PowerBase's focus on recording interactions between you and your constituents opens up amazing opportunities for measuring engagement and leadership.
Basic
The most basic way to measure leadership within your organization is to use the "Leadership Level" field in the "Grassroots Info" section of the contact record.
You can set the value to anything you want (by default it's a number between 1 and 5, but you can change it).
With the basic method, each organizer assigns a contact a number corresponding to their perceived engagement or leadership level in the organization.
With this field set, you can easily search for everyone who is a "5," etc.
This approach is intuitive, easy to teach and straight forward to mainaing. However, there a few problems:
- How do you trust the data? This approach won't tell you who recorded the number and when it was recorded.
- It's subjective. Sometimes it's good to be subjective because data can't tell you everything. On the other hand, if multiple organizers and ranking people, you may get a wide variety of scores.
Repeated assessments
One solution to the problem is to enable the Last Assessment Extension. This extension will allow you to track both the leadership level assigned to the person and the date it was assigned. Furthermore, all assignments are made via activities. Whenever you add an activity and set the Engagement Index field, that value and the current date will be automatically copied to the contact record. With this approach, you benefit from easily and intuitively finding the most recent assessed leadership level, the date it was made, and a history of how it has changed.
This approach is common with labor unions who are tracking individuals for a particular campaign.
This approach, however, still suffers from being subjective. Below are two more approaches that are objectively based on recorded interactions in your database.
Event Count Search
The most basic example is to find everyone in your database who has attended more than a certain number of events in a given time period.
You can run this search by going to:
Search : Custom Searches : Event Count: Find People Who Have Attended Events Multiple Time
Simply enter the minimum number of events, the date range and, if you want, you can even restrict by type of event.
Engagement Level
Some organizers may want more fine tuned control. For example, what if you want to count participation in other activities? What if some activities should be weighted higher than others?
You can answer these questions using the Engagement Search by going to:
Search : Custom Searches : Engage: Search by level of engagement
This search gives you many more options, including:
- Restrict to certain groups
- Restrict by activity type, status or campaign
- Indicate both a minimum and maximum count
And lastly it allows you to search by minimum or maximum engagement level.
When adding an activity, you have the option to set the "Engagement Index" - that allows you to specify a high or low ranking of engagement for this activity.
If your organization agrees on standards for using this field then you can add even more fine tuning to your engagement searches. *