Notes+session+5+group+2

= Chat Transcript: Group 2, Session 5 = November 17


 * What's your favorite measurement tool?**


 * Emily Knutson**: I haven't found a favorite yet, but I am enjoying playing and exploring the options.
 * Debbie Ford-Scriba**: Torn between FB because it's easy, but the more I use Twitter, the more I like & learn...
 * Nicole Lampe** :My favorite tool is Sysomos because it provides great infographics and I am a huge fan of the share of voice query.


 * If you are finished designing, what helped you the most?**


 * Pam Sturner**: What helped me most was informational interviewing with colleagues who had encountered questions I was grappling with.
 * vickie mcmurchie**: getting support from senior staff. having them promote the pilot project to rest of staff has helped move the process along
 * Jocelyn Herbert**: I've started implementing my "prelude" study, just really starting to choose orgs whose practices on Facebook I can use to identify best practices and meaningfully compare my grantees' work to. I did my homework from our office hour, read Beth's blog entry and reviewied some of the cited references, then just started looking at 3 organizations on FB; need to identify other orgs to look at.
 * danielle siembieda**: I've created a different pilot campaign, Im actually moving quite forward with it, it wont be implimented until January
 * Michelle Berg**: It helped that our department implemented a dashboard, so we are now required to start measuring! Other classmates' ideas have helped to pick the metrics that are important to include in our social media section.
 * Debbie Ford-Scriba**: Analysis Exchange's work. Our implementation is happening in stages & are fairly extensive. Just launched redesigned website for major initiative that incorporates social media, which was one recommendation.


 * Presentation by Natalia of Leadership Learning Community**

We're focusing on the launch of a publication. Goals: increasing awareness about networks. Internal impacts: inspire discussion. Key components: Introducing a champions program; Sending out a survey to people who download report and develop case studies; trying out a Twitter chat/activity and possibly analyze content of the coverage we're getting.

Target audiences are leadership development programs, foundations investing in leadership development and in networks, and “champions” or network providers—thought leaders around this topic with their own communities.

Few layers of engagement: downloading the report, discussing it, taking a survey. We used a similar plan from the previous publication as a starting point and the team built upon that.

Against the ladder of engagement, we identified metrics and tools to go with each of the three layers of measurement: awareness, engagement and self-organizing. For awarness, we're looking at downloadsa nd page views/ google analytics. For engagement, coverage like socialmention.com, topsy, hashtracking if we do the twitter chat, rowfeeder. For self-organiziaing, how many meetings we organized. We want to do a 100% increase of previous launch.

We track our time using Harvet (getharvest.com), it's a paid tool but affordable and allows us to see how much time we're spending as well as copyeditors etc. it's easy to use.

We are struggling with the twitter event since we've never done it before. I'm not sure how to involve people to participate or co-host.


 * Ashley Boyd**: We use all of our channels. We try to connect to email action alerts, blog posts and to timely, frontpage news. We reach out to partners ahead of time to be experts, draw their communities.

Beth is doing a chat today for the Blue Key campaign. The organizer sent the champions cut/pasteable tweets with hashtag and a signup sheet to get someone to cover and respond for each hour.

Nicole Lampe I guess what I'm struggling with is that we already track these sorts of metrics, so am unsure how to develop a measurement pilot that feels new/meaningful..
 * danielle siembieda**: Freshbooks works too, its free. How many people are on your team?


 * Presentation by Ashley Boyd, Momsrising.org**

We're trying to figure out how to collect data and use metrics for decision-making over the last few years. I came from a more project planning culture but Momsrising is a new organization and we're working more responsively to what's working rather than planning far in advance. Personally I'm trying to refine the way we think and plan.

We make sure that metrics flow from our mission. We track them from top line goals, key results areas and each of these has an associated metric.

We've identified top line goals and we look at top line goals to see how we're growing the movement and winning legislative policy changes—these are two key results areas that we use for every single campaign. This is our true north and our feedback to know whether we're on track. Associated metrics are weekly/annual new members, retention, and incorporation of diversity and inclusion. For policy changes, number of actions per year per member and target policies moved forward or passed. We work with partners and that's where social media is so crucial.

The process we've developed over time is that every week we review the metrics as a full staff. We review highlights and themes from qualitative feedback (email, comments). We use it to flush out something not making sense in the quantitative feedback. They work in concert together.

It's valuable to do it as a full staff since everyone has the same information and getting the same learning. At first we had one person as the stats person, who became the expert. But by including everyone we're spreading the knowledge so everyone can implement it. The issue teams do deeper analysis though and make decisions on those campaigns.

On metrics Monday, we have a quick and dirty spreadsheet. Email is our primary comms tool so we carefully track every email (2/week) and opens, clicks and follow-throughs to completing the action. It pertains to our goal of growing our movement, we want people to forward and share our content so we know that it's compelling. It's also a key component of changing policies.

The second component is measuring social media. We use Twitter to measure our growth, we try to analyze our content. We test how many to send, and experiment a lot to get the data to show what's working better. We try to be easy on ourselves knowing a number won't work. We have an active blog and track those analytics. We're very curious which actions or pages generate new members which tells us we need to do more of that. We've done a lot of subject-line testing, any characters that catch they eye work but we didn't find specific trends to apply both for Twitter and email.

We take qualitative feedback seriously and we don't assign it to an intern, we value it as an important channel and not an administrative task. We had a Medicaid action alert when the debt ceiling discussions were going on. We used a first-person story which has worked in other campaigns. A second alert we did was to appeal to parent-membership, another tactic we've used.

We found something interesting that the first message had a very high unsubscribe rate, while the second was average. Alert one generated average growth but the second had very high Facebook shares. Finally for the action rate, the second also resulted in more actions. As a result, we learned that our members weren't as responsive to personal stories in the larger environment of the political issues at that time. We needed to educate people better about those issues.

This is what works for us but it will look differently for you. Metrics need to tie into your strategic mission and vision and should help you move them forward. This is the way we make decisions, it's not a sideline activity so it doesn't feel like an extra element of work. As a membership organization we feel accountable to our members.

We have two staff members who gather the stats, one who looks at website/email and another for social media. It takes a couple hours of their time per week but it's an organizational investment that we all go over it for 20-30 minutes/week.


 * Pam Sturner**: What process did you use to put together your Monday metrics spreadsheet? How did you learn what you needed to do?
 * Anne-Marie Alden**: Do you have one main person who actually creates the posts, or is it done by a team?
 * Danielle Brigida**: I like the concept of measuring "movement growth" if for no other reason it builds morale :)
 * Debbie Ford-Scriba**: Very intriguing presentation, as was Natalia's. So helpful to know how other orgs are doing this work.


 * Reflections**


 * Emily Knutson**: transform data into wisdom and reporting
 * Jocelyn Herbert**: Thinking about designing a pilot for after the launch of the South Coast MPAs, which will be January 1