You’ve invested time and money in developing a comms strategy that aligns with your organisation’s strategic goals. You’ve rethought your audiences, researched which channels and activities they prefer, you’ve nailed segmented messaging, and you’ve started creating excellent content.
So how do you know what’s working then adjust your approach as you learn?
In a three-part series, Duncan Robertson, Agenda senior associate for digital, outlines how to anchor your comms planning, measurements and learnings using focused KPIs, a content calendar, and analytics and insight.
In this first blog, let’s start with KPIs.
KPIs are crucial for success
A Key Performance Indicator is a top-level description of the success you want to achieve through your activity. You should aim for a handful of comms KPIs, each aligned to your comms objectives and feeding up into your organisation’s objectives and KPIs.
Aligning your strategies, objectives and KPIs
Your organisation strategy will have specific objectives: perhaps to acquire more members in a particular sector or donors from a particular demographic; to develop a certain percentage of supporters into advocates or volunteers; to influence certain decision-makers to make conditions better for your members or beneficiaries.
Your comms strategy will have one or more specific objectives which aim to deliver each organisation objective: perhaps you will have one or more objectives which will raise the profile of your brand and/or your cause in order to acquire those certain members and donors; one or more objectives which will target which supporters to turn into volunteers; one or more objectives around developing helpful policies or laws.
Understanding SMART KPIs
Your organisation strategy should therefore have specific KPIs which describe what success looks like for each objective.
Your comms strategy should have comms KPIs which show your team’s contribution to the organisation’s KPIs and success, as well as capturing your team’s success in meeting its own objectives.
For example, one health charity we helped has a key performance indicator to increase ‘awareness about what individuals can do to reduce their personal risk’ to help prevent the onset of a disease.
At the comms level, this translates to a KPI of ‘people know about the nature of the disease, its risks and impacts, and what can be done to prevent, diagnose and treat it.’ This includes specific measures to do with comms work, such as appearances in specific publications, the percentage of key audiences who see press work and how well people say they understand the disease in surveys.
Integrated KPI approaches: Collaboration is key
For a truly integrated approach to KPI setting, you’ll not just set comms KPIs which describe your team’s success or indeed contribute to your organisation’s success – you'll also think about working across teams to see how your work contributes to their KPIs and vice versa. You may even share some KPIs across teams if your organisation splits functions like fundraising and comms, or digital and comms.
Measuring success through your comms KPIs
KPIs are not a description of quantifiable targets or metrics. KPIs are the description of the success your comms is working towards.
KPIs do need actual data and context to demonstrate this success, otherwise you’ll not know what's working, what could be done better – so your KPI should be SMART: specific; measurable; achievable; relevant; and time-bound.
Data, metrics, and benchmarks
We worked with the health charity to describe the specific change each comms KPI aimed to achieve over a defined time-period. For example, one measure we used for the KPI above was how many times a specific set of phrases reached 50 per cent of the charity’s key audience each quarter, based on appearances in target publications.
To understand the real-world impact of this output, another measure we used was how members of the public rate their own understanding of the impact of the disease. As changing understanding is slow and difficult to achieve, this indicator is tracked on an annual basis.
We set some targets for the types and volume of comms activity which we knew would reach priority audiences. We also identified the metrics by which we could measure increased interactions by core audiences thanks to the comms we put out and the asks we made.
Benchmarking, baselines and initial research
KPIs are often set against what has gone before so they’re benchmarked in what’s relevant and what’s achievable.
As the health charity’s comms strategy was linked to a new organisation strategy, we did not have a great deal of relevant historic data against the new KPIs.
Understanding your audiences
Instead, we researched what the charity already measured and reported on, which would give data and context. This included ongoing work with nfpResearch, a leading market research agency in the not-for-profit sector, to look at both awareness of the charity’s brand and of the disease itself among their key target demographics.
Tracking media performance
The charity has also been using a media monitoring platform to track media output and understand performance in this area. Creating a set of ‘baseline’ metrics against which to judge progress is a key part of good KPI setting, and the plentiful data already in the platform meant this would be straightforward.
Other routes to set KPIs include using industry standards, which can help set the balance between attainable and ambitious targets.
As the charity’s comms strategy had a focus on increasing coverage in the media outlets which target audiences prefer, we also worked with their media monitoring service to capture data on the quality of interactions with journalists and titles.
Using content planners strategic planning and reporting
We helped refine dashboards to learn which journalists on which titles were opening, clicking through, and reporting on press releases, and whether the coverage was positive, negative, or neutral.
From here, we helped the charity to refine its activity to improve interactions and positivity over time.
As part of our project, we helped evolve the comms team’s existing project management tool into a content calendar that not only prioritised work but also provided reports on which comms objectives had been met.
We’ll cover how we did this work in our next blog, then in our final blog, we’ll look closer at analytics and insight to learn what works.
