How do you show results to leadership?
How do you best showcase the results your emails and comms strategy have helped bring in to VPs and the President of a university?
Show how your work contributes.
Reporting activity is not enough.
Open rates, clicks, impressions… Those are performance metrics. They help you optimize your work.
Leadership wants strategy metrics. They want to know how your work advances institutional goals.
Your job is to connect the two by showing contribution.
The easiest way to do this is by using comparisons. Here’s how I do it:
Use tracking to compare channels.
Three quick examples:
Leadership wants to convert nondonors on Giving Day and you send a postcard. Add a unique QR code so you can compare how many gifts came from the postcard versus other channels.
You launch a social campaign to increase campus event attendance. Ask registrants how they heard about it.
You email first-gen students to drive applications. Use a trackable URL so you can see how many application starts came directly from that message.
Create a (temporary) control group.
If tracking is not possible, test exposure.
Instead of sending the email to everyone, hold out a portion of your audience.
Compare conversions between those who received the message and those who did not.
Then send it to the group you held out! Lest anyone panic!
Compare before and after.
Sometimes control groups are not feasible, especially on social or broad awareness initiatives.
In those cases, compare conversion rates before and after implementation. Year over year comparisons can work well when most other variables are stable.
You may not be able to claim sole causation. But you can hypothesize contribution.
Be careful what you compare.
Imagine someone saying:
“People who come to my restaurant are more likely to buy food than people who don’t.”
You don’t say! In higher ed, we do this all the time:
“Visitors are more likely to commit.”
That correlation is real. But it ignores that students who visit are often more interested to begin with.
The more interesting question is not whether visitors commit at higher rates. It is how many minds the visit changes. That’s the real effect of the intervention.
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