Experiment, Tailor, Learn. Repeat. | Visceral

I traveled to Seattle last week to participate in the Communications Network 2012 Conference. The conference was a meeting of the brightest communications minds in the Foundation space. It was well organized, fun and informative.

On the flight out, I was reading the latest Harvard Business Review with the title, Getting Control of Big Data. The issue was focused on the vast amounts of information available to businesses and how this is changing management and decision making within these entities. Or how they should be changing. While it focused primarily on corporations, this exact theme carried through at the conference.

Data, data visualization and stories were hot topics. Not as hot as Sherman Alexie (the keynote speaker) and his missing tooth or Jane McGonigal (a serious game changer) ? more to come on that in another post ? ?but pretty sizzling.

I went to 3 ? sessions on Day 1. Below is recap of the first session:

If you want a fast digest of the conference without reading this recap or my later follow up posts, I?d check out the Top 10 tweets from the conference.
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Day One ? Session 1
Analytics in a Digital Age: Using Data to Drive Strategy for Marketing and Communications

With Anjula Carrier, Vanessa Schnaidt, Roxanne Joffe, Melissa Thompson
@fdncenter @thepattersonfdn
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What the session was about:
Communicators from the Foundation Center and the Patterson Foundation shared tools and resources that gave insight about how data placed in context can be a powerful way to promote social good, philanthropic progress and funder collaboration.

The key question they sought to answer: How can organizations use data to drive strategy in communications? Note: Strategy. Not Tactics.? The session was focused on tools that can help evaluate and improve communications plans through analytics.
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Key Takeaways:

• Not every organization can be ?data driven? but every organization can use the power of data to support important decisions.
• Internal plans and processes for data adoption are just as important as external materials and messaging around data.

(Personal note: Data in all of its glory and power, will not eliminate the need for vision and human insight. In other words, anecdotal evidence and dare I say, Visceral feelings, are still important. )

Detailed Session Re-cap
Here are some high-level steps to begin to use data to drive strategy for marketing and communications in your organization:

Build a data and analytics action plan. ?????
This plan will support goals outlined in your strategic plan. If you are asking yourself if you?ve waited too long, then you have.

To build the plan, answer these questions:

1.? What is your goal?

• Is it to evaluate the success of your communications efforts, weave together stories about your organization in the media etc.?
• Who is your target audience? Everyone is not the correct answer.
• What data do you already collect? Website analytics, annual reports, audience surveys? If your answer is none, don?t freak out. There are probably other places to look before conclusively saying ?none?. If there are really no data points, then it?s a good thing you are starting to think about this now.
  • What information do you need (or would you like to have) that will help you achieve your goal?
  • The types of channels that your audiences use to communicate on a regular basis etc.
• What tools and resources do you have to track and collect information?
  • Consider human and financial resources

2.? Select the tools you can use to collect the data. View a list of resources and tools below.

3.? Evaluate the data in the context of your communications strategy

• What have you learned?
• What new insights does the data tell you?
• Are there new approaches that you might consider from seeing the data?
• How can you use the data to shape your knowledge into a plan??

NEAT nugget from the session?

Vanessa Schnaidt from the Foundation Center shared a case study of the Center?s approach to increasing internal staff knowledge and engagement around the use of Google Analytics to support the Centers goals. To do so, her team ran a competition called GA Sprint where they asked staff to use GA to find useful pieces of data. The purpose of the project was to increase staff comfort with GA and facilitate the discovery of interesting pieces of data (factoids) to tell valuable stories and raise awareness about the power of the tool.

The outcomes of the project were:

Engagement from staff proactively using and learning GA, key pieces of data that told new stories from difference perspectives (good for infographics, grants and other key communication vehicles), a training hidden under the guise of a friendly staff competition.

This has opened the doors for the Center to engage staff further by asking them to take GA data and produce next steps recommendations for the Center.

Tools & Resources to help you collect data, mine data and give meaning to all the hard work that you do!

Source: http://www.thisisvisceral.com/2012/10/experiment-tailor-learn-repeat-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=experiment-tailor-learn-repeat-2

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