Numbers versus Value
“900 people clicked on a link in our e-newsletter”
“500 people made wall posts in our Facebook group”
“50 people participated in our live chat”
So what?
Reporting of numbers like this (i.e. as if they meant something) is a direct result of venturing into technology-driven marketing strategies without first setting goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success because you don’t know what you should be measuring.
Numbers are important in that they provide benchmarks and can illustrate growth of initiatives over time. But those numbers mean nothing if you can’t prove that they contributed to the bottom line of your institution in a meaningful way.
Numbers report statistics which may or may not be meaningful.
Value uses numbers to show a bottom-line contribution.
Let me make it more tangible: When I review my monthly email statistics report, I barely even glance at the number of people who clicked on a link. What I’m really looking for is how many recipients gave money to my institution and the average value of their gift. I also look at what percentage of people who clicked on a link in an email gave a gift (our click-to-gift rate). Making a gift is the bottom line action that I’m looking for. Clicking a link only gets them part-way there.
If you want to apply this to admissions, the bottom line results you’re usually looking for are (a) submitting an online application or (b) enrolling in the institution. It’s not the number of posts on a Facebook Group wall. Being active in a Facebook group only gets you part-way to your goal for your prospects. To really show that your efforts have contributed, you have to take it all the way to the bottom line action. Here are the questions you really should be asking:
- What percentage of those who were active in my Facebook Group enrolled?
- Is that percentage significantly higher that prospects who weren’t active in my Facebook Group?
- If so, how much additional value did my efforts to start and promote that Facebook group bring to my organization?
This is how you demonstrate the value of this type of communications to people that don’t get it. This is how you show that everything that you’re doing with technology is contributing above and beyond traditional methods - make it relevant to your administration in ways that they care about and can relate to. They don’t care about 500 posts on a Facebook wall or 900 clicks on an email. They care about more donations to the institution, more applications and more tuition checks.
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January 13th, 2009
I’ve had many questions circling in my head related to the ideas you touch on in this post. When I launched Cafe New Paltz, Kyle James told me I should set goals, such as “I want x number of members within the first week.” I don’t understand the value in selecting an arbitrary number. If I hit it, I can give myself a pat on the back? If I don’t, I’m a failure? I don’t agree with that idea. But, what I do agree with is figuring out how it affects the bottom line, and have been asked that constantly with my series of Cafe New Paltz posts, and I’m struggling to figure out how to do this.
We have awesome participation and conversations going on in the Cafe. But, we won’t know until May 1 what our incoming fall class looks like. How can I directly correlate having Cafe New Paltz impacted the composition of this class? I guess I can export the Ning members as a CSV file and have an IT staffer run their e-mail addresses against those who paid their deposit, and hope there was a direct correlation? Is the answer to do a survey after May 1 to ask what factors contributed?
I’m being asked by the community to show ROI on this program, and I’m just not sure where to start. You touch on these ideas, and gave a kick ass presentation about numbers in November, but my head is still spinning around how to best tackle this. Any advice?
January 13th, 2009
Here’s what you do - run the list on May 1 like you’re talking about and then compare the conversion from accept to enroll for your Cafe New Paltz kids to the 3 year rolling average your admissions office has (they should have those numbers readily available and if not, I’m positive they have the resources to find them, at least for last year). That way, you can compare apples-to-apples conversion rates with Cafe New Paltz and without it. Now, you also want to do this on arrival day because a lot of students pay their deposit after May 1 (and some who pay before May 1 ultimately decide not to attend). Another thing you could look at is if those who participated in Cafe New Paltz over the summer had a decreased “sugar off” (students who deposit and then decide not to attend) than the general population.
Does that help?
January 13th, 2009
but doesn’t this gloss over the entire idea of engagement? someone may not have made a donation now but the fact that they clicked through means they are engaged and have a higher likelihood of making a donation in the future. And when they do make that donation won’t it skew your email reporting numbers because you’ll assume a direct correlation from your most recent campaign?
The same goes with facebook. Maybe that person who posted on the group wall won’t ever enroll, but maybe 5 people will see that post in their feed won’t necessarily post to the group but will apply and maybe 2 will enroll.
How do you gauge the value of engagement? I agree we all need to be more ROI driven but isn’t there a way to aggregate these data points, compare them with a broad view of enrollment trends and donations and then put a value on engagement?
January 13th, 2009
@Isaacson - what is the point of that engagement if it gets the institution nowhere? You’re making an assumption that because a person clicked on a link they are more likely to give next time. I don’t have statistics to back that up (am not saying they don’t exist, but I’ve never seen them). Like it or not, the email they eventually do make the donation from is the trigger - it’s not the ONLY factor in their decision but it’s the one that finally motivated them to take the desired actions. That’s what I’m looking for, so it doesn’t skew anything.
