 I think we're gonna get started here. Thank you so much for coming. This is all about marketing metrics and you, obviously, but it's more about not getting so overwhelmed by the amount of metrics that you have to track and about how to use them effectively so that you can get the most out of your limited resources. Thank you so much for coming in. If you could come and join this group down over here. Thank you. Yeah, we're gonna make you talk to each other. Cause that's what marketing is all about. It's all about messaging, but how is your messaging gonna be effective if you can't track it, if you can't make empirical decisions? So that's where metrics really come in handy. So why don't we introduce ourselves? Yeah. Sure. Hi, my name is Liz DeFury. You may recognize me because I've been a loudmouth all week. And I work for Bevcam. I'm the community engagement manager. We're on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I was just hired in April and I'm brand new to the industry, but my entire career has been spent doing marketing and membership services for trade associations and other not-for-profits, as well as some children's illustration on the side. So while I'm new to your industry, I am not new at all to building communities both online and in person and understanding the metrics behind them. Awesome. Thanks, Liz. My name is Emily Ruror. I've met most of you at this point. I work for CCTV and Tavini TV right down the road here. I do, my title has changed a million times over the course of almost two years that I've been with Tavini TV. I, at the moment, I am the marketing and outreach coordinator for the overarching CCTV Center for Community Emergency. I started with CCTV as an intern. My senior year of high school, my senior year of college, right down the road at Champlain College, and started out as a video production intern and kind of, it just kind of naturally lent itself into more of a social media production path. I created TikTok for them and by the time that I graduated, I was lucky enough that they would conduct a position for me to do some work in the development and communications realm. And- You share points. Yeah, we sure can. Yep. No problem at all. And that wasn't, I went to school for media, our communication with a specialization in media production, so development wasn't really my forte, though as everybody knows, everything overlaps with everything in community media. So it was a good opportunity to have a little bit of that development focus first. And then our marketing manager stepped down about a year ago and I was able to fill that role and have been doing that since. So I'm very excited to be here and to talk about marketing in a metric capacity and hopefully we'll send you home with some really tangible information and tips that you can implement right away. All right. So first quick show of hands, who's currently using metrics and analytics to measure your marketing or anything on your website. Okay. And so those of you who are using what, like Google Analytics, are you looking at social media platforms? Do you feel like you're advanced or do you feel like you're like beginner or like moderate? Moderate? Yeah. Okay. That's perfect. You guys, y'all are exactly the people that we wanted to talk to you today. Beginners and almost beginners and that's okay. Everyone starts somewhere. So we'll jump right into the kind of backbone of the presentation here, which is do we want to pass out these sheets? So we actually, before we get dived too deep into it, so no test afterwards, but this is just to take with you back to your access centers and... This is exactly what you want. And so rather than like, oh, I've got to take a picture of the slides, here's a sheet that you can take home and refer to when you're diving deep into your metric journey. Okay. So the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a picture of the slides. Okay. So the very first thing that we're going to mention... Brace yourselves. You have to brace yourselves because it's going to be a little scary. The whole Halloween was over, but we're about to scare the pants off of you. All right. Ready? This is the big thing. Jump scare warning. You only get three goals. You have to prioritize. And when I say just three, I mean it. You only get three goals that you're going to use to determine if you're being successful. And you only really get three metrics you're going to use to determine the success of those. If you're like, oh man, I got to worry about swimming and membership and whether or not enough programming is happening and how many producers are there? No, no, no, no, no. You only get three and we're about to go into why that is and how we're going to figure that out. And before we get too deep into that, the first thing that we're going to kind of just review quickly or go over is some examples of top priorities, goals, and those goals are typically can be posed as questions that we're asking ourselves in the planning process. So, and these goals that we have, for example, goals, we tried to, we tried to think of, okay, I'm going to do them one at a time. I went a little fancy with it. Yes, exactly. We tried to pick goals, for examples, that are probably things that you are already asking yourself at your organizations. So the first is, how do we keep or grow our funding? So growing our funding is a huge one that I've heard many times over. The next, another one is, how do we stay relevant? And this changing age, I'm getting caught in the microphone cord, in this changing age, how do we stay relevant? So when I can get my news on TikTok or wherever it is, why are we still here and why are people still coming through our doors? And how many, and then another example is, how do we attract a new demographic? I know that's something that we're really grappling with at CCTV and Towneating TV. All of our community producers that come in and have regular programs are, I'd say at least 50 plus, probably skewing much older than that. And I was actually just thinking about this the other day, the only young person that we come in and that comes in and does a regular program at our access center is Ms. Vermont. And she came in to do just a program about it and we were like, hey, why don't you come in every month and update us on your progress as Ms. Vermont. So that's an example. Yeah, we also have