How do I not get lost in the data?
Making sense of the data you have, identifying what you should collect, and integrating it into your marketing practices can help you put your finger on impact and target your marketing efforts and dollars.
Where do we begin?
1
What's your goal for digital marketing?
Just as with your website, it's helpful to consider before you set off, what are your goals? Is it to engage more volunteers, reach beneficiaries with the right interventions, or tell your story to potential donors? With a target in mind, we can better understand performance.
2
What data do you have? What might you need?
Based on your goals, you'll get a feel for what information you will need to measure against your goals. Are more cases coming in? More volunteer inquiries? Are migrants in your target geographies engaging with you? This will clue you into the gaps you might have in your system.
3
How do you present and read the data?
Now that you've sorted your data sources and filled in some potential gaps, how do we organize it that's useful for different stakeholders: managers, donor reporting, board members? Then, how do we draw insight from the tea leaves?
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Migrasia as a Case Study
The Migration Support System.
Migrasia had in place an organically grown network of Facebook communities with tens of thousands of followers, millions of impressions, and hundreds of ongoing cases. With so much activity, it was hard to keep track of all the data sources — and crucially, how to read them altogether.
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With the goal of reaching migrants at key points of migration in select corridors, the team implemented a case management system that would track client interaction data (what issues did they face, where were they going?). The next step was to consolidate social media data across the various channels (what content generates engagement? in what geographies are we most resonant?).
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Putting this information together, we are now able to understand see across data sources and identify some macro trends (what type of content leads to a particular type of case? how is the health of each page?). It is a work in progress, but adapting these dashboards has streamlined and enriched weekly management meetings, monthly stakeholder discussions, and quarterly reporting.
Some Helpful Tools
Looker Studio & Connectors
Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is an online tool for converting data into customizable, informative reports and dashboards.
Community Connections is a collaborative program started in 2015 to connect corporate employees with social impact organizations that seek directors, committee members, and skills-based volunteers. After FSI took over the program in 2020, Community Connections now also provides training to equip corporate employees with leadership skills.