My Favorite Advice
How to Be Smart About Measuring Your Success.
After political pollsters failed to predict Trump’s 2016 election win, you might think that they have little to teach us nonprofit folks about metrics and measurement. Not true, says this article in PR Newswire. According to the author, at least, the Biden campaign has done an enviable job selecting metrics that actually correlate to campaign success – instead of simply being visible and easy to measure. How does that apply to your organization? Well, don’t let your boss talk you into padding your monthly metrics report with Twitter impressions and website page views. It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics and false cause fallacy’s instead of collecting and analyzing the data that truly matters. I realize it’s easier said than done, but your whole organization should be on the same page about what matters and how to measure it. Without a clear metric for judging the success of outreach or fundraising, you end up grasping at assumptions and are unable to correctly measure whether you actually reached your goals.