the same issue and they're all white males. But if we look at the demographics of Beverly as a city, which is like 48,000 people, that's not even close to being the majority of people who make up our demographic. So how many of you are looking to, you think it's one of your top priorities at your station to attract a new demographic? Yeah? And then we'd like to hear from you. What are some of your other top goals that we haven't mentioned that you're really grappling with and trying to, or top problems that you're trying to solve? So increase membership and make it easy. Easy as in signing up to membership or making it easy to be a member? Make it easy to sign up. User experience. User experience, it's a big one. That was really impressive. Proving necessity. So we've got increased membership, user experience, proving necessity. Any others floating around out there? And based on some of the most powerful presentations we've seen this week, how about addressing accessibility in terms of like racial and economic disparity within your demographics, right? Like DEI and B. Is that one of your top priorities? Reducing barriers. Reducing barriers. I'm going to generalize it as diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Is that okay? Acronyms. Can you think of any others that are your top number one priorities that keep you up at night that you're just like, if I don't do this for my station in the next three years? Is that increasing audience or is that increased viewership? Market research. I might even put up there something like audience feedback because in terms of YouTube comments or more people coming through the doors to participate or create a show, just an increase in something like that. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Just general increased engagement as well. That feels like a really good list. You might have noticed there are more than three things on this list. We're going to fix it. So, another quick show of hands. How many of you know what SMART goals are in terms of the acronym? One, two, three, four. All right, thank you very much. For those of you who don't know, that's okay. It's on your cheat sheet and we're going to explain it. Our project management strategy comes from the world of scrum, which is from the technology sector. It's one of those things the tech blows gave us. And that's okay because it works really well. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. If your goal, if you're the thing you're reaching for in this way, then it is a dream. It is a feral. And it's hard to understand how to actually achieve it. So, every one of your goals has to be defined in this way. If you're going to measure it, if you're going to be looking at metrics, you have to know what you're trying to achieve. So this is one of the reasons why we're saying you only get three priorities that you're really going to focus on over the next year. Not forever, but over the next year in terms of your marketing efforts, pick three goals, define the SMART goals, and that's how you're going to determine what your metrics are working towards. But it also helps you understand how to use the limited resources you have time, staff, money in the most effective ways. If you're trying to go after everything, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. That's why we say pick three. It's not that you can't go after these other things throughout the year. It's that you need three that you're constantly working towards that are the top priority over everything else that's happening that year. And that can be hard. I mean, trying to choose out of, at least I know from my experience at CCTV and town meeting TV, I jumped right into the marketing role and a million things were piled on my plate immediately. And so, which I'm sure is a pretty relatable experience with folks. So in that sense, just don't overwhelm yourself and really like nail down those three goals. So this is about tying metrics to your goals. Does anybody know what KPI are? I see one, two, three, that's good. KPI's are, if you're coming in the back, please come forward. This is gonna be participatory. You're gonna get put in groups. Come on. I am hella friendly. KPI's mean key performance indicators. This is also on your cheat sheet. This is a marketing jargon word, but I think it's really useful, especially when you're talking to your board about what you're measuring and such, because there are a lot of metrics out there. If you've ever opened up Google analytics, you have been overwhelmed. I know because that's me. And tracking everything is not gonna be helpful. Most of the time it's just overwhelming. So key performance indicators is you're going to determine which metrics are the most important for measuring the success towards your goal or whether or not you need to change something. So that's a useful terminology. You're looking at quality over quantity. So again, only three. Pick three metrics, pick three goals. The more that you can focus on these limited things, the further those limited resources you're working with are going to go. And then knowing your audience. So we talked a little bit about how market research and increase engagement are two of the really big goals that you guys are working towards within your stations. Understanding who your audience is will help you pick which goals and which metrics are the most important to focus on in the short term. Talking like a year in terms of short term. So when you're trying to figure it out, know who comes, the types of people come into your studios. Can you say, yes, most of the people who are in memberships right now are over the age of 65, they're white and they're male. But we want to be reaching 35 to 55 and we want them to be half and half, but more women because that's what our demographic shows. And like, yeah, so I could go on. But knowing who you want to reach and who you are currently reaching will really help you determine once we start getting into things, what metrics to look at, where you should be posting things and what your message should be. Either. Well, the next in the timeline of working with metrics is you don't just do something in marketing and then forget about it. The best thing to do is to read that performance over time so that you can then make adjustments, make changes or keep doing what you're doing if it's doing really