving your communications team well. Take a step back. What are your organizational goals and how does your digital strategy help to achieve them?
Here at Mission Minded, we remind our clients to communicate the big idea first before getting into the details. Not only is this a messaging best practice – it applies to digital analytics too!
Here’s an example:
Let’s say the overall reach of your blog content on Facebook rose by 25% this year. Hooray! But what does this really mean?
Follow the formula of Goal → Strategy → Tactic.
With this data, we can now formulate a more goals-focused, high-level finding to lead with. Remember to minimize jargon!
Facebook was a key tool in helping us achieve our organizational goal of sharing the impact of our work to key donors this year, as it played a major role in pushing audiences to our blog content and reached more people than last year.
See how this tells a more full story than the numbers and statistics we started with? Not only is this more understandable to your colleagues, but it actually shows how this metric helped you achieve a goal. Plus, it helps with benchmarking for the future. Did a given tactic miss the mark in seeking to achieve a goal? It might not be worth your resources to continue that tactic if so.
For colleagues who are interested in the details of the data, you can still include the numbers after this statement. But leading with a high-level, big idea of your findings allows you to better communicate this information while putting more of a focus on the marketing resources you’re currently leveraging and if/how those can best serve you in meeting your goals for the year ahead.
Reach out to us to learn how we can support your organization’s brand, digital strategy and metrics benchmarking!
See all posts by Rosie Powers