By Noelle Salerno
Last Friday, we hosted our Metrics That Matter webinar and shared how to translate data into content that inspires action, including tactics on how to fully leverage data in your community through education, advocacy, and marketing.
Here are some key takeaways from the webinar:
Selecting Your Metrics
Select metrics based on your community’s specific strategic goals. Along the way you might find some metrics are more difficult to measure than others, but digging into more nuanced data may lead you to uncover new strengths to celebrate or challenges to address. Monitor your progress and adapt strategies based on your metrics.
Educate & Advocate
Be transparent, and publish your metrics and progress reports online. Utilize your data resources to produce content that keeps your community engaged and informed about economic development activity and successes. Make sure you’re celebrating your successes, but don’t be afraid to share your challenges too. Identify areas of collaboration to share resources and leverage the collective impact of your stakeholders. Use a data-driven methodology to provide an objective, non-partisan foundation for collaborative decision-making.
Market
Most important to marketing is crafting a brand identity that is founded in research to ensure it is authentic and inspiring. Uncover unique competitive advantages in your data and use them across your marketing materials. Share key datasets to aid in the site selection process.
Identify marketing channels based on your target audience (ask yourself questions such as: where are they located? How do they consume their news?). Write content specific to each channel and with your target audience in mind. To make sharing your successes easier, develop a marketing calendar for each campaign that eases implementation and strategically reinforces key messaging.
Want more information and best practices of communities translating data into action? View a recording of the full webinar here.