 So welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited that you're here. I'm Mickey Reggio I'm an analyst and project coordinator at Parsons TKO and today we'll be talking about our content impact study that my colleague Chelsea Louie is here to help us with Chelsea go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi everyone, I'm Chelsea. I'm really happy to be sharing a bit about the content study. I worked on the study with Mickey and another one of our colleagues Stephen Bird Kruger last year. So very happy to be sharing this. Additionally, I'm also communications officer with activism always a student founded startup that's really working to uplift mission driven organizations using social listening technology doing these type of studies and looking into the space more. Thanks so much Chelsea and for those of you who are here for the first time welcome where Parsons TKO a nonprofit consulting agency that works with nonprofits and other mission driven organizations to improve their engagement via things like marketing tech data strategy and business processes. Right. And with that, let's go ahead and jump in. So just as a brief agenda today we're going to be talking about the content study, what we found from talking to so many different people in the mission driven sector. Chelsea is going to walk us through that and some of our main findings and takeaways. And then she'll pass it back to me and we'll talk about some practical applications and what this means for you and your role at your organization. So before we get rolling, we're going to do a little poll so thanks for everyone who participated in the chat telling us where you're calling in from. We have a super diverse audience which is super great from all around the US. And so I just launched our polls you should see it and so we just are asking about your role in your department, and then we'll share the results when we're done. Just a second. Right, I'll go ahead and end the poll. Thank you for everyone who participated, and you should all be able to see the results and so we have a large variety which is also really cool looks like we mostly have partners, directors and mid level managers. No interns but that's okay. In the department we have an overwhelmingly majority for communications which makes a lot of sense, but also glad to see some analytics folks, some C sweet and other. All right, so thanks for participating in our first poll. I'm going to pass it back to Chelsea to get us started. All right, I guess we'll get right to it. Really diving into what you're all here for to learn a bit more about the content impact study that we've worked on. We are exploration into the into content impact is how I would best describe it. We were really interested in these sort of like three main points that I have detailed here. This is really what got us interested in the first place. We really wanted to know how content was defined by professionals in the mission driven space, the relevance of data specifically in mission driven work, and then the role of data in content development. So these three ideas really summarize we just want to understand better the value and direction of data in the mission driven space, and we found that content is something that mission driven orgs are always producing. And later in these slides we'll see all the different ways of content is being produced and all the different ways content is being described. So in those questions and in actually starting our study we wanted to have some type of theory some type of baseline to start our work with and that's where the five content stages come in. For most of you who are working in communications these stages are probably familiar, even if you haven't seen it laid out specifically like this I'm sure you've at least heard of something similar, seen something similar or work in one of these five stages yourself, and all of them. So this was really our baseline. This is the baseline for most people working comms you usually start by strategizing, you create something you promote it, you measure it, and then you refine that work and you do it over and over again to create the content that best represents your organization best represents the mission that you're working towards. However, we wanted to push that a bit further. And through the study we really asked people how they define different stages where they saw data working in these different stages and how they wanted to improve processes within the stages. So, with our next slide, I can talk a bit more about what we actually did. We call this a content study our exploration into content impact. But really what we did was set up a number of intimate interviews. This began in June of 2021 and it led through sort of mid fall 2021 where we conducted 16 interviews on the topic of content impact. And we have a very just broad breakdown to give you an idea. But it looks a bit like our audience here today actually, we talked to some technology professionals so these were people that were called technology leads data managers analyst, whatever the name might be, but they're working more with the technology and analytics in the process. Overwhelmingly we talked to people who were communications or content professionals. So people working in marketing editorial communications manager people who say that they are producing strategizing working with content on a daily basis. And we also talked to a number of people who considered themselves other but still worked with content in some type of way. These were founders, people who are graphic designers C suite executives managers, people that might not be necessarily working directly with the content, but still in relation to many communications and content professionals. This just gives you a bit of idea of the scope of the work we're doing. I think it's a good little caveat to start with that like, our work is not going to be completely representative of the entire mission driven sector of the entire nonprofit