Advanced: Measuring Engagement

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Overview

Measuring engagement challenges participants to think about organizing strategy and how to move people along an engagement ladder. It also provides training on useful tools for measuring this engagement in powerbase.

Objectives

All participants should finish this lesson with a solid grasp of how find the individuals in their database with the most activities, specifically how to use the Engagement Search and Event Count search and also how to find potentially useless contacts (e.g. without addresses, etc).

Requirements

Familiarity with how PowerBase records activities – events, donations, etc.

Description

The lesson should take about 45 minutes. All students should be using the training database for this lesson.

Discuss

What are the objective indicators that a person in your campaign is active? Attend meetings? Fill out petitions? Give donations? On board? Encourage people that may not be doing data entry that they can be using information such as messages. Email messages. Or people can consider what they would like to start doing even if they are not collecting data now. Start where they are. Can you find these people in your database? Are you ever surprised by the results?

Demonstrate

Review how all events and contributions show up under activities.

• Pick a random contact in the database.
  • Add a new activity of type meeting and put in an engagement level of 5.
  • Add three contributions of $5,000 each.

Review: you cannot set an engagement level for events or contributions – only activities added via activities tab directly.

Show summary fields.

Engagement Search: Demonstrate search for everyone with at least 1 activity that has an engagement level of 4 or above.

Advanced Search Summary fields:

How would you find everyone who made more than $10,000 in donations last year?

Wrong answer: Search for donations of $10,000 or more (doesn’t includevmultiple donations same year).

Right answer: Summary fields: More than $10,000 total.

Discuss

What about the opposite? Instead of finding people who are fully engaged, what if we find people who are useless to us? Like people without any contact information?

Demonstrate

Search Builder

Find everyone with a empty city, state, zip code, email and phone number.

Teach: Contacts vs Individual, Location Type (choose primary), what different criteria mean, And/Or search

Put in a smart group called: Everyone without contact information

Teach: Naming convention (develop one) and mailing list checkbox (don’t check it unless you really want to send them email).

Discuss

What if you want to delete all records without contact info unless they have made a contribution?

Include/Exclude

Create a smart group of everyone who made a contribution.

Perform Include/Exclude with everyone without contact info, but exclude everyone who has made a contribution.

Final Exercise

20 minutes: Hand out exercise and ask everyone to fill it out. When everyone is done, ask for the results and see if they are the same.