A good rule of thumb is to allocate 10% to 20% of your budget on measuring, evaluating, and communicating the impact of your community.
If your total budget (platform, staff, etc…) is $500k a year, allocating $50k a year to build a world-class system for analysing the community’s results and communicating the next steps isn’t just common sense…it’s a bargain!
That might break down to:
- $10k – Software.
- $30k – Consultancy to setup measurement, analysis, and reporting systems.
- $10k – Misc budget. Designing reports, bringing stakeholders together in-person to report the results.
Spending 1 day a week on analysis and reporting might, in turn, break down to:
- Maintaining the systems for collecting and updating community data.
- Collecting data and updating community reports.
- Developing recommendations based on the data collected.
- Communicating the results to the steering group (both individually to key stakeholders and as a collective).
- Update the strategy based upon the results.
- Designing and publishing community stories.
I bet if you did just half of these, you would have far more support for your community and knowledge about your community than you do today.