space. But we really wanted to have these interviews to talk with actual professionals, rather than a survey. We actually sat down and talk to them and got the language that they were using in relation to content content impact and data. So with all that setup. I'm actually going to break down a little bit about what we actually found in our content impact study. So with the next slide. We're actually going to give you another poll question because we want to know what you're doing before we give you the findings. So a quick quick poll that Mickey's going to put on the screen so what type of content do you, if applicable, or your organization produce the most frequently, and this will inform our next slide. Give it a few more seconds. All right, I think the poll has ended. But what I'm seeing is overwhelmingly, most people here are working with all of the above in pretty equal levels of frequency. So it makes sense once we go to the next slide. But also I'm seeing lots of newsletters and emails social media content. This is definitely something we saw in our study as well as content pieces that were pretty frequently activated and used in communications work. So we'll go right to the next slide. I keep alluding to it, but we're actually going to get to it. Going into our findings. Our first question to everyone that we interviewed was really, how do you define content. What is the content that you make just really broadly ask them kind of what how we asked you in that poll. What are you working on. And really the finding there wasn't that surprising. Most people define content in a really sort of broad sense because they are working on a lot of different things. content itself as a word is a really broad term. But we're seeing that people are defining them as pieces of communication output stories messages, whatever that might be newsletters social media posts blog posts. And that really sort of broad answer, because we were able to access our interviewees through conversations rather than just a survey. We began to start to map out all the different ways content was being used and being discussed to create a little table that we have on the right, right here. This is again not. These are not hard categories to define all these specific posts but this is sort of an example of how we started sort of mapping out these conversations. But we found that most outputs fit into a number of categories and these categories tended to overlap in different ways. So what we described it was content to unify. So we described that as content that strengthens and organizations brand messaging or image. This is sort of the content that really is at the crux of your mission so if you're working to promote sustainability this is the content coming out that is showing that sustainability is important to you, your community. This is the stuff that's unifying your organization unifying the community that you're building around your organization. You also found that content to translate was often discussed. And then we also found that as translators translating information and messages that you might have within your organization that might have within sort of the research realm, things that are a bit more technical but you're trying to translate that to non expert audiences. And then we also found the two categories of expert and public content and this is what we're going to spend a bit more time talking about today. So content really is that highly technical content content that is technical and made for a technical audience where it matches up the technicality of the content matches the technicality of the folks reading it, and then public content, where we're getting something slightly different, where the technicality of the content is translated, and it's more for a non expert audience. So again with that sustainability example, you might be doing really cool research, you have professionals in your field, writing amazing research pieces blog posts, but sometimes you do need to translate that content for people who are non experts, whether to get them to unify so get them more excited about the piece. Or to translate it so that they can talk about the ideas themselves. That is where public content comes in. So this is an example, these are definitely not have hard categories to define these content pieces that I've listed here. Probably most of you working with social media like, well social media can be used in like more than one of these ways. But this is sort of an example of how we started mapping out these conversations and mapping out where a content pieces could actually provide value. So in our next slide, we'll go into a bit more about expert and public content. And not be alarmed by this large table. This really is an example of a bit more depth that we put into defining entire defining and categorizing process. So, in the report that we eventually made around the content impact study we have a number of these tables that really map out our notes map out all the different information we learned. But we're going to walk you through just one of our tables today around expert and public content. So we see we have expert and public content here, but really, it breaks down to these four other categories that sort of define what makes content expert, what makes content more public. And really at the start of that is the goal of the content. So, why are you creating the piece of content. And then it breaks down into other more sort of specific details or the audience of that content, the different digital content types that tend to work best for that type of content and also the teams that maybe responsible for working on it. So we're going to go into a bit more about expert content in the next slide also a bit more about public content. We'll just take a moment and walk through this for expert content the definition is on the slide again, but we're really making technical content for a technical audience in this example. So that means that there's generally a barrier of