We need to be better at understanding the impact of our work. In the digital team, we’ve decided to focus the team efforts on projects which we can prove have been effective.
There are lots of free online tools that we can use to help evaluate our work. However before we consider how to evaluate a project or communications activity, we need to be clear about what it is we are trying to achieve.
The key to making evaluation easy is to set objectives that can be measured. Sometimes objectives are so broad that they are almost impossible to measure.
The Times 100 website details some examples of setting objectives for a specific business need. The basic rule is they should always be SMART:
Specific - clear and easy to understand
Measurable - i.e. able to be quantified
Achievable - possible to be attained
Realistic - not 'pie in the sky'
Time bound - associated with a specific time period.
Once you’ve set some SMART objectives you can then decide how they are then best achieved and measured. The DH digital team are always on hand to help select the best digital channels and methods to do this, and you can read our blog post on how to know where social media conversations are taking place.
This pinterest page describes some tools that you might like to consider when measuring the effectiveness of digital channels.