At C4C, we group communication activities into two types, namely institutional communications and public campaigns. Institutional communication aims to increase the reputation or trust of stakeholders in an institution. Meanwhile, public campaigns have more specific goals, for example increasing public awareness of certain issues, raising funds, or mobilizing the public to urge policy makers. In this article, we will focus on public campaigns.

For those who are not familiar, the analytics that I mean in this article is the information we obtain from analyzing data about the performance of the sites or social media accounts that we manage. The information obtained includes, for example, how many times our content was viewed (or more precisely: broadcast), by whom, and what they did with the content. This data can be accessed via various platforms provided by the media channels you use. For example, we can see Google Analytics for websites, while for social media via Instagram Insights, Youtube Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, TikTok Analytics, and so on.

From conversations with friends from various non-profit organizations, it is rare for anyone to admit to always monitoring social media analytics and campaign websites via the platforms I just mentioned. This made us curious, so what is usually written in public campaign reports on digital channels? Shouldn't the report discuss the extent to which the communication succeeded in reaching and attracting the target group? Then, where can we know the performance of a campaign to reach and attract targets, if not from the data that can be obtained on an analytics platform? And if we don't know how a campaign is performing, how can we learn to improve it?

It turns out that many of the organizations we met (yes, it wasn't random sampling ) made campaign reports and learned lessons based only on activities and a few outputs. For example, you already have a site and social media, the frequency of uploading is quite frequent or regular, the number of likes and followers is large. From this, it can be concluded that the public campaign program has been successful. But, can this conclusion be justified?

The answer is not certain, because many questions remain unanswered. For example, who are the followers, are they really the targeted group? What is the follower development curve-his? Why is the curve shaped like that, and what are the influencing factors? How do they behave? What kind of content attracts them so that it needs to be reproduced? What kind of content fails to attract them and needs to be fixed? When is it best to upload new content? Upload photos or videos, single image or carousel, do you need pictures or just text? I think I could write a full page just to list questions like this.

However, what is more important is the answer. The answers to all these questions can be found through analytics, and can be directly accessed with the laptop or cellphone you are using now.

By analogy, writing a public campaign monitoring or evaluation report is like cooking, and you are the chef. The purpose of cooking is to produce a dish. Apart from having to be delicious, it also has to be nutritious and appropriate to the context (for example, ice cream is usually served as dessert and not for breakfast). Then the analytics platform is like a marketplace, where you buy ingredients. How can we cook a dish that is delicious, nutritious and appropriate to the context, if we don't gather the ingredients first? How can you produce interesting and insightful reports , if you don't take data from analytics first? Almost impossible.

Maybe now you're starting to get impatient and ask, "Okay, so how do I start?" I will give three things to pay attention to when checking analytics, still using a cooking analogy. The first thing is to determine the menu that will be cooked, namely determining the purpose and context of making the report, so that we know what to check in the analytics. The second is to make a list of questions before checking the analytics like making a shopping list before going to the market. Last but not least, explore while still limiting yourself so you can get meaningful complementary data without wasting a lot of time.

These three things will each be discussed in one short article. I recommend that you read all of them in order to get complete and coherent information. If you need a more comprehensive analysis of communication performance in your organization, both in digital and other media, you can also contact us by clicking the banner below.

Find out what else you need to pay attention to by reading the fourth article on limitations of data exploration. I recommend that you read this entire series of articles in full and in order to get complete and coherent information. If you need a more comprehensive analysis of communication performance in your organization, both in digital and other media, you can also contact us by clicking the banner below.