Communications evaluation – 2009 trends

Last week I gave a presentation on evaluation for communicators (pdf) at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. A communicator asked me what trends had I seen in communications evaluation, particularly relevant to the non-profit sector. This got me thinking and here are some of the trends I have seen in 2008 that I believe are an indication of some directions in 2009:

Measuring web & social media: as websites and social media increasingly grow in importance for communication programmes, so to is the necessity to have the capacity to measure what their impact is. Web analytics has grown in importance as will the ability to measure social media.

Media monitoring not the be-all and end-all: after many years of organisations only focusing on media monitoring as the means of measuring communications, there is finally some realisation that media monitoring is an interesting gauge of visibility but not more. Organisations are now interested more and more in having some qualitative analysis of data collected (such as looking at how influential the media are, the tone and the importance).

Use of non-intrusive or natural data:  organisations are also now considering “non-intrusive” or “natural” data – information that already exists – e.g. blog / video posts, customer comments, attendance records,  conference papers, etc.  As I’ve written about before, this data is underated by evaluators as everyone rushes to survey and interview people.

Belated arrival of results-based management: Despite existing for over 50 years, results-based management or management by objectives is just arriving in many organsations. What does this mean for communicators? It means that at the minimum they have to set measurable objectives for their activities – which is starting to happen. They have no more excuses(pdf) for not evaluating!

Glenn

And more on measurement of social media

Still a very new field, there is more and more being done in the field of measuring social media (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.). I’ve recently read two interesting opinions on this subject.

First, here is an interesting post from Tom Watson of the Dummyspit blog writing from an IPRA conference in Beijing:

“Measurement of social media was one of the main discussion points. Don Stacks said that data on social media output, such as traffic and click-throughs, was easy to collect but the penetration of messages was much more difficult and mathematically complex. His view was that social network analysis was the way forward with methods, such as Marcovian chain analysis, coming from sociological research.

To understand how messages are being processed and passed along in social media, we need to track bloggers, code the content of their text and work out who is talking to whom.”

Read the full post>>

Secondly, here is an interesting article from the New Communications Review which speaks of a study to determine “influence and social media” which amongst its findings included:

“For online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:

o Participation level
o Frequency of posting by the community member
o Name recognition of the individual “

Read the complete article>>

No doubt, more to come in this area…

Glenn

Key performance indicators for non-profit websites

i’m just back from my first Web Analytics Wednesday (that’s their logo above), held here in Lausanne, Switzerland. I’m interested in web analytics (as I’ve written about before) as it is can be a key component in measuring communications activities today.

The focus of this get-together was on Key Performance Indicators – and in particular KPI for non-profit websites. Here are some of the KPI suggested:

- Bounce rate – number of persons visiting only one page compared to number of people visiting more than one page or vice-versa

- Length of visit (time) – compared to same time last year/month/week

- Depth of visit (number of pages) – compared to same time last year/month/week

And quite some interesting KPI for search:

- Number of visitors using search

- Average number of searches per visit

- % of zero search results (my favorite -high % means people don’t find what they are looking for!)

These are all interesting IKP to think about in monitoring website usage – it also is a good addition to the standard measures usually looked at (e.g. number of visitors and page views).

As we discussed during the get-together, some of these IKP need to be taken in the particular context. Take for example “depth of visit” (average number of pages viewed per visitor). A lot of pages viewed can be both positive and negative. It can mean that someone is really doing some in-depth browsing – or it can mean that someone doesn’t find what they want and is clicking everywhere on the site. A solution was suggested by the WAW moderator, Jmarc Vandenabeele – combine both depth and length (time) of visits. If you have short visits with a lot of pages viewed it could be negative (sign that visitors are clicking on many pages in a short time to find something) whereas long visits with a lot of pages viewed could be more positive.

Glenn