As part of your engagement strategy, you should be tracking your engagement activities to help you measure performance. To help you benchmark and measure performance metrics, you first need to set and understand your long-term goals, how they align with your organization’s overall strategy, and by which metrics you will measure success.
Your short-term goals matter as well but are often more specific to the project at hand. Long-term goals and measurements will help you track engagement rates.
You must also understand your audience. Which stakeholders do you want to engage? Are there specific community groups whose input would be especially valuable?
As an EngagementHQ user, you can access a range of reporting and metrics to help you benchmark and measure performance. This article will go through some statistics you can find in EngagementHQ and some tips to help you measure performance.
Measure Performance Over Time
EngagementHQ provides a range of statistics that you can use to understand how your site performs over time. In the Project Reports, you’ll find a Visitors Summary from which you can gather statistics using a custom date range. You can also measure by specific projects, if necessary.
You can track:
Pageviews, visits, and visitors: These metrics mean slightly different things but can help you track how many people are visiting your site.
New registrations: Track how many new registered participants you get over time to see how your database is developing.
Aware, Informed, and Engaged: Understand how many people are aware of your projects, how many seek further information, and how many submit a contribution.
While the Visitor Summary graphs your Pageviews, Visitors, Visits, and New Registrations, you may find it helpful to note down your annual aware, informed, and engaged figures and enter them into a spreadsheet. You can use the spreadsheet to generate a graph of these figures and understand how these metrics are changing over time.
With all this data, you can understand how your site is performing over time and start setting goals and making plans to improve future performance.
Measure Sources of Traffic
In Project Reports, you will also find the Sources of Traffic section. This report charts how people are arriving at your site and if those users are aware, informed, or engaged.
You can use this information to help build your next communications campaign. For example, if many people arrive at your site via a Search Engine, then that could be a sign that your SEO practices are working. However, if no users arrive via your Email newsletters, then something in your content may not resonate with your subscribers.
Measure Community Satisfaction
Community satisfaction surveys are one of the best methods of tracking community sentiment and annual engagement goal setting. These surveys provide foundational benchmarks and deep insights into how your community thinks you’re doing.
Satisfaction surveys should be designed to ask the same questions over time so you can directly track and compare progress in key areas. You may consider asking about:
Ease of involvement
Range of consultation topics
Levels of trust and transparency
Communication and responsiveness
Project updates and closing the loop
Perceived impact of involvement in consultations
Perceptions of value
Clarity around decision-making and their input
You are not limited to these reporting measures or the metrics you choose to use for benchmarking. What’s important is that you understand what you want to measure over time and set goals to help you do that.
Using some or all of the metrics we provide can help you set goals for your community and your organization. It will also ensure that you hold yourself accountable while striving to improve your community engagement practices continually.