entry to this type of work that's a little higher than public content. You can use things like jargon industry specific, even names case studies that if you were sharing with a public audience would lose them at some point, because they don't necessarily have that expertise. But in creating expert content. This is the type of thing that you want to invoke that you want to share, because it actually increases your credibility. This is the set type of stuff that if you're a technical expert, you want to have a technical piece to actually So these content types usually can come a bit few and far between in an organization as comms department so I know most of you here are coming in with comms expertise. However, we talked to a lot of people that were working in other teams responsible. So teams that describe themselves as research policy program fellows fellowships. And the interesting part is that they refer to the work that they're doing as content being created. So while maybe someone a comms professional would say that the content that they're producing is more social media focus that is more one way or another. So teams still refer to their work as content. So I think that was a pretty interesting finding in our work to sort of expand how we describe content from the original definition we saw it was communication outputs. But we can break it down to these different types of pieces and then categorize them in these ways. I think a bit more about the applications and content data bit later, but this is just sort of a preface a little bit more, as the slide says, to show that there's a lot of variety in what we consider content. And there's a lot of different ways we can use data to sort of strategize and standardize other ways that we're collecting information from these outputs. So that was just a little bit. And we'll have also a little bit more about public content. This is a bit more of the stuff you think when the generic idea of comms team comes to mind. But there's so much more to public content from these conversations that we had three main goals that we captured from the mission driven space from these was really using communications outputs using digital content types that we have listed there to one inform a non expert audience. So these are people that might not 100% know what you do what your mission is, but inform them what's going on to to strengthen the audience support or interest in the topic. So once they do know what's going on, strengthen that. And the third point is to call on actions towards the topic. So actually affect behaviors affect action one way or another. You might think this is pretty straightforward of what you would want to do with your communications work, but this kind of breaks it down a bit more specifically using language from the people that we interviewed. So content is really nifty. It sheds a lot of light on the specific work that we're doing. And Mickey, if you can go back to the previous slide for just a little bit longer. I think the last point of the slide is that targeting is really important. I think most people here working comms can agree that a general audience really doesn't exist in this line of work. Because if you're trying to appeal to everyone you don't appeal to anyone really. So you're really trying to target your work to hit these different goals. So targeting so that you're translating your, well, very obviously you're trying to translate a technical topic to a non expert audience that's really one type of targeting, but to target people to affect their attitudes and behaviors you need to be pretty proactive and how you're developing that content. So targeting an audience is sort of the key there. So that's a bit more about public content and can move on to the next slide. Okay, so we're going to move on just a little bit from expert and public content, but another point from our findings was measuring content impact and thinking about him, how metrics can support or hinder content development in the mission driven This was sort of, I mean it's in the name of the study honestly the content impact study, we want to know how content is impacting the work that we're doing impacting the missions that we're fighting for. Honestly, as data people here at PTK we might be a little bias, but we think having a really clear metrics, really strategizing well can standardize your creative outputs, so that you can at least collect and track the work that you're doing. And with that, sort of the opportunities are endless on how you want to activate it. A bit more here, we really go into the measuring and refining steps a bit more into our report. In our interviews we actually talked to professionals about how what data they collected what they consider data and also how data moved within their organizations. And we break that down sort of in the same way that we broke down expert and public content into those sort of larger tables. But generally we found that the questions that you really need to be asking when you're collecting data is what are we measuring for thinking about who the teams are responsible for the metrics, the types and forms of metric outputs. Thinking about what we want from those metrics, once we have them, and then the audience for those content metrics within your organization. So now that we have it all. Now we know what we want to do with it. Where is it going back out to, and then the goals of those metrics once they're actually given back out to the to the different content teams. And we're going to be talking a bit more about applications in just a moment I'll pass it back to McGage to lead us through some actual actionable steps from this work. But I think in these two sort of findings that we're sharing today, a major theme in our study is talking a bit more about the relationship between content and data thinking about content in terms of the different teams that work on it. And knowing that it's not impossible to navigate as much content there is out there in your organization