Your Facebook scenario is more plausible, but it’s also a bit of a stretch. It’s grasping at straws because you don’t want to take the time to definitely prove that such an initiative is successful through numbers. In other words, it’s a complete cop-out. I have full confidence that Facebook groups do have an impact on an institution’s enrollment but the laziness of some “marketer” out there to refuse to PROVE it annoys the hell out of me. They have the resources available to them to do it, they just don’t want to make the effort under the guise of “you can’t measure social media!!!” Bullshit. You can. And many out there do.
I think I explained pretty clearly how you gauge the value of engagement - you find a way to measure if that engagement contributed directly to the bottom line. Even if your school just has a modest database and tracking program in place, then you have this data available to you. It all goes back to my first argument - if you had set goals up from the beginning, you would also have put in place a way to measure those goals (one would think anyway) so there wouldn’t be all this scrambling and “you can’t measure social media” BS going on after the fact.
January 13th, 2009
@Isaacson I agree that engagement is important, but Karlyn makes a great point not to cop out by throwing your hands up with the claim that it can’t be measured. Karlyn is right when she says “…the email they eventually do make the donation from is the trigger…” and, therefore, that’s the email that gets credit with a measurable direct action. There may have been 5 emails that preceded it, but those don’t have a DIRECT measurable action associate with them. So therein lies the engagement conundrum. How do those earlier emails get credit for the work they do if it’s not directly measurable?
One way, I think, is to measure over time- generate trends. After your first email, track how many people ended up donating or applying or whatever it is you want people to do. Do it again for a second email, then a third and fourth and so on. Once you have a few emails under your belt, see how the measure changes. If all else stays the same (who the emails go out to, the message, the call to action, etc.) then you’ll know two things:
1. You know the direct relationship between who saw an email and whether or not they took action. This is what Karlyn advocates you do.
2. Looking at trends, you’ll be able to infer whether a single email does the trick or whether it takes 3 emails before people are moved to act, or whether it takes 6. This certainly isn’t an exact science, but it does ferret out some insight. For example, whether frequency is a factor and whether emails generate word of mouth (you are tracking the social media landscape, correct?) which then has an effect on conversion.
One other note… When you launch an email campaign, don’t put an end date on it initially. Keep the campaign going for as long as necessary in order to generate and track trends. Only when your trend lines go down should you consider ending the campaign. Otherwise, if the trends stay at an acceptable level or increases, then you know it’s working and precludes any reason to end it. As long as it’s doing it’s job, why not keep it going?
January 13th, 2009
Karlyn - I’m always in favor of ‘not copping out’ but I’m concerned with assigning 1:1 values when there is a whole web of factors that trigger an outcome. We have a PR department (ok 2 people) who can’t translate their results into dollars and cents (they can quote for me the value of their placements in advertising equivalent but its hardly apples to apples), but their contribution to our bottom line is invaluable (literally).
I second Mike Rivera’s call for monitoring trends over longer swaths of time and I think its misleading to live or die by immediate ROI (though, again, I applaud the push for accountability). Having goals is hugely important but there are so many factors that go into a desired result that I’m still not convinced we have adequate tools to measure properly.
January 13th, 2009
@Isaacson - If it’s invaluable then they should be able to show it with numbers. If you can’t show it with numbers, then you can’t make the claim its invaluable. There are any number of ways to measure PR, and I don’t happen to think that advertising equivalent is out of line, particularly if you can prove that you actually garnered benefit from that placement (it could be as simple as asking your prospects the question - they’ll tell you if that placement had influence on them).
I don’t think I ever called for living or dying by immediate ROI, but I also have a realistic notion of how much time measuring trends would take. Most schools don’t bother to measure at all. Ask them to measure trends is just not a reasonable expectation. As much as I would love to do that in my office, I know that there’s just not the time or the resources. The trigger message is the best I can do and it still proves the value of the medium, which ultimately is the point of all this. You say we don’t have the adequate tools - wrong. We don’t have the adequate manpower. All the data is there.
January 13th, 2009
Some people might think invaluable means “cannot be measured.” Whereas its meaning is more like “value beyond estimation.” The value can be measured up to a maximum point (which is where one is satisfied), but the value continues beyond it.
January 13th, 2009
@Ez - I agree with you completely. I’m not suggesting that you can measure EVERYTHING….but that you can measure a lot more than people traditionally do.
January 14th, 2009
@Karlyn Not only can you directly measure more than people traditionally do, you can attempt to measure indirect causation. By “indirect causation” I mean accounting for marketing you do over time that doesn’t have an immediate effect, but does in the long run. It’s not perfect though. There are many variables (some of which change over time complicating things), but I’d prefer an informed guess about indirect effect (with known caveats) is better than guessing or only looking at direct effect. And yes, it takes extra time and reflection to do this, but I feel it can be worth the effort in cases.