Grant-funded communications are essential for raising awareness, engaging stakeholders, and showcasing results of your project. But how do you know if your messages are reaching and influencing your target audience? In this article, you will learn how to assess the impact of your grant-funded communications using a simple framework and some practical tools.
Before you start measuring your impact, you need to define what you want to achieve with your communications. What are the specific goals and outcomes of your grant project? How do they align with your funder's expectations and priorities? How do you want your audience to think, feel, and act after receiving your communications? Write down your objectives and make them SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
A meaningful assessment of impact for grant-funded communications is rooted in your objectives. Consider these three things when defining your tactics and metrics: 1. Awareness is not an objective. Read that again. It's really only a stage along the path to decision-making and behavior change. Don't just tell people about your work.Tell them how and why they should engage with it. 2. Unleash the power of peer-to-peer advocacy by including specific objectives for staff, community partners, boards, and volunteers. 3. Integrate the work throughout your annual communications plan, even if that goes beyond the grant period. Your content should encompass all points: PRE:Award announcement DURING:Stories and outcomes as they happen. POST:Results.
Next, you need to choose the indicators that will help you track and evaluate your progress towards your objectives. Indicators are the data points that show how well you are performing and what changes you are making. They can be qualitative or quantitative, depending on the type and purpose of your communications. For example, if you want to measure the reach of your social media posts, you might use indicators such as impressions, followers, and shares. If you want to measure the engagement of your newsletter subscribers, you might use indicators such as open rate, click-through rate, and feedback.
Once you have your indicators, you need to collect the data that will inform your analysis. There are various ways to do this, depending on the sources and methods available. For example, analytics tools can track and report the performance of online communications such as websites, blogs, and social media platforms. Additionally, surveys and polls can be used to gather opinions, preferences, satisfaction, and feedback from your audience. Interviews and focus groups are also interactive methods that allow for in-depth conversations with your audience to explore their perspectives, experiences, and motivations. All of these methods can be used with online platforms such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Typeform, Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet.
Once you have collected your data, it is time to analyze and interpret the results. To do this, you can use various techniques and tools to organize, visualize, and compare the data to draw insights and conclusions. Descriptive statistics such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, frequency, and percentage can be used to numerically summarize the main features of your data - spreadsheet software such as Excel or Google Sheets can help you calculate and display these statistics. Charts and graphs are also useful visual representations for illustrating and communicating the data in a clear way - charting software like PowerPoint or Google Slides can help create these visuals. Finally, dashboards and reports are comprehensive documents that help synthesize and present the data in a structured manner - reporting software such as Word or Google Docs can be used to create these documents.
Finally, you need to use your data and analysis to improve your communications and increase your impact. This is where you can apply the lessons learned and the best practices from your evaluation and make adjustments and recommendations for your future communications. A/B testing, segmentation and personalization, as well as feedback and engagement are all effective strategies for improving your communications. A/B testing allows you to compare the effectiveness of two or more versions of your communications. Segmentation and personalization allow you to tailor your communications to the specific needs and interests of your audience segments. Feedback and engagement enable you to solicit and respond to your audience's input and involvement. There are various software programs, such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram that can help you run tests, create customized communications, and interact with your audience.
Creating a tracking system culminating all of the discussed factors is also a key consideration. Using a simple system that is easily retrievable is super important.