Measuring Engagement
Every organization has a different method for engaging their constituents, measuring that engagement and developing new leaders. This training covers the organizing principles and tools available to help with the process.
Discussion: 15 minutes
Question: What are your criteria for determining if someone is ready to take on a leadership role? Open a riseup pad, ask people to type them in.
Add two categories to the top of the list:
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
Ask a volunteer to organize the criteria.
Commentary: The database can only provide quantitative answers - it can't tell you who your leaders are or who are potential leaders. But it can answer two important questions:
- I'm looking for a speaker/facilitator/co-chair/etc from our membership and I don't want to pick from the usual suspects - who am I missing?
- Are we successfully developing leaders?
Demonstration: 15 minutes
Contact Leadership level: Enter a number indicating each person's engagement. Then, you can search for all the people who have been coded over a certain level.
- Requires commitment: you have to make the search and review of numbers a regular part of your organizing workflow, otherwise the numbers become stale
- Downside: the assessments are not dated, so hard to know whether or not they are stale. Also, without history you have to record numbers elsewhere to evaluate change (e.g. in 2020, we had 75 people coded as 5's, in 2021 that number was 95).
Last Assessment: Same as above, but you make your assessment by creating an "assessment" activity.
- You can revise the assessment and each revision is a separate activity, so you have a full history
- The assessment is copied to the contact record, along with a date, so you can easily see if it's stale or not
- Downside: assigning a person a number is really arbitrary - you may have wildly different numbers depending on the organizer or the organizer's mood at the time
Engagement: As long as you are recording your engagements (event attendance, one-on-one phone calls) you can generate a more objective list of your most active members.
- Custom Search: Event Count - show everyone who has attended 2 or more events
- Very simple search - and you can filter by event type - but it only counts people who have attended (so you have to re-code people from registered to attended)
- Engagement search - more powerfull, searches all activities. Show everyone with 3 or more activities
- Finding leaders via engagement is the holy grail of data driven organizing
- Very flexible to your needs - you can count just about anything
- Can be used with smart groups: Combine complex searches - attended X events, had 1 assessment in last year, etc. You can have smart group for each leadership level that always shows the people at that level
- Requires constant data entry!