well. And so one of those, one of the ways that you can read metric performance over time and that you should be incorporating, you should be incorporating your marketing plans within your project management. And so that means, and into your project calendar. So that means like when you're planning a program or planning an event or coverage of an event, marketing should be absolutely a part of that conversation as well. Who's doing the marketing and when? And come back to that and then reevaluate how did it work, how did it go? And that kind of jumps into the next section here, retrospectives and postmortems. Review crew. Review, review, review. And because, and I have done this before in the past, like I've put something out there and been like terrified to check how it went because I was like, oh, I put so much effort and time into this thing. And I would be crushed if only like so, so many people viewed it, no engagements, whatever it is. But it's like, you know, that's a part of the process and you won't know if something is performing well. If you don't go in and check and we'll get into this a little bit more, but like go on to Metabusiness Suite and check out those native analytics on those platforms. Just make sure and have those conversations. Are you going to be filming an event and you know that you have to plan for it weeks in advance and you gotta make sure it's staffing and who's gonna be on cameras and who's gonna be doing the editing afterwards? You know, make sure somebody's been delegated to handle the marketing for the footage that you get from that event. Just make it a part of your project management. If it's a part of all of the project management you're already doing, then it's not an afterthought anymore. Pick milestones throughout the year. We base our milestones on the major festivals that we have because they work out to be about two months apart from each other. And I know that that's gonna be a really big content creation thing. And so right after each of those festivals we have it scheduled on our calendar that our staff is having a postmortem, a retrospective on how the marketing and the coverage of that event happened over the past two months, not just that event but how things are happening over the past two months. Is something working? Is something not working? Have we been putting things on Facebook and they're not getting any more views? Do we have whatever the thumbnails on YouTube are not performing as well as we thought, change it now so that it's not an afterthought and you're not just like, oh, we've been doing this forever and when am I supposed to, how am I supposed to know to change it? Check it at regular intervals, set milestones for yourself throughout the year. And I just as another example, we actually, it's all washed out. I know, I should have planned a little better and picked a better color to do for the slides but at Town Meading TV, we have weekly marketing meetings and we're lucky in the sense that we're actually a pretty, we have a pretty big full time staff, maybe 15 folks, which is not typical as what I've learned. And so on our four. So for example, that is quite the difference and so we're very lucky that we have three dedicated staff members that meet every Wednesday for a marketing and development meeting and in the sense that we're planning, we're doing two things. Well, sometimes we're doing many things. Two of the major things we're doing are we're planning ahead for what are the major things like right now, in a couple weeks, in a couple months, we're talking about it all, but we're also, if something has just occurred, we're discussing it, we're reviewing it, we're figuring out how did it go, where can we, what can we do differently next time? And in the sense of like putting marketing into your planning, one of our biggest coverage events every year is town meeting day coverage. And so we start the planning for that, so it's in March every year. We start the planning, we're actually gonna start, have our first planning meeting for that when we get back from Thanksgiving, so in a week or two. So months in advance, we're planning the production schedule for all the candidate forums and everything like that, but marketing is a part of that every step of the way. I go to all those production meetings and figure out, okay, when do I need to start advertising on front porch forum? When do I need to start boosting posts on Facebook? And because we're doing it months in advance, weeks in advance, we're being proactive rather than reactive, which is really where you're trying to strive to be because I personally hate being in that reactive mode, which I have been in for the past couple of weeks and months, due to many circumstances, but that constant catch up of trying to be like, oh, I need to post this, oh, I need to review that. If you're planning it in advance, it's much easier to then just, so what the slide, what you can't read on that, what it says is have the audacity to ask for time to plan. If you feel like you're overwhelmed, if you've got newsletters going out every week, take a week off, I'm serious, stop sending it out for a week, whatever your posting schedule is, don't do it for a week, use that time to plan how you're going to improve your process so that in the coming weeks, you have the ability to not be constantly catching up. You're trying to set a precedence for taking action rather than just being reactive, and you're not gonna be able to do that if you're in the thick of it all the time. If you need to say to your boss, or maybe you're the boss, and you just have to tell yourself, I need to take Monday afternoon completely off from whatever it is that other things are being planned, and I need to just set a plan for how this is going to work going forward. Have the audacity to do that. And we mentioned it in like some of the materials, but the conversations that come with having the audacity to ask for time to plan can be difficult. You don't, somebody doesn't wanna hear like, oh, I need two weeks to not send the newsletter out so that we can improve it and just meet whatever our goal is. Determine whether or not something needs to be changed. Exactly, and I think, I speaking for my experience at my station, we've been around for a very long time, and we have folks that have been there for a very long time. And so when that