Dictionary Series: What do we mean when we talk about Engagement?
At the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF, we are dedicated to innovative thinking. We are constantly exploring new ways to build collaborative teams, design innovative solutions and develop novel processes.
Something we were keen to explore is how we can understand the value of our community engagement. We believe solving complex problems takes a community. We seek to build collaborations of organisations and individuals who can work together and support our goal of improving outcomes for every child. To achieve this goal, we need to develop and maintain a diverse community through effective engagement.
But this has led to the question: “what do we mean by effective engagement, and how do we measure it?”
The Importance of Engagement
Value is a funny thing. In terms of engagement, organisations will traditionally consider the ‘number of hours’ spent with someone to be a key indication of how valuable that engagement has been. For example: “less than X hours = low value engagement”.
At the Collaborative we asked the question – is it this simple?
Our team wanted to scratch beneath the surface of valuable engagement. Value doesn’t simply come from the number of interactions, especially when you’re considering the growth of a community. Beyond the number of times you interact, you want to consider the relationship you are developing. It’s less about time spent, and more about frequency of time spent together. When you combine this with the outcomes of your relationship, you begin to build a far better picture of value. This isn’t new, of course. The business development and sales communities have been mastering the craft of building and measuring relationships for a very long time.
Understanding Our Community
For the Collaborative, our community drives our delivery. We are constantly bringing together new combinations of expertise to co-design and develop solutions to some of the most complex and challenging issues facing children. Our network brings a range of perspectives to each issue we tackle, allowing for the development of novel and innovative data driven solutions.
Our network can be divided into five key partner types:
An important aspect of our engagement is appreciating that each partner type requires a specific engagement strategy. We are currently in the process of finalising our engagement strategy including the methods we use to interact with each partner type, how we can grow the network and what successful engagement looks like for us.
Once we have categorised our network, and built our engagement strategies, we need to measure if our approaches are having an impact on our relationships.
Step forward our Engagement Index!
Working closely with the incredible Data Science team at The Data Lab , the Index was developed to show, quickly and easily, how the value of our engagement changes over time. The Index pulls data from various sources, including Outlook and Salesforce, to consider the value of our engagement based on several factors. Significantly, the factors considered vary depending on the partner type. This is important as the dimensions we believe ‘valuable’ will differ depending on the type of organisation and their interests in working with us and vice-a-versa.
Building an Index
We won’t go into too much detail regarding the data types and weightings we use for this Index (but please get in touch if detail is what you’re after!) All data is pulled directly from the meetings we arrange within Outlook and the information we collect within our CRM for our Engagement Index. The system works intuitively and harmoniously with our daily work. It doesn’t ‘add’ work. This was fundamental in its design to ensure the tool can scale sustainably alongside us.
Then iterate!
An Index can be a powerful tool. It can give you a unique insight into a world previously unseen. As incredible as this may sound, you aren’t going to get it the right first time!
Along with a good understanding of statistics, you also need to ensure the knowledge that drives your Index is sound. At the Collaborative, we have benefited from developing a comprehensive understanding of what is considered valuable within our community. That could be a frequent meeting, a signed agreement, or a tangible outcome to a customer’s problem. Working with the team at The Data Lab, we were able to capture this knowledge within the Index. After each iteration we make minor tweaks to the weightings until we felt the Index captured the changes we expected to see. We used many key events throughout the past year as reference points for ensuring that the Index captures notable changes to the value of our engagements across the community.
What Does This All Mean?
This is a good question - and one we should always ask throughout any internal project. We developed the Index as a novel way to understand and visualise valuable engagement across our community. Throughout the process, we have established partner types and got a unique understanding of how our engagement with our network has changed over time. Using this tool, we can ask questions like “Does our Data Partner Pledge help sustain our relationships with those organisations?” or “Do Impact Collaborations help improve relationships with our customers?”.
We can begin to understand what is important to our community, and how can future collaboratives can use tested strategies to grow and sustain their own networks.
Most importantly, reviewing our Index can point us in the direction of where we should focus our attention next. This is true data-driven decision making.
At the Collaborative, we want to maintain transparency and openness in all aspects of our work. As such, the engagement index sits as a publicly available visualisation on our Impact Dashboard. It allows everyone to see how we perform as we continue to grow our community and deliver impact.