Unions 21’s worked with Nationwide Group Staff Union (NGSU), to help them do more with their digital estate.
As with any review of operations, we started with NGSU’s overall strategy, thinking about what they wanted to achieve to recruit, retain and engage members and to influence key stakeholders. We also discussed key challenges around time and money to carry out regular social media work, and considered which digital activities would make the most impact on reaching audiences for the least impact on resources.
Our overall approach
Having determined that the website and Facebook were NGSU’s main digital channels to reach members and reps, we agreed three key principles to ensure the website and Facebook were fit-for-purpose tools for delivering the support and advice that recruits and retains members, and reps would find useful in their roles:
members’ engagement with content would be the most important metric for decision-making
insights from the website would inform content creation for social media
we’d look for maximum efficiency in the time invested in analytics and content creation.
Analytics and the baseline
A first step for setting goals and measuring progression is to understand what historical activity tells us.
Union output tends to be cyclical, with peaks and troughs of activity. Look backwards at the metrics over a suitably long period - a year, perhaps - to establish a performance baseline and to ensure any judgements you make about what ‘good’ performance looks like are accurate.
We focussed on metrics around the quality of engagement with website pages or social media posts, rather than pure numbers of page views or post impressions.
Engagement and operational output
Once the baseline analysis was done, we set up a way to track the performance of new output against these same metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. This in ensures limited, efficient analysis which massively simplifies your work if you lack resources and you’re uncertain about what to focus your time on.
Lightening the load
Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights are incredibly useful and versatile tools for understanding performance, but they often have a very steep learning curve for new users. We set up a report in Data Studio. This free tool from Google allows you to consolidate data from an extensive range of different sources, including Google Analytics and Facebook.
Over time, as the digital strategy grows to include other social media channels and activities, the dashboard can also grow and be adapted to different uses.
Team working on this project:Duncan Robertson