Data-Driven Creativity
Auburn University's advancement marketing department requires teams to collect metrics—but until recently, the numbers weren’t very useful to the marketing and communications team. Then Director of Content Todd Deery had an idea.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, we would have killed for this kind of data,’” he says, recalling his past roles in freelance writing, teaching, advertising, and higher education. “The notion that we should still be using our best educated guess [in marketing strategy is] what I did in the ’90s. We need to do much better.”
Those thoughts inspired Deery to create Data in Action meetings. The meetings have become normalized as a decision-making tool within his department, happening as often as once a month, and can be called by any team member.
Three principles allow the meetings to stay on track:
- Start with a question—not the data. (For instance, “What magazine stories are the most popular online?” or “When do people register for our alumni events and what causes them to register?”)
- Scope the meeting by making sure the question(s) asked can be answered in under an hour.
- Require takeaways.
Prior to the meetings, a designated team member retrieves data relevant to the questions being asked and arranges it into charts.
“I wanted these meetings to not be overwhelming, to be manageable and practical,” says Deery.
Asking when and why people register for events allowed the team to look at data that matched the action of the end user (registration) with marketing activity data (emails, social posts) to learn what is most effective. This led to the realization that constituents typically registered for paid events outside of work hours, and free events during work hours.
ADVANCE WORK:
“All of our marketing going forward has been informed by some of this data,” says Deery. “We are much better about when and how we send things out now.”
The meetings have shortened project approval time within the department from more than five to two days on average. And other departments at Auburn have taken notice to adopt similar meetings based on the principles of Data in Action.
One of the benefits Deery didn’t foresee was the fostering of a positive data culture for his majority creatively minded team.
“I think one of the fears is that if you start holding these meetings it will restrict your productivity or creativity— that you’ll look at the data and it’ll scold you. I found it to be the opposite,” he says. “Once you start, the more that you learn about your audience, the more assured the people above you will be that you know what you’re doing. You can actually take more risks because you know that you’ve got a team that’s willing to come back, take a look at the data, and see what worked.”
About the author(s)
Hannah Ratzer is Editorial Specialist at CASE.
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Article appears in:
May-June 2024 Issue of Currents
FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS: Best practices for responding in high-stakes situations. Also, how to diversify your donor pipeline, why mentoring matters, and harnessing the narrative with the seven basic plots of storytelling.