Step Ten: Measuring Your Impact

With Internet tools continually recording “hits” and “clicks,” measurement is at your fingertips.  As a result, you can monitor the readership of each story, community responses, the number of views of your site overall, the number of members on any social network sites you run, the most popular stories or features of your website and anything else that shows the impact your organization is making.

These measurements, or “metrics,” serve many purposes.  You’ll include them in reports to funders, who are looking for ways to measure the social return on their investment and the impact of their grants.  You will also include them in grant applications. 

In the parlance of foundations, you will be expected to show “deliverables”—the product of the work—and “outcomes”—what happened because of your work.  You’ll present them in reports to your board or university sponsor.  You will probably tout them in your marketing materials and press releases.  And you will want your advertisers and sponsors to know about these as well.

Remember to count the number of participants at workshops or events and hand out evaluation forms, asking for feedback. Take note of the diversity. Count your participation in journalism panels or training sessions. Collect emails and correspondence and focus on growing your database of contact. Count your growth in Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

Also, remember to regularly run the numbers.  Year-end metrics aren’t good enough, because deadlines for grant applications and reports come due at different times, and you will likely report to your board on a quarterly basis, at the very least. You may want to examine your metrics monthly.

In keeping track of your deliverables and outcomes, you’ll be surprised how often you refer to that mission statement we described in Step One.  To determine what you measure, you’ll want to spell out reasonable, specific goals that align with the broader scope of your mission.  Corporate “facilitators” often talk of SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. These goals (as the “M” in the SMART acronym indicates) lead to your metrics. 

For example, one goal could be to deliver a certain number of stories throughout the year on particular topics.  Over the course of the year, you will periodically count up those stories and their outcomes. 

Consider using a free tool like Google Analytics or a more powerful and more expensive tool, such as Adobe’s Omniture to help measure web traffic.  You can learn more about this topic in J-Lab’s “Making the Most of Metrics” learning module.

Throughout the year, compare your outcomes with the values embodied in your mission statement.  The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, for example, in its mission statement promises to cover government integrity and quality-of-life issues of importance to people in the state, as well as seeking to increase the quality and amount of investigative journalism there.  It has to gauge its success by measuring those areas.