Show me the numbers
by Jessica Delaney, Principal, Engagement and Strategic Communications
About a year ago, I shared that I had recently purchased a Peloton and was loving it. I realize now, a year later, that part of what I love about it is the metrics. How far did I bike (yes on a bike that goes no-where)? What’s my personal best? How many minutes have I worked out? Having metrics has helped me set better, more specific, targets and goals. It’s not – I want to improve my fitness, but rather I want to see if I can crack 30 km in 60 minutes. Being specific has helped to motivate me and track progress. If we don’t measure, we don’t really know where we are at. And guess what? The same is true for engagement. On October 18 thru to 20th, we are offering our Evaluating Engagement course again. Rick will be teaching this three day, nine-hour course on how to evaluate the effectiveness of your engagement plans.
This course will ensure you gain better insights into why and how we evaluate, what we evaluate and how we report out on evaluation metrics. In our experience, if we don’t measure both the process and result, then project teams can defer to making engagement just a numbers game. By that we mean, how many people took your survey? How many people showed up to the open house? This is one measure, but it can be a very rudimentary measure, kind of like: how many minutes did I bike? There is nothing in that measure about the quality of my effort, the consistency of my pace, or my output. Similarly, if we only measure “how many people/participants/clicks” we don’t gain insight into: were they the “right” people? Did they have the information they needed to participate? Are they the impacted people?
If you want to join the course, contact Brenda at Brenda@rmdelaney.com. There’s a few more spots and it’s sure to be a deep dive into exploring how we measure the ROE – return on engagement.
To learn more visit: https://www.rmdelaney.com/training/evaluating-engagement/