in your community in sort of the entire sector. What it comes down to is breaking down and tracking and then targeting that work. Just to wrap up my section, a final question we asked in every interview is asked our interviewees what they would most like to do with data and how data support content in the ideal world. And we got a lot of different answers, but at the crux of it. We will really want a deeper understanding that would allow for more transparency across the sector, more predictability across teams, and a wider definition of what we consider content a wider definition of what we consider content metrics. So, I will pass along the question to you all as well. This is a mini interview that we're doing. So I think the questions on the screen already if you can answer that real quickly, how would you want data to inform and improve your content. And if you've never thought about it or you don't really think data would be helpful in informing the work you're doing, feel free to click other. And also explain and chat as well. I think the poll just ended, and we see that most people we want to see how data can affect how we measure engagement. You're in luck, because I'm going to pass it to Mickey who's actually going to share a bit about how we can use data and these different five stages that we outlined at the start so from strategizing creating publishing and promoting measuring and refining. Measuring will definitely be touch. But thank you all for sharing a bit with us today. And for letting me share a bit about our study. The report is available. I think I saw something really quick in the chat about that the full report is available for download and you can check out the tables and more detail afterwards as well. Thanks so much Chelsea yes we'll be sending out the link to download the report along with the deck and the recording to all our districts and so, so you'll get that. But now that Chelsea has given us the overview of how we conducted the study and our biggest takeaways I really wanted to dive in deeper about what this means for you your role in your organization. So all of these concepts are really great but are one of our main goals with the content impact report was to make this information helpful and help organizations understand how to apply these theories. Right so as Chelsea went over we have five steps to the campaign planning process. And of the five steps the last two have the majority of the data that you need to incorporate into your next campaign strategy. So those are steps four and five measure and refine which go into improving your next campaign. And from our interviews people were very interested in how each of these steps and stages kind of affected each other, and how they would build off of each other. So although we've shown this as a linear process it's really important to remember that this actually is cyclical. This is an ongoing process that would ideally never end. And each step informs the next as well as strengthens the understanding of the people who work in all these stages or just one or two of these stages. And so where on this I also wanted to highlight the importance of cross departmental collaboration. So none of these steps should happen in a vacuum and they rarely do. In fact, many of the individuals that we conducted interviews with express the desire to want to know more about what their peers were doing at different stages and then how they can work together. So even for smaller organizations this may not be applicable. But even if there's just more than one person or department working on one of these steps or one of these campaigns. It's really important to be able to collaborate to share your findings metrics and strategies. So of these five steps we're going to talk about practical ways to get started on three of them which are steps one strategize the step four measure and step five refine. So first up we have strategize we describe the step as using data to meet your campaigns audience where they are, and match their interest your specific content. So when planning for in conducting the step we have a few suggestions of top priority items to keep in mind as you start going about this work. So first off you want to start by thinking about who these different audiences and users are previously Chelsea talked about kind of the expert content and public content and the different audiences for that and so that's a great thing to keep in mind because this can the audiences can vary from different types of pieces if you're an organization that produces both public and expert content. But there also can be different stages in the campaign for specific audience members and so being able to have a clear idea of who these people are, what content you want to direct them towards and what you want that final outcome to be or CTA called the action. This is a great place to start. And so we have an image on the right, which is an example of how you may want to map it out. So our team, I'll dive into this a little bit more in the future slides, but our team is a big fan of Miro that M I R O, and it's basically like a big digital collaborative whiteboard. And so you're able to like you stickies and drag them around and so it's a great way to map out your audience journeys into match them to specific pieces of content that you may be producing. Right. And then now that you've decided out who you're targeting so you've identified your audience part of your strategy, you want to think about how exactly you're going to measure that. So, for example, if you work at a think tank and you're releasing a new policy memo or recommendation, most likely your goal would be to influence the outcome of that policy. And so this but this can happen in a lot of different ways and all of those different outcomes can be measured differently. So you're able to be really specific about what your what your outcome is that you're trying to measure. So for example, maybe you want to get as many eyes on your policy memo