In nonprofit and government organizations, we’re working every day to communicate important messages out, engage with key audiences, and motivate them to action. It’s easy to recite a list of all the things you and your team completed last quarters (e.g., published two white papers with thousands of downloads; authored eight blog posts; live-tweeted at three events; sent out 10,000 emails within 1,300 click throughs; issued a press release); however, it can lead to falling into the reporting trap. To measure the impact of your work, not just activities, provide metrics that tell the story of how you are moving your mission forward; which may go beyond how many links were clicked.

A few years ago, while working on a digital communications strategy for a major foundation, it was time to brief the new communications director on the project and the plan we developed. 

The client  walked into the meeting with one very important question: “So what?” 

My team and I had been working with his organization for the past year. During that time, we had re-launched the foundation’s website, developed a comprehensive social media engagement plan, set up an email outreach schedule, and put in place an analytics & reporting strategy that encompassed the full spectrum of the foundation’s online communications. All in all, a considerable amount of time, effort and money had been poured into the plan. 

To answer the client, I needed to ensure that I was speaking the same language as leadership and framed success in terms of their organization’s goals, especially when it came to how we made an impact. 

Output vs impact

There is a clear difference between “outputs” and “impact” and how we measure them. Outputs are the tangible results of a task or activity. Say you have put time into your digital communications channels, the following may be some examples of outputs vs. impact:

The key is in determining how you plan to measure and report on your impact and outlining that as early as possible when developing your strategy.

Developing an impact measurement plan

To ensure you and your team are able to communicate success in terms of moving your mission forward, take some time to reflect on the following questions. 

The big picture

What is your organization trying to achieve through its mission?

You must understand the root of what your organization is trying to achieve and how it collectively defines success before you can demonstrate progress toward it. 

Target audiences 

Is your work or output reaching the right people to help your organization achieve its mission?

When it comes to achieving your mission, not all people have equal value. It’s important that you focus your reporting specifically on those who can make a difference. 

Output metrics

What outputs are being produced?

It’s imperative that you know how each work product (e.g., event, report, blog, etc.) supports your mission. In cases where this is not clear, revisit whether or not these products are worth continuing as they are.

Engagement metrics

Is the target audience using or engaging with your output in a constructive way? Did they take constructive action? 

Simply distributing materials to target audiences does not tell us if they actually read, used, or acted on them. Capture their engagement through their actual actions, for example, the time they spent or the depth they scrolled within your website, if they registered and/or attended an event if they signed a petition, etc.

Impact metrics

What methods can you use to monitor progress toward your mission?  

By reflecting back on your organizational goals, conduct a survey of your target audiences to see if you’ve shifted their mindsets or motivated them for action. Additionally, you can leverage existing surveys, polls, ratings or studies conducted by others to monitor change over time. 

Measuring influence

What were your organization’s contributions to an overall outcome or impact?

You don’t work in a vacuum, and it’s important to acknowledge your role, and the role of others, in an outcome. As an example, a great model that a large nonprofit we’ve worked with uses a three-tiered approach to evaluate its role in producing the measured impacts: 

• Decisive: The weight of evidence suggests the outcome would not have been achieved without the program’s efforts.
• Important: Multiple factors contributed to the outcome and we played a substantive role.
• Inconsequential: The program played little or no part in the outcome and would have occurred without its involvement.

Bringing it together

Assembling a holistic digital strategy and quantifying its impact on your mission isn’t easy. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but there are best practices for both data collection and reporting. 

It takes a deep understanding of your organization’s mission, what outcomes you are looking to achieve, and how you are working to achieve them in order to develop methods to monitor progress. We’ve worked with many organizations to do just this, so if you are new to business intelligence, or are looking for ways to tie your digital strategy and data to your organizational mission, we’re here to help.

For more on focusing on measuring actionable data check out “Looking Past Vanity Metrics to Actionable Analytics”