How do you measure the impact and effectiveness of your reports and proposals? This is a crucial question for any professional who wants to communicate clearly and persuasively with their audience. In this article, you will learn some practical tips and tools to help you assess and improve your communication skills in reports and proposals.
Before you start writing your report or proposal, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. What is the main message or argument you want to convey? Who is your target audience and what are their needs and expectations? What are the specific outcomes or actions you want them to take after reading your document? By defining your purpose and objectives, you can set the criteria and indicators for evaluating your impact and effectiveness.
The analytical process is defined as: Ask > Prepare > Process > Analyze > Share > Act. This is the foundation for analytical thinking and helps to provide a clear framework for any analytical project. The first phase - Ask - is all about defining your purpose and objectives. This is where you figure out everything you need to know and understand before you delve into creating any data-driven project. The first things I tend to ask are who are the primary and secondary stakeholders, what is the overall purpose of this project, and where the data lives as well as how it can be accessed. There are some subsequent questions as well as additional questions that are always needed, but this is my framework for identifying the purpose and objective
One way to make your objectives more measurable and realistic is to use the SMART framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For each objective, you should ask yourself: Is it specific enough to avoid ambiguity and confusion? How will you measure its progress and success? Is it achievable within the available resources and constraints? Is it relevant to your purpose and audience? When do you expect to achieve it? By applying the SMART framework, you can create clear and concrete goals that will guide your writing and evaluation.
This framework is used by many experts in the industry and it helps to provide data professionals as well as stakeholders an understandable framework of what kinds of qualities are required of both their own intended objectives as well as the data itself. As long as your stakeholders are thinking about their problems with a smart framework, and they are bringing that thought process to the ways in which they collect and organize their own data, then working through a project will be made that much easier.
The format and structure of your report or proposal can have a significant impact on how your audience perceives and responds to your communication. Depending on your purpose and objectives, you may need to choose between different types of reports and proposals, such as informational, analytical, persuasive, or feasibility. You may also need to follow specific guidelines or templates from your organization or industry. In general, you should aim for a clear and logical structure that follows the basic elements of introduction, body, and conclusion. You should also use headings, subheadings, tables, graphs, and other visual aids to organize and highlight your key points.
The right format and structure are where things oftentimes tend to get tricky for most. It is easy to make a simple example dashboard with a basic, pre-cleaned dataset for your own practice, but bridging that gap in which you can tailor your technical expertise for a specific business or industry becomes much more difficult to simply just "practice". It can be best to work on these things via two ways: work with data in your desired industry, and try your best to work with dirty data. Identify what industry you want to work within, and work with data pertaining to that industry. Then, try to find a local company or non-profit that you can work with to do some analytics - they are usually appreciative and happy to see your results!
Another important aspect of effective communication in reports and proposals is the quality of your writing. You should strive for clarity and conciseness in your language, tone, and style. This means avoiding jargon, acronyms, and technical terms that may confuse or alienate your audience. It also means using simple and direct sentences, active voice, and positive words. You should avoid unnecessary repetition, filler words, and vague expressions. You should also proofread and edit your document for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.
This, more times than not, requires great experience to fully understand. I, myself, still tend to struggle with what information to display, and what information to hide. Oftentimes, those who are looking at your reports want to understand your data - numerators and denominators so they could maybe identify a potential skew. They also tend to enjoy being empowered to manipulate and slice-and-dice data with slicer tools so they can be their own data detective! Other times, a stakeholder just wants a very barebones, easy-to-read dashboard that tells a message easily and clearly with nothing extra. They both have pros and cons, and it's important to ask and assess which one is important for your task at hand
One of the best ways to measure and improve your impact and effectiveness is to solicit feedback from your audience or other stakeholders. You can ask them to review your draft or final version of your report or proposal and provide constructive comments and suggestions. You can also use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or other methods to gather feedback on how well your document met their needs and expectations, how persuasive or informative it was, and what improvements they would recommend. Based on the feedback, you can revise your document to address any gaps, errors, or weaknesses.
In my professional experience, the most valuable thing to get is honest feedback. Most people are honored and glad to be asked if they could look over and provide critique for your work. Often times, they will have perspectives or experience that shines line in a new way, either on an individual metric or slide, or the project as a whole.
Finally, you should track and analyze the results of your communication in reports and proposals. This means measuring the outcomes or actions that you intended to achieve with your document. For example, you can monitor how many people read your report or proposal, how long they spent on it, how they reacted to it, and what actions they took after reading it. You can use various tools and metrics, such as web analytics, email tracking, conversion rates, or return on investment. By tracking and analyzing the results, you can evaluate your impact and effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.