as possible. And so an example metric of that is page views or web traffic so you can really get the finite number of people who have clicked on it or read the memo. Maybe your goal could also be to have the right people look at it so you don't care about how many people as long as the lobbyists and the right politicians are reading and looking at your memo. So in that case then you may want to be tracking different metrics such as time spent on page and we'll talk about some tools that can help you do that. So as you can see those are two very vastly different metrics that require different setup and strategy and so identifying and choosing these goals are really important in the first strategy phase when you're getting started. And just as I talked about before about cross departmental collaboration. Once you have these goals and metrics it's really important to align your whole team around them. The team this may again may not be people directly in your department, or your direct reports or managers but anyone who kind of has skin in the game for this campaign so this can be stakeholders executives board, maybe grant givers. And so aligning everyone around what these goals are and what you want to accomplish can be really helpful and also will come back in the future steps that we'll discuss. So once you have this guiding start you can transition into the next three steps which are your actual content creation and other campaign creations, and have a more kind of intentional outcome in your head which can increase your chances of reaching that goal since you have a specific one. All right, so here are a collection of tools that all have free tiers of pricing and can help with all of the strategizing steps that I went over. So first off from mapping out a user's journey I talked about mural already which can be really effective. They have a free tier of pricing but for some teams maybe they just like to use Google Docs. Something simple that everyone can just collaborate on and that's totally fine too. Next we have Google search console which can help you understand how your current audiences are finding your content. And so let's say let's go back to that example of the policy memo so you can see what terms people are typing in on Google to find that policy memo. And that can inform a lot of different things that can inform like your audience, the type of content that you're producing and so that can be a really valuable set of data that also is free. And then also we have Microsoft clarity. And so Microsoft clarity is also free to use and you can incorporate it into your website, and it'll give you really specific metrics so that time spent on page metric that I talked about earlier. Microsoft clarity can give you that. And also maybe number of clicks per page or how many clicks per minute. So a lot more specific data insights if you want to drill down a little bit deeper. So that's all level stuff Google search console and Google analytics, which is helpful to look at your website performance overall. It's great. And then also if you have content that may not be on your main website. These tools can still work. And so even if it's on your main website or kind of on like a sub portal, you can still really be able to drill down into this data. And then lastly, we have Hive, which is a free project management tool. I know there's a bunch out there with my work at Parsons CK I also work as a project manager and so I know there's an overwhelming amount of project management tools. But Hive is a great one and can just be a central place to communicate with your team, list out those goals audiences strategies for the campaign and just have visibility for everyone so that everyone's on the same page. Great. So next up we have the measure phase which is pretty self explanatory but we like to think of it as the step we really hone in on your metrics and are creating a new content or material around those metrics. So these first involve an action and then a way to measure that action. So in the strategy step we were brainstorming about it but in this step this is when you're actually conducting the analysis and doing the measuring plugging those tools in and reading the results. And so one of the most common and easiest response metrics is the call to action, the CTA. And so on the right in the orange box with the green button you can see that we have a screenshot of a CTA on our homepage. So this is one of the free toolkits that we produce at Parsons TKO that's designed to help organizations prepare for when Google Analytics 3 ends next year, July 1 2023. And so our call to action button on this is clicking the get started button so the arrow is pointing to the little green box. That's where you want to direct people when they come to our homepage. When they click on the green box they're taken to that screenshot below, which is a landing page with a form to access the toolkit so we can measure both how many people are clicking on the call to action box in the first screenshot. And then also we can compare that against how many people are actually submitting the form. And so that can tell us two different things so if they click on the first link and that means that orange box got them. Something about it was interesting and they wanted to click. But maybe when they got to the landing page they didn't fill out the form in the green box. Maybe the copy on here wasn't clear or not enticing enough. But all of that data can really give our marketing team insights into how to change this to make it more appealing to our audience which is mission driven organizations. Next we have impact measurement from the poll I know a lot of you express interest in this and this also goes back to kind of understanding the purpose of your content and measuring that which can be difficult because impact and purpose can be such vague metrics. But there definitely is a way to kind of go about it strategically. Sometimes this can be hard numbers but it doesn't always have to be a