happens, you just kinda get into the groove and it's like you're expected to just keep doing what you've always been doing, and that's kind of where I'm at with like, my, we do weekly newsletters. And I'm at the point where I am going to bring it to a marketing meeting and say, hey, I recommend that we need to stop this. I need to have more of a focus on what I'm sending out to our mailing list of like a thousand people. It's like, rather than just putting out a newsletter because we've always done a weekly newsletter. So, and sometimes people don't wanna hear that, but usually being able to defend that decision with saying, well, we only know how many people are opening the newsletter. We don't actually know whether or not the content is relevant. We don't know whether or not people are clicking through the links. We don't even know if some of the links work because they've just been there forever. So these are the things that you're not gonna know to change unless you take the time to review it and decide whether or not something needs to continue. So I think the next section where it's, it's, there was fish for lunch, but it's meat for the afternoon. We had a little bit of an Arby's theme going through when we were meeting to like put together this workshop. And so then I had fun making that gift. I didn't do it properly, but it was still fun, frame by frame. So yeah, the next part of this presentation, we really wanted to give you guys an opportunity to dive in to what we've been talking about and apply it to your specific situations and your centers. So that way, and to workshop it with each other so you can go home and can pick it right up and be excited and ready to have your top goals, your top metrics and get started on. So yeah, I think what might work best is, yeah, just click. So I think what might work best is we're gonna split into two groups and I think one of us can take each group and one person from each group is going to be the tribute, you must volunteer. And everyone else in the group is going to help you workshop what those three goals are that you would like to be working towards over the next year. We're gonna talk about what metrics to pick to track. We're gonna talk about what milestones maybe you should be setting. We're gonna be talking about what you're currently doing, what you'd like to see change in terms of what you're doing and we're gonna write it down and then make you report to the class at the end. So that's why I told you to sit next to each other. So we've got six people here. If you could please join this group over here. Yep, you. And then do you wanna take one of the groups and I'll take the other one? Sure. So we're gonna take 30 minutes with each group to, so who's gonna be the tribute in each group? Decide amongst yourselves and then we'll have your report at the end. So that we can share both groups, get a chance to hear with the others. And this mic is still working as well. Cool. Hi everyone, I am Becky. I am the Marketing and Distribution Coordinator at GNAT TV. We talked mostly about reaching a new audience. We serve us nine towns, but we mostly reach people 50 plus. Predominantly the same people come in and produce content. So we want new, younger people to come in and make content and we want to be able to reach new and a more diversified audience. It's very much older white males mostly. So we talked about different metrics that I can go home with and look at. Some of them I already know because I do look at the we're not hitting them and then different strategies for potentially making our content like my voice, the voice of the organization be a little bit more guided towards a younger audience. Fantastic, that's it. Thank you. You're going to do great. Yay. So much for Jen. All right, so I'm Jen. I'm with West Hartford Community Interactive and our group. So we really talked about like how we use YouTube with a specific, smart goal of trying to reach an additional 1,000 subscribers every year, but then looking at the pockets of where our engagement is and how to create an intersectionality, bringing all of our different groups together. And one of the things that really came out was sort of doing engagement, like a study or like a poll to try to get more data. Sorry, Community Impact Survey. Thank you, Community Impact Survey. And then also just looking at how we can chunk up our content so that it can reach more people and create an intersectionality. And then also, I think you helped me out here. We mostly just, within that, like for example, the chunking the videos up into either really bite-sized pieces or just smaller than two hours. You can then, depending on where you post them, whether it's YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, I think one of the best metrics to look at in that case is not necessarily views, because you could be scrolling through Instagram, be on it for a second and that counts as a view. But if you go in and you look at video view length, you can then see, okay, somebody came and looked at this chunk for the whole minute. Okay, then that shows me that this is actually, this is valuable to our audience. Whereas, okay, this two minute clip, people only watched for 10 seconds. That's telling me either clearly there wasn't a hook or whatever, it just didn't resonate with the audience. So that's, if you wanna get really like, there are very overarching metrics and then there are some less typical ones that you would see. And so like, for something like that, going in and checking, like if you posted it on Instagram, boosted it on Instagram, whatever, seeing what is that reach, how long did somebody watch? And so those were the metrics. And then we didn't really get to the milestoneing and what we're doing now, well, we did talk a little bit. But yeah, so I'm hoping that, can you say that? I just said, I'm so excited this workshop was amazing, because I just have so many things to think about. I just, yeah. And that was our whole point, like we wanted to get the brain, the brain's flowing, blood pumping, the idea's just coming, because, and I hope within the small groups focusing on one person, you see your own access centers and your own goals reflected back and are also excited to get back to your work and really dive into those metrics. We have one more ask. Everybody stand up. Come over here. We're taking a selfie.