At CEB, mid-year performance review time is here. Seven busy and slightly hectic months of 2010 have flown by (how is it already August?!). I have lots of stories to share. A few things I’m proud of. A few goals to achieve in the next half of the year. But how do I put the right story together to truly demonstrate my impact to my manager, let along my manager’s manager??? I doubt newsletter metrics or download numbers for my research pieces will do the trick.
Communicators, have you recently tried to demonstrate your team’s effectiveness? One of the top cries for help we hear from CEC members is: “Metrics! We need help with metrics… how to define them, how to present them, and how to link them to the business goals that senior leaders actually care about.”
In a recent poll about Communications dashboards, only 31% of communicators said they have a dashboard they present to senior leaders to demonstrate Communications’ effectiveness. Of those, only 50% said they are satisfied with their current dashboard. However, this “satisfaction” is questionable if you look more specifically at these respondents’ satisfaction with their dashboard’s ability to do the following:
While communicators may be satisfied with their dashboard’s ability to report volumetric consumption around specific channels, events, or activities (88% of those with dashboards), this is not enough to overcome the top challenge we hear: creating a business-focused dashboard (only 38%). Indeed, the #1 hindrance to both those that have a dashboard AND those that are still struggling to develop one is: linking the metrics to specific business goals.
Please tell us more. What’s the main challenge your team faces in creating a dashboard or improving the one you currently use? Or alternatively, where have you seen success in terms of your metrics or dashboard?
Over the next few months the CEC will be taking a deeper look at leading Communications dashboards. Our goal is to provide you with templates, examples, and guidance than can make that monthly, quarterly, or annual check-in with the leadership team less of a cringe-inducing moment.
Want to help? Take our quick poll to share your experience (or lack of experience) with a Communications dashboard. Or, help shape our research with a quick conversation to ensure we’re asking the leaders in this space the right questions that will most benefit your team.
on 29 July 2010
Respond
The problem with most of the polled objectives is that they mean nothing to your CEO in an of themselves. For example, the focus on volume, type of comms, reputation, event attendance, etc means nothing unless it is monetized. This means showing how these areas impact fundamental business metrics like revenue growth, expense, etc. These metrics are notably rendered in financial terms, not marketing stats. In this sense, the profession has been working with half-way metrics, representing them as the end-result. This needs to change in very substantive ways asap. For this reason, I find it heartening to see that most respondents agreed that their comms metrics were still much too far away from business metrics to be viable. The survey also revealed the huge opportunity in the marketing and communications profession, and that is showing people / companies how to correlate their data with business data from across the company.
on 2 August 2010
Respond
Dashboards are often used as a pretty report to demonstrate how busy your team has been over the last month or so. However – the true power in this data is the insight it can provide. Instead of looking at it soloey as a means of impressing the boss – you can also use to the data to understand how you can improve your channels and messaging to increase effectivness. This is quite tricky – and we stugglle with it monthly – but we always ask the question “What can we do differently as a result of this information to imporve what we are doing?”
on 2 August 2010
Respond
Mark- Thanks for your thoughts here. For years communicators have assumed it nearly impossible to make a direct link between communications metrics and fundamental business metrics. The results in this survey have made the urgency to find the link more clear, and showed that a few leading communicators out there are starting to be make strides forward in this area. We’re excited to see what we can learn from these leaders’ experience.
And Chris- Definitely the right question to ask. It is much easier to look at a dashboard as another thing we need to pull together to satisfy the boss and justify our impact. Especially while the majority of dashboards are weak in their link to business goals, the data in these reports are as Mark noted– “half way metrics”– metrics that are more valuable for us to learn from than for leaders to evaluate us on. Do you have any examples of how you have altered your dashboard based on the time your team spent discussing insights from those “half way metrics”?