data point that can be compared to something else and sometimes it doesn't have to be a number at all. And maybe for your organization or for your specific content or campaign qualitative data is more important and more helpful for your team and your stakeholders. And so maybe this is reaching like one specific political influencer maybe you really want President Biden to read your policy memo and if you accomplish that then you feel like you've accomplished all the goals of your campaign. And that's great and something else to keep in mind and using qualitative data is relevant and helpful but just the one thing to remember is to define it and so when you're reporting out or you're talking about it. So instead of kind of having this abstract thing where like we want people to listen. You need to get just a little more specific like I was the example I mentioned with like having X person read the policy memo or perform X action. And so data doesn't have to be for this process you don't have to have hard numbers if that's not your thing or relevant. There's many other ways to measure it as well. All right so I know that was kind of a heavy step so I wanted to go in a little bit more detail about how to conduct these, this data analysis how to get these metrics, and then also how to share them. And so the easiest way to do this is to have a dashboard. Analytics is a great way to start with a dashboard and I also personally love dashboards because it's a really easy way to share it with team members, and also to help guide conversations whether you're in a meeting or planning for another campaign. And you can refer back to this dashboard at any point in the five step campaign content left cycle. You can use Google Data Studio as I mentioned and if your organization is set up to use Google Analytics. Then you also can automatically have those pull into your dashboard, but also so we have a screenshot of our dashboard on the right one of the other free resources on our website. And if this looks too complicated for you that's totally fine you also can just make like a simple graph or on a spreadsheet and Google sheets or Excel, whatever works for your team. Once you have the data and you're able to collect it and put it into some type of condensed place. The next really important step is to sit down as a team and review it together. You want to really be able to dedicate a conversation to look at all this data and understand it. And so you can look at what your best and worth metrics were, and what you want to change or what worked really well and you want to carry out and incorporate into all of your campaigns in the future. And that actually takes us to step five of the content life cycle which is refine. Right, so we're finding is just reporting on the contact and content impact of your campaign to affect internal strategies and behaviors to like I mentioned comparing in contrasting what worked and what didn't. And you can think of this kind of as like a retrospective or a debrief that's cross departmental as applicable to review what you thought the campaign would accomplish, and then contrast it to what it actually accomplished and how it maybe matched your initial hypotheses about who you thought what you thought the user can audience, sorry the user journey would be in the strategize phase and see if that actually happened. And the metrics in the dashboard it can be a way to compare that. And so also with this phase and refining maybe you find out that you want to standardize the reporting process maybe you want to have everyone use Excel charts and maybe you want to have everyone use Google Studio dashboards and that can also be a great way as you repeat this cyclical process to compare and contrast the metrics from all of your previous campaigns. Right, and then, like I mentioned conducting in weekly team meetings it can be an option I think the biggest takeaway from this is just to dedicate time to analytics into the refining part and so if you have like a strategy plan. That's a strategy meeting at the beginning of every campaign you also need to schedule time with your team to sit down and review all this before you start the next campaign, or if you have multiple campaigns at the same time whenever the first campaign ends. And that I think really is the key to all of this that we learned from our interviews from talking to everyone, analyzing our interview results and putting all of this together is that if you're able to dedicate time to it which I know can be difficult. That's the best way to get started on this. Some of these steps can seem really confusing and complicated. But if you just use that as kind of your starting point then you'll be surprised by how much you can incorporate data into the rest of your content lifecycle. Right, so for our call to action. I wanted to share with you all about our outreach technology road mapping workshop. And so it can definitely be difficult to work through some of these more specific steps of the content lifecycle, and how data can be used and how it can be woven throughout and so if you don't have a clear view of the bigger picture our workshop is a great way to kind of work with us to understand what that can be. You will help you to prioritize your audiences and channels and segment that into different strategies for content distribution. And so I will drop this link into the chat. Along with that link I mentioned before about the Google Analytics toolkit. We'll also be sending this out in our follow up materials to everyone. All right, so that is all we have for you today in terms of the content impact study. But as I mentioned we'll be sending out lots of resources and we also have a lot of other free resources on our website. So we have our blogs, articles, podcasts informational videos and so please feel free to check that out and then also reach out to us with any questions that you have. But I know that we have a few minutes left and so would love to take any questions that the audience has.